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 savage 
hunters. 
