HUNTING A CHRISTMJS DINNER. 351 



below zero, and with the frozen fog drifting- sharply over the 

 snow-covered prairie. I had arranged to ride up to my " Cow- 

 camp" (where I had some thoroughbred shorthorns wintering 

 under the lea of the pine-hills of the upper ground), and to 

 •devote Christmas Eve to an attempt at procuring fresh meat 

 for the next day's dinner. For the pine-hills in question, over- 

 looking Powder River, were still the resort of some few white- 

 tail and black-tail deer, the remnants of the game that only a 

 very few years before had swarmed over these prairies. For the 

 valleys of Powder River and the Yellowstone were, with that of 

 the Big Horn and the Upper Missouri, the range of the buffalo 

 as late even as 1880 ; and the heads and hides of the last few 

 old bulls (the skins too worthless to strip off) dotted the prairie 

 as recently as 1884. A few elk were said to be still inhabiting 

 the cotton woods alongside the bed of Powder River, but I 

 could not hear of any one having shot an elk for some two 

 years before the date of my story. Game of every kind had in 

 fact been virtually exterminated by the hide-hunters, who made 

 Miles City their head-quarters and their pandemonium during 

 the summer months— flinging away in ignoble debauchery the 

 dollars that they had earned with no little hardship during 

 the winter, and that their wagon-loads of skins had readily 

 furnished them on their return in the spring. 



Miles City, before the cattle trade had made such progress — 

 peopling the ranges with tamer herds and making the town 

 at once a commercial centre — was nothing more than a oreat 

 hunting depot, lively and uproarious during the summer months 

 and almost closing its doors during the winter. 



But this belongs to the past. The present, i.e., December, 

 1884, is represented for the purpose of my tale by two stock- 

 men, bent on procuring something more edible than bacon, and 

 with this end in view facing as cold and comfortless a day as 

 ever men selected for a ten-mile ride. The trail up the creek — 

 at the head of which lay the log-hut for which they were 

 bound — was no longer marked in the snow ; for the restless 

 herds (with a few hardy exceptions still clinging to the hills) 



