THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
animals, and so regular their increase, that their depredations made but 
little difference. 
Armed with bow and arrow or lance, and both with and without the aid 
of horses, the Indians killed enormous numbers. In the north they pursued 
them during the winter on snow-shoes, and sometimes a whole tribe 
would unite in forming a buffalo pound, when the animals were either 
led or driven down converging lines to the edge of a steep cliff, over which 
they were forced. Perhaps one of the worst causes of destruction of the 
buffalo, was the treacherous ice on the rivers in spring. In winter they were 
accustomed to cross the ice in safety, but in spring there was an impulse 
to wander north in compact masses. A few rivers were crossed in safety, 
and then one would be encountered where the ice had become rotten. 
Those in front went crashing through the ice and thousands more were 
pushed forward to death by the frenzied herd behind. 
Alexander Henry, writing in 1801, describes the stench from the vast 
numbers of drowned buffaloes on the Red River, whilst John MacDonnell 
speaks of a similar disaster on the Qu’Appelle River in May, 1795. He 
spent one day (May 18), in counting the carcasses and found that they 
numbered 7,360, drowned, and mired along the river and in it. 
In old times residents on the Missouri River were familiar with the 
early flood that carried countless buffalo carcasses and stored them in the 
Mississippi mud. Practically all the large northern rivers were a death 
trap in the spring; but with all this vast destruction there seems to have 
been little apparent difference until the coming of the rifle. With this 
weapon the doom of the buffalo was sealed. 
Buffaloes were always accompanied by the cow-bird ( Molothrus ater ), 
a member of the starling family. It is a very peculiar bird as it never pairs, 
makes a nest, or brings up its own young. “ Free-love ” is the motto of 
this peculiar bird, and when the female is ready to lay her eggs she searches 
for a nest of some small birds and deposits them there. She then returns 
and mixes with the flock whose host is the buffalo. I observed a flock of 
these birds in the National Park at Banff in 1908, and could not help com- 
paring some of their movements and attachment to the large animals 
with those of the rhinoceros bird. The cow-birds do not climb up and 
search the skin of the buffalo as the ox -peckers do in Africa, but walk 
sedately beside their friend or flit over its back catching flies. When the 
animal is at rest, they sit along its spine. Their attachment to the buffalo 
is so intimate that the Indians say that they nest in the wool between 
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