an and every traveller familiar with the great plains
region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick
death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's
end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were
always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the
sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.

In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On
Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several
hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than
elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in
shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this
appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city
parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders,
with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.

* * * * *

Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful
enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the
hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured
two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to
the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of
idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,
when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores
had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.

In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June
before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length;
fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters
were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate
perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds
many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual
hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer--by still-hunting; for
though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except
sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long
as he did not see its cause.

Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper
might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a
moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes.
Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he
could get m