THE BUFFALO. 397 



their people. Before this hated coming they and their 

 fathers had been accustomed to calculate, with the same 

 certainty with which the sailor does the ebb and flow of 

 ocean tides, these annual migrations, and could move with 

 or follow them at leisure and with confidence ; but suddenly 

 the mighty herds have snuffed some hidden danger on the 

 tainted breeze, and breaking away in mad and scattered 

 career over the plains, have defied pursuit, to gather again 

 in some remote and unaccustomed pastures beyond the reach 

 of this vague, indefinite dread which has met them on the 

 coming air. 



Thus all calculations for the usual supply of the season 

 having been thrown entirely out, the tribes are left to struggle 

 with the precarious chances of again finding the buffalo. 

 They, too, have been accustomed heretofore to watching the 

 signs of the seasons, and could even scent a drought as far 

 as the grayest muzzle of the leaders of these herds, and 

 could, with unfailing sagacity, foresee what variation from 

 the usual trail this would cause with them. But now a new 

 sign was in the heavens, a prognostic of evil, which, as it 

 could only be felt in dread by their savage souls, was now 

 first more nearly interpreted by the sure instincts of their 

 brute co-occupants of these great solitudes and in these wild 

 panics, distant, so unaccountable to them at first, they soon 

 learned to recognize a mysterious apprehension of the remote 

 advance of that destroying Power, the realization of which 

 has now, though later, come to them more clearly. The 

 brute sense proved surer than the man's in this, as in all 

 other instances in which circumstances have enabled us to 

 measure its actions and their results in regard to the 

 approaches of our race into the wildernesses of earth with the 

 fearful appliances of civilization. The shudder of approach- 

 ing dissolution has already passed through all those vast 

 herds, as well as felt in the awed souls of these savago 

 hunters. 



