But there are two sides to the question. It is simply a case of the survival of the fittest. Too late to stop and moralize now. And sentiment must have no part in our thoughts from this time on. We must have these 3361 hides that this region is to and did furnish us inside of three months, within a radius of eight miles from this main camp. So at it we went. And Hart, whom we will hereafter call Charlie, started out, and in two hours had killed sixty-three bison.
CHAPTER VI.
Two hundred and three Killed at One Time.—How We Skinned Buffalo.—I Saw a Panther.—Cyrus Saw a Bear.—I Killed an Eagle.—A Great, Moving Mass of Buffalo.—I Kill a Cougar.—Hickey, the Hide-buyer.—Cyrus Meets a Bear.—The Wounded Panther.—The Weird Night Watch.—Left Alone.—On Meat Straight, Fourteen Days.
Dockum and I for the first few days worked together. We two skinned thirty-three of this killing. Hadley and Cyrus worked together for a short time. It was now a busy time. Some days thirty and forty-odd hides, then a good day with eighty-five, and one day in February, one hundred and seventy-one; then again the same month, 203; and these 203 were killed on less than ten acres of ground.
My experience with the Woods had helped me. In starting I had learned to keep my knives in good order and how to handle and manipulate them. But it was here I learned to simplify, lighten, and speed the work.
We fastened a forked stick to the center of the hind axle-tree of a wagon, letting the end drag on the ground on an incline to say 20 degrees; fastened a chain or rope to the same axle, then we would drive up quartering to the carcass and hook the loose end of the chain over a front leg. After skinning the upper side down, then start the team up and pull the dead animal up a little, and stop. (The stick prevented the wagon from backing up.) Then we would skin the belly down mid-sides; start the team again, and pull the carcass over, having rolled the first side of the hide close to the backbone. Then we would skin down to the backbone, and the hide was separated from the carcass. We would then throw the hide in the wagon, and proceed as before until all the hides were skinned from the dead carcasses.
Many times we had in one killing more hides than the two ponies could pull to camp, in which case we spread the hide, flesh side down, by the carcass, in order to get them when there was a slack time in the work.
After the first ten days I went alone with the team, except on the occasion of a big day's killing. Each night Charley got out his memorandum book and I got mine, and we put down the number of hides I had skinned that day. Isolated as we were, we kept track of the days of the week and the month of the year. This was Dockum's work. He was very methodical in everything he did.