the great bull buffalo
through the barrier of the steel-wire fence, were fitted, before all
others, to give him a name. Between him and them there was surely a
tragic bond, as they stood there islanded among the swelling tides of
civilization which had already engulfed their kindreds. "Last Bull"
they had called him, as he answered their gaze with little, sullen,
melancholy eyes from under his ponderous and shaggy front. "Last
Bull"--and the passing of his race was in the name.

Here, in his fenced, protected range, with a space of grassy meadow,
half a dozen clumps of sheltering trees, two hundred yards of the run
of a clear, unfailing brook, and a warm shed for refuge against the
winter storms, the giant buffalo ruled his little herd of three tawny
cows, two yearlings, and one blundering, butting calf of the season.
He was a magnificent specimen of his race--surpassing, it was said,
the finest bull in the Yellowstone preserves or in the guarded
Canadian herd of the North. Little short of twelve feet in length, a
good five foot ten in height at the tip of his humped and huge
fore-shoulders, he seemed to justify the most extravagant tales of
pioneer and huntsman. His hind-quarters were trim and fine-lined,
built apparently for speed, smooth-haired, and of a grayish
lion-color. But his fore-shoulders, mounting to an enormous hump, were
of an elephantine massiveness, and clothed in a dense, curling,
golden-brown growth of matted hair. His mighty head was carried low,
almost to the level of his knees, on a neck of colossal strength,
which was draped, together with the forelegs down to the knees, in a
flowing brown mane tipped with black. His head, too, to the very
muzzle, wore the same luxuriant and sombre drapery, out of which
curved viciously the keen-tipped crescent of his horns. Dark, huge,
and ominous, he looked curiously out of place in the secure and
familiar tranquillity of his green pasture.

For a distance of perhaps fifty yards, at the back of the pasture, the
range of the buffalo herd adjoined that of the moose, divided from it
by that same fence of heavy steel-wire mesh, supported by iron posts,
which surrounded the whole range. One sunny and tingling day in late
October--such a day as makes the blood race full red through all
healthy veins--a magnificent stranger was brought to the Park, and
turned into the moose-range.

The newcomer was a New Brunswick bull moose, captured on the Tobique
during the previ