, the animal I am speaking of is really the bison.
It has a protuberant hunch on its shoulders, and the body is covered,
especially towards the head, by long, fine, woolly hair, which makes the
animal appear much more bulky than it really is. That over the head,
neck, and fore part of the body is long and shaggy, and forms a beard
beneath the lower jaw, descending to the knees in a tuft; while on the
top it rises in a dense mass nearly to the tops of the horns, and is
strongly curled and matted on the front. The tail is short, and has a
tuft at the end--the general colour of the hair being a uniform dun.
The legs are especially slender, and appear to be out of all proportion
to the body; indeed, it seems wonderful that they are able to bear it,
and that the animals can at the same time exhibit the activity they
seemed possessed of.

In summer the buffalo finds an abundance of food by cropping the sweet
grass which springs up after the fires so frequent in one part or other
of the prairies. In winter, in the northern regions, it would starve,
were it not possessed of a blunt nose, covered by tough skin, with which
it manages to dig into the snow and shovel it away, so as to get at the
herbage below. In winter, too, the hair grows to a much greater length
than in summer, when the hinder part is covered only by a very short
fine hair, smooth as velvet. Many thousands of these magnificent
animals congregate in herds, which roam from north to south over the
western prairies. At a certain time of the year the bulls fight
desperately with each other, on which occasions their roaring is truly
terrific.

The hunters select, when they can, female buffalo, as their flesh is far
superior in quality and tenderness to that of the males. The females
are, however, far more active than the males, and can run three times as
fast, so that swift horses are required to keep up with them. The
Indians complain of the destruction of the buffalo--forgetting that
their own folly in killing the females is one of the chief causes of the
diminution of their numbers.

Huge and unwieldy as is the buffalo, it dashes over the ground at a
surprising rate, bounding with large and clumsy-looking strides across
the roughest country, plunging down the broken sides of ravines, and
trying the mettle of horses and the courage of riders in pursuit of it.

To the Indians of the prairies the buffalo is of the greatest possible
value, for they depend o