hrow her, and turn her upside down to milk
her, while exhilarating as a pastime, was not productive of results.
Gradually we accumulated tame cows, and, after we had thinned out the
bobcats and coyotes, more chickens.

The ranch house stood on the brink of a low bluff overlooking the broad,
shallow bed of the Little Missouri, through which at most seasons there
ran only a trickle of water, while in times of freshet it was filled
brimful with the boiling, foaming, muddy torrent. There was no neighbor
for ten or fifteen miles on either side of me. The river twisted down
in long curves between narrow bottoms bordered by sheer cliff walls,
for the Bad Lands, a chaos of peaks, plateaus, and ridges, rose abruptly
from the edges of the level, tree-clad, or grassy, alluvial meadows.
In front of the ranch-house veranda was a row of cottonwood trees with
gray-green leaves which quivered all day long if there was a breath of
air. From these trees came the far-away, melancholy cooing of mourning
doves, and little owls perched in them and called tremulously at night.
In the long summer afternoons we would sometimes sit on the piazza, when
there was no work to be done, for an hour or two at a time, watching the
cattle on the sand-bars, and the sharply channeled and strangely carved
amphitheater of cliffs across the bottom opposite; while the vultures
wheeled overhead, their black shadows gliding across the glaring white
of the dry river-bed. Sometimes from the ranch we saw deer, and once
when we needed meat I shot one across the river as I stood on the
piazza. In the winter, in the days of iron cold, when everything was
white under the snow, the river lay in its bed fixed and immovable as a
bar of bent steel, and then at night wolves and lynxes traveled up and
down it as if it had been a highway passing in front of the ranch house.
Often in the late fall or early winter, after a hard day's hunting, or
when returning from one of the winter line camps, we did not reach the
ranch until hours after sunset; and after the weary tramping in the
cold it was keen pleasure to catch the first red gleam of the fire-lit
windows across the snowy wastes.

The Elkhorn ranch house was built mainly by Sewall and Dow, who, like
most men from the Maine woods, were mighty with the ax. I could chop
fairly well for an amateur, but I could not do one-third the work they
could. One day when we were cutting down the cottonwood trees, to begin
our building op