IN THE OLD WEST 117 



fefed their horses on the bark of the sweet cotton 

 wood, upon which they subsist, and even fatten. 

 Thus, wherever a village has encamped, the trunks 

 of these trees strew the ground, their upper limbs 

 and smaller branches peeled of their bark, and 

 looking as white and smooth as if scraped with a 

 knife. 



On the forks, however, the timber is heavier and 

 of greater variety, some of the creeks being well 

 wooded with ash and cherry, which break the mo- 

 notony of the everlasting cotton wood. 



Dense masses of buffalo still continued to 

 darken the plains, and numerous bands of wolves 

 hovered round the outskirts of the vast herds, 

 singling out the sick and wounded animals, and 

 preying upon such calves as the rifles and arrows 

 of the hunters had bereaved of their mothers. 

 The white wolf is the invariable attendant upon 

 the buffalo ; and when one of these persevering 

 animals is seen, it is a certain sign that buffalo 

 are not far distant. Besides the buffalo wolf, 

 there are four distinct varieties common to the 

 plains, and all more or less attendant upon the 

 buffalo. These are, the black, the gray, the 

 brown, and, last and least, the coyote or cayeute 

 of the mountaineers, the wachunkamanet, or 

 " medicine wolf " of the Indians, who hold the lat- 

 ter animal in reverential awe. This little wolf, 

 whose fur is of great thickness and beauty, is of 

 diminutive size, but wonderfully sagacious, making 



