It was a real darkness, too, besides the dark that came when Shaggo closed his eyes. The mighty buffalo was so strong that even his heavy fall did not make him senseless very long. In a little while he opened his eyes again. He could still feel the pain in his shoulder, but what surprised him more than anything else was the darkness that was all about him.
“This is very queer,” said Shaggo to himself. “When I started to run away from our buffalo range it was daylight. That could not have been so very long ago, yet it is now as dark as night. I wonder if I could have been here all that while. Guess I’ll move about and see what the matter is.”
Shaggo shook himself, thereby rousing himself and getting wider awake from his queer sleep. He managed to scramble to his feet, but no sooner had he done so than the pain in his shoulder grew sharper.
“Why—why!” exclaimed Shaggo, “I can hardly move. Ouch! Oh my, this is terrible! I hope my leg isn’t broken!”
Shaggo knew what it was for a buffalo to have a broken leg. They hardly ever lived to get over it, and he did not want anything like that to happen.
So Shaggo moved each one of his four legs very carefully to see if any of them was broken. But though his front left leg was very painful up near his shoulder, it did not seem to be broken. But, oh, how it hurt to move it!
“And yet I have to move it if I’m ever going to get out of this place,” thought Shaggo. “Where am I, anyhow? It’s very dark, and yet I’m sure it isn’t night. It doesn’t smell like night.”
Buffaloes, and other animals, are not like boys and girls. Animals can tell many things by merely smelling, where we have to see things to know what they are. And Shaggo could tell when it was daylight or night by smelling. And though now, to his eyesight, it was dark all around him, somehow or other he felt sure it was not the darkness of night.
“And if it isn’t night, then I must be in some sort of cave or hole,” thought the mighty buffalo.