1 14 



RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING-TRAIL 



into the valleys. 1 he deer had been hung in a thicket of dwarfed cedars; 

 but when we reached the place we found nothing' save scattered pieces of 

 their carcasses, and the soft mud was tramped all over with round, deeply 

 marked footprints, some of them but a few hours old, showing that the 

 plunderers of our cache were a pair of cougars — "mountain lions," as 

 they are called by the Westerners. They had evidently been at work for 

 some time, and had eaten almost every scrap of flesh ; one of the deer had 

 been carried for some distance to the other side of a deep, narrow, chasm - 

 like gnlly across which the cougar must have leaped with the carcass in 

 its mouth. We followed the fresh trail of the cougars for some time, as it 

 was well marked, especially in the snow still remaining in the bottoms of 

 the deeper ravines ; finally it led into a tangle of rocky hills riven by 

 dark cedar-clad gorges, in which we lost it, and we retraced our steps, 

 intending to return on the morrow with a good track hound. 



But we never carried out our intentions, for next morning one of my 

 men who was out before breakfast came back to the house with the start- 

 ling news that our boat was gone — stolen, for he brought with him the 

 end of the rope with which it had been tied, evidently cut off with a sharp 

 knife ; and also a red woolen mitten with a leather palm, which he had 

 picked up on the ice. We had no doubt as to who had stolen it ; for 

 whoever had done so had certainly gone down the river in it, and the only 

 other thing in the shape of a boat on the Little Missouri was a small 

 flat-bottomed scow in the possession of three hard characters who lived in 

 a shack, or hut, some twenty miles above us, and whom we had shrewdly 

 suspected for some time of wishing to get out of the country, as certain of 

 the cattle-men had begun openly to threaten to lynch them. They belonged 

 to a class that always holds sway during the raw youth of a frontier com- 

 munity, and the putting down of which is the first step towards decent gov- 

 ernment. Dakota, west of the Missouri, has been settled very recently, and 

 every town within it has seen strange antics performed during the past six 

 or seven years. Medora, in particular, has had more than its full share 

 of shooting and stabbing affrays, horse-stealing, and cattle-killing. But 

 the time for such things w^as passing away ; and during the preceding fall 

 the vigilantes — locally known as " stranglers," in happy allusion to their 

 summary method of doing justice — had made a clean sweep of the cattle 

 country along the Yellowstone and that part of the Big Missouri around 

 and below its mouth. Be it remarked, in passing, that while the outcome 

 of their efforts had been in the main wholesome, yet, as is always the case 

 in an extended raid of vigilantes, several of the sixty odd victims had been 

 perfectly innocent men who had been hung or shot in company with the 



