"Now, brother!" said Tawannears.
He cast off his head-dress, and advanced openly upon the animals. I imitated him, and an old bull gave a bellow of warning. A medley of noises answered the alarm, mooing of cows and bleating of frightened calves and over all the bellowing of other bulls. The herd milled around and gave ground before us. Tawannears waved his arms, and it broke into a run.
"They will go over Peter!" I exclaimed.
"No," answered Tawannears. "If it were a large herd, perhaps. But we have only made it easier for Peter, who said he needed no help. He will shoot into the herd when it approaches him, and the buffalo will split right and left on either side of him."
The herd topped the first swell to the south, and a shot boomed suddenly.
"Watch!" said Tawannears.
The frenzied mass of huge, shaggy creatures divided as if a giant sword had sliced down from the blazing sky overhead. I ran up the slope behind them and reached its brow in time to see the halves reunite a quarter of a mile farther on. Directly beneath me lay the body of a fat cow, and Peter already was at work upon it with his knife. Tawannears raised the war-whoop, but Peter carved stolidly on.
"Ja," he remarked when we joined him, "you think you put der choke on Peter, eh? Well, you don't. I look back once andt I don't see you. Andt den der herd begins to mofe, andt it stampedes. 'Ho,' I said to myself. 'Funny tricks! Ja, funny tricks.' But I shoot me der best cow in der lot, yust der same. We hafe some nice hump for supper. Ja."
Fortunately for Peter's appetite, we were able to camp that night in a grove of dwarf trees that bordered a small river, and the broiled buffalo hump was all that he had anticipated. We seized the opportunity afforded by a plentiful supply of firewood to jerk the balance of the choice cuts, about four stone in weight, which detained us in the grove all of the next day. Of course, we could not make a thorough job of it, but it sufficed to preserve the meat untainted in that searing heat for three or four days longer, and at the end of that time we had worked into a different kind of country where game was more plentiful.
Here lush meadows alternated with dense patches of low timber and swamps and bottomlands, these latter backwaters of the river, which were forest-covered, yet never completely drained. The increasing natural difficulties slowed our pace, and we were three days in traversing this broken country; but Tawannears encouraged us with the assurance that it indicated our nearness to the Great River, which always in the Spring inundated the lands along its course, sometimes for many miles.