nded upon game for fresh
meat. Nobody liked to kill a beef, and although now and then a maverick
yearling might be killed on the round-up, most of us looked askance at
the deed, because if the practice of beef-killing was ever allowed to
start, the rustlers--the horse thieves and cattle thieves--would be sure
to seize on it as an excuse for general slaughter. Getting meat for the
ranch usually devolved upon me. I almost always carried a rifle when I
rode, either in a scabbard under my thigh, or across the pommel. Often
I would pick up a deer or antelope while about my regular work, when
visiting a line camp or riding after the cattle. At other times I would
make a day's trip after them. In the fall we sometimes took a wagon
and made a week's hunt, returning with eight or ten deer carcasses, and
perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well. I never became more than a
fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either
failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some
blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired. Looking back,
I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was
that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many
other things. Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were very
hungry, I never killed anything but bucks.

Occasionally I made long trips away from the ranch and among the Rocky
Mountains with my ranch foreman Merrifield; or in later years with
Tazewell Woody, John Willis, or John Goff. We hunted bears, both the
black and the grizzly, cougars and wolves, and moose, wapiti, and white
goat. On one of these trips I killed a bison bull, and I also killed a
bison bull on the Little Missouri some fifty miles south of my ranch on
a trip which Joe Ferris and I took together. It was rather a rough trip.
Each of us carried only his slicker behind him on the saddle, with some
flour and bacon done up in it. We met with all kinds of misadventures.
Finally one night, when we were sleeping by a slimy little prairie pool
where there was not a stick of wood, we had to tie the horses to the
horns of our saddles; and then we went to sleep with our heads on the
saddles. In the middle of the night something stampeded the horses, and
away they went, with the saddles after them. As we jumped to our feet
Joe eyed me with an evident suspicion that I was the Jonah of the party,
and said: "O Lord! I've never done anything to deserve this. D