SHERIFF'S WORK ON A RANCH 



117 



their weirdness ; the twilight only made their uncouth shapelessness more 

 grim and forbidding. They looked like the crouching figures of great 

 ooblin beasts. 



o 



Those two hills on the right 

 Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in tight — 

 While to the left a tall scalped mountain. . . . 

 The dying sunset kindled through a cleft : 

 The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay 

 Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay — 



might well have been written after seeing the strange, desolate lands lying 

 in western Dakota. 



All through the early part of the day we drifted swiftly down between 

 the heaped-up piles of ice, the cakes and slabs now dirty and unattractive 

 looking. Towards evening, however, there came long reaches where the 

 banks on either side were bare, though even here there would every now 

 and then be necks where the jam had been crowded into too narrow a 

 spot and had risen over the side as it had done up-stream, grinding the 

 bark from the big cottonwoods and snapping the smaller ones short off 

 In such places the ice- walls were sometimes eight or ten feet high, con- 

 tinually undermined by the restless current ; and every now and then 

 overhanging pieces would break off and slide into the stream with a loud 

 sullen splash, like the plunge of some great water beast. Nor did we dare 

 to go in too close to the high cliffs, as bowlders and earth masses, freed 

 by the thaw from the grip of the frost, kept rolling and leaping down 

 their faces and forced us to 



keep a sharp lookout lest our tJL > }'}VJ-^ 



boat should be swamped. 



At nightfall we landed, and 

 made our camp on a point of 

 wood-covered land jutting out 

 into the stream. We had seen 

 very little trace of life until late 

 in the day, for the ducks had 

 not yet arrived ; but in the 

 afternoon a sharp-tailed prai- 

 rie fowl flew across stream 

 ahead of the boat, lighting on 

 a low branch bv the water's 



■' IHK CAPTUKF, OF THE GERMAN. 



edge. Shooting him, we land- 

 ed and picked off two others that were perched high up in leafless cotton- 

 woods, plucking the buds. These three birds served us as supper ; and 



