unds everywhere. Then, one day,
we suddenly heard a roar above that of the rushing water, coming from
the direction of the Little Missouri, and hurrying there saw a sight,
once seen, never to be forgotten. The river was out of banks clear up
into the cottonwoods and out on to the bottom, going down in a raging,
muddy torrent, literally full of huge, grinding ice-cakes, up-ending
and rolling over each other as they went, tearing down trees in their
paths, ripping, smashing, tearing at each other and everything in
their course in the effort to get out and away. The spectacle held us
spellbound. None of us had ever seen anything to compare with it, for
the spring freshets of other years had been mild affairs as compared
to this. But there was something _else_ that had never been seen
before, and doubtless never will be seen again, for as we gazed we
could see countless carcasses of cattle going down with the ice,
rolling over and over as they went, so that at times all four of the
stiffened legs of a carcass would point skyward as it turned under
the impulsion of the swiftly moving current and the grinding
ice-cakes. Now and then a carcass would become pinched between two
ice-floes, and either go down entirely or else be forced out on the
top of the ice, to be rafted along for a space until the cake upon
which it rested suddenly up-ended or turned completely over in the
maelstrom of swirling water and ice. Continuously carcasses seemed to
be going down while others kept bobbing up at one point or another to
replace them."

And this terrible drama continued, not for an hour or for a few hours,
but for days. Only as the weeks went by and the snow retreated was it
possible for the cattlemen to make any estimate of their losses. The
coulees were packed with dead cattle; the sheltered places in the
cottonwood trees in the bottoms along the river were packed with them.
Here and there a carcass was discovered high up in a crotch of a tree
where the animal had struggled over the drifts to munch the tender
twigs.

"I got a saddle horse and rode over the country," said Merrifield
afterward, "and I'm telling you, the first day I rode out I never saw
a live animal."

The desolation of the Bad Lands was indescribable. Where hundreds of
thousands of cattle had grazed the previous autumn, shambled and
stumbled a few emaciated, miserable survivors. Gregor Lang, who had
gone into the winter with three thousand head all told, came out o