erhaps even weeks, dying a lingering, but I am glad to
think and believe not a painful, death. What an awful death for a
reasoning, conscious man. Dumb animals, like cattle, happily seem to
anticipate and hope for nothing one way or another. Once I found a mare
in the river in such a position under a steep bank that nothing could be
done for her. Her young colt was on the bank waiting and wondering. Very
regretfully I had to leave them and carefully avoided passing that way
for some days to come till the tragedy had terminated. The Little
Colorado River, and afterwards the Pecos River in New Mexico, I have
often seen so thick with dead and dying cattle that a man might walk up
and down the river on the bodies of these unfortunate creatures. The
stench would become horrible, till the spring flood came to sweep the
carcasses to the sea or covered them up with deposit.

Quicksand is much more holding than mere river mud. If only the tip of
the tail or one single foot of the animal is covered by the stuff, then
even two stout horses will not pull it out. The Pecos River is
particularly dangerous on account of its quicksandy nature, and it was
my custom, when having to cross the mess wagon, to send across the
ramuda of two or three hundred saddle horses to tramp the river-bed
solid beforehand. On one occasion when crossing quite a small stream my
two driving ponies went down to their hocks, so that I had to cut the
traces and belabour them hard to get them out. Had they not got out at
once they never would have done so. My ambulance remained in the
river-bed all night and till a Mexican with a bull-team luckily came
along next day.

At the Meadows, my winter camp, I had to fill a contract of two or three
fat steers for the town butcher every week. With a man to help me we had
to go far afield and scour the range to get suitable animals, the best
and fattest beeves being always the furthest out. After corralling,
which might mean a tremendous amount of hard galloping and repeated
failures, the most difficult part of the job was the actual killing,
which I accomplished by shooting them with a six-shooter, not a carbine.
Only when a big steer has its head down to charge can you plant a bullet
in exactly the right spot, a very small one, too, on the forehead, when
he will drop like a stone. It was very pretty practice, but risky, as to
get them to charge you must be afoot and inside the corral. The butcher
was rather astonished