The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals—a persistent vindictiveness.
In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.
After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White hunters have been accused of waste, because they used only the skin, tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the buffalo sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.
The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.
"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his rifle.
The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.
The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.
And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a stone.