The Hunters of the Ozark

by Edward Sylvester Ellis

Even in that exciting moment Terry saw the grotesqueness of the situation. His legs were stretched apart so as to span the animal just back of his enormous neck. Letting go of the branch that had played him the trick, he grasped the bushy mane with both hands and yelled in a voice that might have been heard a mile away:

"All aboard! off wid ye!"

So far as a bull is capable of feeling emotion, that particular specimen must have been in a peculiar frame of mind. He glared about him, here and there, turned part way round, as if the whole thing was more than he could understand, and then as his bulging eyes caught sight of the remarkable load on his back and he felt the weight of the burden, he was seized with a panic.

He emitted a single whiffing snort, and flinging his tail high in air, made for the other side of the prairie as if Death himself was racing at his heels. His actions were of that pronounced character that his fright communicated itself to the rest of the herd. There was a general uplifting of heads, and then, as the bulls and cows saw their most eminent leader tearing across the prairie with a live boy astride of his back, the sight was too much for them. A wholesale series of snorts and bellows followed, tails were flirted aloft, and away the whole herd went, fairly making the ground tremble beneath their tread.

By the time the alarmed Fred Linden had his rifle reloaded there was not a buffalo within a hundred yards of him. The one that bore his friend on his back was making as good time as the fleetest and was well toward the head of the drove. The panic began like an eddy of the sea; there was a surging of the animals toward the other side of the prairie and away they went, as I have said, with their tails and heels in the air, as if they meant to keep up their headlong flight for twenty miles, as is sometimes the case, when an immense drove become stampeded on the great plains of the west.

Whatever feelings of amusement might have been first aroused by the figure that Terry cut on the back of the terrified bull were lost in the dreadful fear of Fred that it would prove a fatal ride for his friend.

He could see him plainly for a fourth of a mile, but by that time the trampling hoofs raised a dust in the dry grass which partly obscured the herd and made it impossible to distinguish the figure of the lad clinging to the mane of his novel charger.

"He will fall off," was the exclamation of Fred, "and will be trampled to death by the others."

He recalled that the bull must have been wounded by his own shot, but that knowledge gave him concern instead of relief; for if the bull should give out, he would be trampled by those who were thundering so close at his heels.

The buffaloes did not preserve the open order which marked them when they were grazing, but crowded together, so that their backs looked like brown dusty waves, rising and falling rapidly from the motions of their bodies.