148 



RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING-TRAIL 



ciated blessiiii;- on the plains of the West, where we often need to carry 

 along with us the wood for cooking our supper and breakfast, and some- 

 times actually have to dig up our fuel, making the fire of sage-brush roots, 

 eked out with buffalo chips. Though the days were still warm, the nights 

 were frosty. Our camp was in a deep valley, bounded by steep hills with 

 sloping, grassy sides, one of them marked by a peculiar shelf of rock. The 

 country for miles was of this same character, much broken, but everywhere 

 passable for horsemen, and with the hills rounded and grassy, except now 

 and then for a chain of red scoria buttes or an isolated sugar-loaf cone of 

 gray and brown clay. The first day we spent in trying to find the proba- 

 ble locality of our game ; and after beating pretty thoroughly over the 

 smoother country, towards nightfall we found quite fresh elk tracks leading 

 into a stretch of very rough and broken land about ten miles from camp. 



We started next morning before the gray was relieved by the first faint 

 flush of pink, and reached the broken country soon after sunrise. Here 

 we dismounted and picketed our horses, as the ground we were to hunt 

 through was very rough. Two or three hours passed before we came upon 

 fresh signs of elk. Then we found the trails that two, from the size presum- 

 ably cows, had made the preceding night, and started to follow them, care- 

 fully and noiselessly, my companion taking one side of the valley in which 

 we were and I the other. The tracks led into one of the wildest and most 

 desolate parts of the Bad Lands. It was now the heat of the day, the 

 brazen sun shining out of a cloudless sky, and not the least breeze stirring. 

 At the bottom of the valley, in the deep, narrow bed of the winding 

 water-course, lay a few tepid little pools, almost dried up. Thick groves 

 of stunted cedars stood here and there in the glen-like pockets of the high 

 buttes, the peaks and sides of which were bare, and only their lower, 

 terrace-like ledges thinly clad with coarse, withered grass and sprawling 

 sage-brush ; the parched hill-sides were riven by deep, twisted gorges, with 

 brushwood in the bottoms; and the cliffs of coarse clay were cleft and 

 seamed by sheer-sided, caiion-like gullies. In the narrow ravines, closed 

 in by barren, sun-baked walls, the hot air stood still and sultry ; the only 

 living- beinofs were the rattlesnakes, and of these I have never elsewhere 

 seen so many. Some basked in the sun, stretched out at their ugly length 

 of mottled brown and yellow ; others lay half under stones or twined in the 

 roots of the sage-brush, and looked straight at me with that strange, sullen, 

 evil gaze, never shifting or moving, that is the property only of serpents 

 and of certain men ; while one or two coiled and rattled menacingly as I 

 stepped near. 



Yet, though we walked as quietly as we could, the game must have 



