“Oh, dear me! This is no good at all!” bellowed the shaggy buffalo, shaking his big head and his hump that was covered with long, dark brown hair. “This is a queer cave, where you can’t even get a drink of cold water!”
Shaggo did not know what to do. The longer he waited the more he wanted a drink, but he could not take that hot water.
“I’ll wait a little longer,” thought the runaway buffalo. “Maybe it won’t happen again. It’s like somebody playing a trick on me. If Soako or Poko were here I’d say they were doing it. But they are far away. They didn’t jump over the wire fence as I did—and I almost wish, now, that I hadn’t. I’m not having half as much fun as I thought I would. The range was a better place for me than I thought.”
Once more Shaggo lay down near the hot, boiling spring. He waited until the column of water stopped bubbling and then he tried, for the third time, to get a drink. But when again it shot up, almost in his nose, he gave a grunt and wuff and said:
“This settles it! I’m not going to fool away any more time here. I’m going out of this cave and get a drink somewhere else! This is a crazy sort of spring!”
Limping along, and shaking his big head, Shaggo turned to find a way out of the cave. He knew that the place where the most light came in was the place where he could get out, and he started for this. In a little while he was outside, on the broad, rolling prairie. He looked around him. Back in the distance he could see the wire-fenced buffalo range, from which he had jumped in order to run away. He was so far off now that he could not make out the forms of any of his animal friends. Nor could they see him, he felt sure. To one side was a big tract of woods, a dense forest, and in the other direction lay the prairies, over which, years before, millions of buffaloes like Shaggo had roamed as they pleased. Now there were only a few buffaloes left, and most of them were in National Parks.
“Now to try for another place to get a drink,” said Shaggo to himself. “I guess I’ll keep out of the woods for a while.”
Raising his big head, Shaggo sniffed the air. He was not quite sure, but he thought that over toward the east, in the place where the bright sun came up every morning, he could smell water.
“I’ll try that way,” said Shaggo to himself. He lumbered slowly along, limping a little because of his hurt shoulder, and soon the smell of water came stronger to his black nose.
All at once a voice that seemed to come from the ground on which Shaggo walked cried: