144 THE MINDS AND MANNERS 



We went; but not armed with "a rusty old revolver." 

 We found a few buffaloes, but ye gods! How changed they 

 were from the old days! Although only two short years had 

 elapsed since the terminal slaughter of the hundreds of thou- 

 sands whose white skeletons then thickly dotted the Missouri- 

 Yellowstone divide, they had learned fear of man, and also 

 how to preserve themselves from that dangerous wild beast. 

 They sought the remotest bad lands, they hid in low grounds, 

 they watched sharply during every daylight hour, and when- 

 ever a man on horseback was sighted they were off like a bunch 

 of racers, for a long and frantic run straight away from the 

 trouble-maker. Even at a distance of two miles, or as far as 

 they could see a man, they would run from him, — ^not one 

 nule, or two, but five miles, or seven or eight miles, to another 

 wild and rugged hiding-place. 



To kill the buffalo specimens that we needed, three cowboys 

 and the writer worked hard for nearly three months, and it 

 was all that we could do to outwit those man-scared bison, 

 and to get near enough to them to kill what we required. 

 Many a time, when weary from a long chase, I thought with 

 bitter scorn of my friend with the rusty-old-revolver in his 

 mind. No deer, mountain sheep, tiger, bears nor elephants, — 

 all of 'which I have pursued (and sometimes overtaken!) — 

 were ever more wary or keen in self-preservation than those 

 bison who ai last had broken out from under the fatal spell of 

 herd security. I am really glad that this strange turn of 

 Fortune's wheel gave me the knowledge of the true scope of 

 the buffalo mind before the last chance had passed. 



What did a wild buffalo do when he found himself with 

 a broken leg, and unable to travel, but otherwise sound? 

 Did he go limping about over the landscape, to attract enemies 

 from afar, and be quickly shot by a man or torn to pieces by 

 wolves? Not he! With the keen intelligence of the wounded 

 wild nmiinant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on 

 three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going. 



