Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow. She throws up her head and is off. There is a stampede—myriad forms lumbering over the earth till the ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo herd but the smoking dust of the far horizon—nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow, leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.
After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must realize that fact as plainly as a human being would. Has he roamed the plains and guarded the calves from sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does not know what those vague, gray forms are, always hovering behind him, always sneaking to the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill, always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down, scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a drink? If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant, he would not have spent his entire life from calfhood guarding against them. But he does know; and therein lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He invariably seeks out some steep background where he can take his last stand against the wolves with a face to the foe.
But the end is inevitable.
While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear; and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink powerless under him, hamstrung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he still keeps his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy the rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till death comes to the victim.
Poor old king! Is anything that man has ever done to the buffalo herd half as tragically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo leader?
Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with the great plains region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.
In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders, with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.
Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter, when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.
In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length; fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer—by still-hunting; for though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long as he did not see its cause.