after a dozen boreal setbacks, the
awakening of green things and the return of a temperature fit for
human beings to live in. Snow buntings came in March, flocking
familiarly round the cow-shed at the Maltese Cross, now chittering on
the ridge-pole, now hovering in the air with quivering wings, warbling
their loud, merry song. Before the snow was off the ground, the grouse
cocks could be heard uttering their hollow booming. At the break of
morning, their deep, resonant calls came from far and near through the
clear air like the vibrant sound of some wind instrument. Now and
again, at dawn or in the early evening, Roosevelt would stop and
listen for many minutes to the weird, strange music, or steal upon the
cocks where they were gathered holding their dancing rings, and watch
them posturing and strutting about as they paced through their minuet.

The opening of the ground--and it was occasionally not unlike the
opening of a trap-door--brought work in plenty to Roosevelt and his
friends at the Maltese Cross. The glades about the water-holes where
the cattle congregated became bogs that seemed to have no bottom.
Cattle sank in them and perished unless a saving rope was thrown in
time about their horns and a gasping pony pulled them clear. The
ponies themselves became mired and had to be rescued. It was a period
of wallowing for everything on four feet or on two. The mud stuck like
plaster.[11]

[Footnote 11: "I never was bothered by gumbo in the Bad
Lands. There wasn't a sufficient proportion of clay in
the soil. But out on the prairie, oh, my martyred Aunt
Jane's black and white striped cat!"--_A. T. Packard._]

Travel of every sort was hazardous during early spring, for no one
ever knew when the ground would open and engulf him. Ten thousand
wash-outs, a dozen feet deep or thirty, ran "bank-high" with swirling,
merciless waters, and the Little Missouri, which was a shallow trickle
in August, was a torrent in April. There were no bridges. If you
wanted to get to the other side, you swam your horse across, hoping
for the best.

At Medora it was customary, when the Little Missouri was high, to ride
to the western side on the narrow footpath between the tracks on the
trestle; and after the Marquis built a dam nearby for the purpose of
securing ice of the necessary thickness for use in his refrigerating
plant, a venturesome spirit now and then guided his horse acro