410 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



thick forest of pine, while the other side is a meadow-like park, covered 

 with splendid grass. Such gorges are the favorite haunt of the mount- 

 ain buffalo. Early in the morning he enjoys a bountiful breakfast of 

 the rich nutritious grasses, quenches his thirst with the finest water, 

 and, retiring just within the line of jungle, where, himself unseen, he 

 can scan the open, he crouches himself in the long grass and reposes 

 in comfort and security until appetite calls him to his dinner late in the 

 evening. Unlike their plains relative, there is no stupid staring at an 

 intruder. At the first symptom of danger they disappear like magic 

 in the thicket, and never stop until far removed from even the appre- 

 hension of pursuit. I have many times come upon their fresh tracks, 

 upon the beds from which they had first sprung in alarm, but I have 

 never even seen one. 



" I have wasted much time and a great deal of wind in vain endeav- 

 ors to add one of these animals to my bag. My figure is no longer 

 adapted to mountain climbing, and the possession of a bison's head of 

 my own killing is one of my blighted hopes. 



" Several of my friends have been more fortunate, but I know of no 

 sportsman who has bagged more than one.* 



" Old mountaineers and trappers have given me wonderful accounts 

 of the number of these animals in all the mountain region ' many years 

 ago;' and I have been informed by them that their present rarity is 

 due to the great snow-storm of 1844-'45, of which I have already spoken 

 as destroying the plains buffalo in the Laramie country. 



" One of my friends, a most ardent and pertinacious sportsman, de- 

 termined on the possession of a bison's head, and, hiring a guide, 

 plunged into the mountain wilds which separate the Middle from South 

 Park. After several days fresh tracks were discovered. Turning their 

 horses loose on a little gorge park, such as described, they started on 

 foot on the trail ; for all that day they toiled and scrambled with the 

 utmost caution — now up, now down, through deep and narrow gorges 

 and pine thickets, over bare and rocky crags, sleeping where night over- 

 took them. Betimes next morning they pushed on the trail, and about 

 11 o'clock, when both were exhausted and well nigh disheartened, their 

 route was intercepted by a precipice. Looking over, they descried, on a 

 projecting ledge several hundred feet below, a herd of about 20 bisons 

 lying down. The ledge was about 300 feet at widest, by probably 1,000 

 feet long. Its inner boundary was the wall of rock on the top of which 

 they stood ; its outer appeared to be a sheer precipice of at least 200 

 feet. This ledge was connected with the slope of the mountain by a 

 narrow neck. The wind being right, the hunters succeeded in reaching 

 this neck unobserved. My friend selected a magnificent head, that of a 



'Foot-note by William Blackmore : " The author is in error here, as in a point of the 

 Tarryall range of mountains, between Pike's Peak and the South Park, in the autumn 

 of 1871, two mountain buffaloes were killed in one afternoon. The skin of the finer 

 was presented.' to Dr. Frank Buckland." 



