ON THE PRAIRIE i 23 



find the buffalo fronting him with lowered 

 not a dozen feet off. Immediately 

 upon seeing him it cocked up its tail and 

 came forward. He was clinging with both 

 hands to the edge and could not use his rifle ; 

 so, not relishing what was literally a tete-a- 

 tete, he promptly let go and slid or rather 

 rolled head over heels to the foot of the cliff, 

 not hurting himself much in the sand, 

 though of course a good deal jarred by the 

 fall. The buffalo came on till its hoofs 

 crumbled the earth at the brink, when the 

 dog luckily got up and distracted its atten- 

 tion ; meanwhile, my cousin, having bounced 

 down to the bottom, picked himself up, 

 shook himself, and finding that nothing was 

 broken, promptly scrambled up the bluff at 

 another place a few yards off and shot his 

 antagonist. 



When my cattle first came on the Little 

 Missouri three of my men took a small 

 bunch of them some fifty miles to the south 

 and there wintered with them, on what were 

 then the outskirts of the buffalo range, the 



