Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes. Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he could get more there was likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too slow for the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was tracking on snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north of the Yellowstone. A wounded buffalo at close range was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly; and it did not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for which the trader would give him only four or five dollars' worth of goods.
The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over a precipice where hunters were stationed on each side below, or by luring the herd into a pound or pit by means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide. But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides; and if the pound were a sort of cheval-de-frise or corral converging at the inner end, it required more hunters than were ever together except at the incoming of the spring brigades.
When there were many hunters and countless buffalo, the white blood of the plains' trapper preferred a fair fight in an open field—not the indiscriminate carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest buffalo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The greatest of these were on the Upper Missouri. This was the Mandan country, where hunters of the Mackinaw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St. Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hudson Bay from Fort Douglas (Winnipeg), used to congregate before the War of 1812, which barred out Canadian traders.
At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Red River ox-carts were used to transport supplies to the scene of the hunt; but at the opening of the last century all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to field on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more supplies than could be stowed away in a saddle-pack, and no other escort than the old-fashioned muskets over each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.
The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only. The course usually led north and westward, for the reason that at this season the herds were on their great migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed them westward. From the first day out the hunter best fitted for the captainship was recognised as leader, and such discipline maintained as prevented unruly spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had closed near enough for the wild rush.
At night the hunters slept under open sky with horses picketed to saddles, saddles as pillows, and musket in hand. When the course led through 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.