Tbe Bison 163 



used to pass, it is useless now to compute. They 

 have all gone. But over a vast extent of the 

 western country they have left memorials still 

 visible and long to endure in the deep trails 

 which furrow the prairie in all directions. 



Other mementos still to be seen, and stirring 

 the heart of the old-timer, though to the man of 

 to-day they are without a meaning, are the huge 

 erratic boulders which lie here and there over 

 the prairie where they were dropped by the great 

 ice mass in its passage down from the highland. 

 Against such boulders the buffalo used to rub 

 their bodies, and such masses of granite or of 

 flinty quartzite, polished and with their sharp 

 angles worn away by the rubbing against them 

 of the tough hides, may often be seen. About 

 such a rock, deep worn in the ground, is the 

 trench, where the bulls and the cows and the 

 younger animals once marched as they pushed 

 their sides against the hard rock, their hoofs 

 cutting the soil into fine dust to be blown away 

 by the wind. The angles of these old rubbing- 

 stones are still discolored by the grease left on 

 them from the buffalo's skins, and looking at 

 them, one might fancy that they had been used 

 only yesterday. 



