as is unknown in the annals of any other
kind of hunting, up hills, down embankments, over cliffs, through
sloughs, across rivers, hard and fast and far as horses had strength to
carry riders in a boundless land!

[Illustration: The buffalo-hunt.

After a contemporary print.]

Riders were unseated and went down in the _melee_; horses caught on the
horns of charging bulls and ripped from shoulder to flank; men thrown
high in mid-air to alight on the back of a buffalo; Indians with
dexterous aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; unwary
hunters trampled to death under a multitude of hoofs; wounded buffalo
turning with fury on their assailants till the pursuer became pursued
and only the fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.

A retired officer of the North-West mounted police, who took part in a
Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago, described the impression at the
time as of an earthquake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of
fleeing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground under the
thunderous pounding, were all like a violent earthquake. The same
gentleman tells how he once saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian
hunter. The man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways to give
him a chance to send a last finishing shot home, the horse became wildly
unmanageable and fled. The buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and
buffalo, the Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown and
fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the buffalo, the great beast
covered with foam, his eyes like fire, pounding and pounding--closer and
closer to the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the horizon.

"To this day I have wondered what became of that Indian," said the
officer, "for the horse was losing and the buffalo gaining when they
went over the bluff."

The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals--a
persistent vindictiveness.

In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.

After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was
first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every
buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White
hunters have been accused of waste, because they used only the skin,
tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the
Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying
thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the