EOCKY MOUNTAINS AND WESTERN CATTLE LAND. 127 



Four or five streams flowing far below one, as one 

 stands on the brink, can be traced for forty miles by 

 the stunted cotton-wood and other trees that fringe 

 their banks, making them appear like green serpents 

 winding among arid alkaline hills. This vast ' bad- 

 land ' depression is filled in every direction by every 

 kind of bizarre peaks and variously-coloured, sugar- 

 loaf-shaped mounds and grotesque limestone buttes, 

 worn and fluted into pillars and odd shapes by denud- 

 ing rains. Bates' s Hole lay before me, and from the 

 point where I had first struck the brink or brim this 

 wonderful spot appeared spread below like a vast map. 

 On the north it opens upon and is bounded by the 

 North Platte Eiver near its junction with the South 

 Platte. But not a head of game was to be seen any- 

 where, and a prolonged and scrutinous examination 

 with the binocular revealed only stray ' bunches' of 

 cattle. The King, with one of the boys, had started 

 to ' fetch a trail ' round the wooded cliffs that bound 

 the edge of the Hole in search of game, and saw a 

 mule-deer, but without a chance of shooting. My 

 ground, therefore, lay in the opposite direction, and I 

 determined to make for an isolated mountain that rose 

 steep and abrupt and almost bare of timber near the 

 brink of Bates' s Hole. 



Passing on my way several bands of cattle, which 

 stared stupidly and then ' bunched up,' like wild 

 animals who had never set eyes before upon a solitary 

 horseman, I at length turned up a steep gully and 

 followed a game-trail, or, more strictly speaking, a 



