illed a half-dozen within a quarter-mile of the
Maltese Cross early that summer, these had been merely a straggling
remnant. The days when a hunter could stand and bombard a dull,
panic-stricken herd, slaughtering hundreds without changing his
position, were gone. In the spring of 1883 the buffalo had still
roamed the prairies east and west of the Bad Lands in huge herds, but
moving in herds they were as easy to shoot as a family cow and the
profits even at three dollars a pelt were great. Game-butchers swarmed
forth from Little Missouri and fifty other frontier "towns,"
slaughtering buffalo for their skins or for their tongues or for the
mere lust of killing. The hides were piled high at every shipping
point; the carcasses rotted in the sun. Three hundred thousand
buffalo, driven north from the more settled plains of western
Nebraska, and huddled in a territory covering not more than a hundred
and fifty square miles, perished like cattle in a stockyard, almost
overnight. It was one of the most stupendous and dramatic
obliterations in history of a species betrayed by the sudden change of
its environment.

Hunting buffalo on horseback had, even in the days of the great herds,
been an altogether different matter from the methodical slaughter from
a "stand," where a robe for every cartridge was not an unusual "bag,"
and where an experienced game-butcher could, without recourse to Baron
Munchausen, boast an average of eighty per cent of "kills." There was
always the possibility that the bison, driven to bay, might charge the
sportsman who drove his horse close in for a sure shot. With the great
herds destroyed, there was added to the danger and the privations of
the wild country where the few remaining stragglers might be found,
the zest and the arduousness of long searching. Roosevelt and Joe
Ferris had had their full share of the latter.

They came on the fresh track of a buffalo two hours after their
departure, that clear warm morning, from Lang's hospitable cabin. It
was, for a time, easy to follow, where it crossed and recrossed a
narrow creek-bottom, but became almost undiscernible as it struck off
up the side of a winding coulee, where the soil, soaked as it had been
by a week of September drizzle, was already baked hard by the hot sun.
They rode for an hour cautiously up the ravine. Suddenly, as they
passed the mouth of a side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle
through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-look