282 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
wide wilderness of plains; of confused circlings day by day, 
always bringing the victim back to his own trail, until the 
dreary, lingering death of starvation relieved the bewilder- 
ment; of banded wolves with gaping jaws, hungry yells and 
tireless feet, pursuing the uncertain flight which has be- 
trayed to their ferocious instinct a sure prey in the lost man; 
of grim, creeping panthers springing from the thicket upon 
the deep sleep of his fruitless exhaustion; of the wild, vague 
and unutterable horror of lonely, unavenged and unrecorded 
death in a thousand forms,—until self-possession reeled, and 
the mad impulse was to strike spurs into my horse and plunge 
blindly on amidst them all. 
This singular sensation gradually loses its ‘intensity, when, 
by a series of happy accidents, rather than instincts, we gain 
more confidence, and it requires a less forlorn struggle to 
recall ourselves to calmness and the cool consideration of the 
position in which we are thrown. 
But let there be as many lessons as can well be crowded 
into a year or two of such wild experiences, yet he is a man 
of very strong nerve who can, even then, draw up his horse, 
after a heated chase of buffalo, deer, or wolf, or bear, and 
not feel much of this appalled startle when, the slaughter 
over, he looks around with aching eyes for the first time to 
see where he is. 
A sinking sense of loneliness and awe is the reaction of the 
fierce and headlong excitement, under which he has been 
hurled, as it were, he knows not in what direction, or how 
far. He gazes around him in breathless silence and name- 
less dread for awhile; the contrast of the stilless, now that 
death has intervened, with the crashing, raging impetus which 
brought him here, is too oppressive, and he dares not make a 
sound; he almost shudders while the dim consciousness that 
he has just done murder in the sight of his peaceful mother, 
Earth, comes over him reproachfully amidst her voiceless 
salms; and the whole forest, with its straight stems, the broad 
