v THE BADGER AND HIS KIN 149 
ern dialects of Great Britain. This last is the con- 
temptuous epithet that Shakespeare employs in 
“Twelfth Night” (Act 2, Scene 5) when he makes 
Sir Toby Belch mutter an aside of annoyance over 
Malvolio’s reading of the dropped letter, — “ Marry, 
hang thee, Brock!” And do you not remember the 
curious part of “next friend,” or counsel and go- 
between, that Grimbart, the badger, plays in the 
legend of Reynard, the Fox? 
It is amazing to see, in such favorable tracts as 
have been mentioned, how the ground is pitted 
and honey-combed with old and new burrows of 
all sorts. The danger of your horse stepping into 
an open hole is doubled by the chance of his crush- 
ing through the roofs of unsuspected excavations. 
Cattle-herding horses must acquire dexterity in 
avoiding such’accidents, or they would break their 
limbs and risk their riders’ necks fifty times a day. 
I shall never forget a wild morning I once spent 
near Cheyenne, hunting antelopes with deerhounds. 
The prairie horses — mine was a nervous gray that 
seemed unable to stand on all four legs at once — 
were eager to enter into the fun, and bore us 
straight across the country, up the ridges and 
down the hollows, over or around the clumps of 
sage and grease-wood, at topmost speed, twisting 
and dodging to avoid badger-earths, ant-hillocks, 
prairie-dog holes, and tall bushes; and more than 
once my horse seemed to take a new flight in the 
air, when he rose to leap over a thicket, and caught 
