ough the country of hostiles, sentinels kept guard; but midnight
usually saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare faces
upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of uprising smoke where
the camp-fire still glowed red, and on the far, shadowy horizon, with
the moonlit skyline meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,
vague, whitish forms--the coyotes keeping watch, stealthy and shunless
as death.

The northward movement of the buffalo began with the spring. Odd
scattered herds might have roamed the valleys in the winter; but as the
grass grew deeper and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie
land became literally covered with the humpback, furry forms of the
roving herds. Indian legend ascribed their coming directly to the
spirits. The more prosaic white man explained that the buffalo were only
emerging from winter shelter, and their migration was a search for fresh
feeding-ground.

Be that as it may, northward they came, in straggling herds that covered
the prairie like a flock of locusts; in close-formed battalions, with
leaders and scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the young;
in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, soft from spring rains,
marked with a rut like a ditch; in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop
that roared like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,
sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the swollen
water-course of river and slough, up embankments with long beards and
fringed dewlaps dripping--on and on and on--till the tidal wave of life
had hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. Here and there
in the brownish-black mass were white and gray forms, light-coloured
buffalo, freaks in the animal world.

The age of the calves in each year's herd varied. The writer remembers a
sturdy little buffalo that arrived on the scene of this troublous life
one freezing night in January, with a howling blizzard and the
thermometer at forty below--a combination that is sufficient to set the
teeth of the most mendacious northerner chattering. The young buffalo
spent the first three days of his life in this gale and was none the
worse, which seems to prove that climatic apology, "though it is cold,
you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged, clumsy bundle of fawn and
fur in the same herd counted its natal day from a sweltering afternoon
in August.

* * * * *

Many signs told the buffalo-runner