It was a mad ride that we had for the next ten minutes—across beds of gravel, among huge bowlders, and once or twice over great fissures in the earth which chilled my blood as I took a sort of bird's-eye view of their depths. In a lumbering run on ahead of us went the frightened bull, his feet occasionally sending back dashes of pebbles, while behind him rattled such a clattering of hoofs that the poor brute, if he could think at all, must have imagined he had butted open the door of Hades, and was now being pursued by its inmates.
There were mishaps in this our first buffalo hunt, of course, and among them, Muggs dropped a stirrup, and was obliged to support himself afterward on one foot—an awkward matter, resulting from his inconvenient English saddle, one of the kind which compels one, half the time, to sustain the whole body by the stirrups alone. We gained upon the game steadily, though no particular member of our party excelled as leader, first one being ahead and then the other. Cynocephalus developed wonderfully, and kept well up with his better conditioned neighbors.
What a magnificent prize for the hunter rushed on before us, swinging his ponderous head from side to side, for the purpose of getting better rear views—such an ungainly and shaggy animal, a perfect marvel of magnificent disproportions! It is well enough to go to Africa and hunt lions, and describe their majestic, flowing manes; but this bison, in mad flight ahead of us, could have furnished hair and mane enough to fit out half a dozen lions. At close quarters, too, he was fully as dangerous as the king of beasts.
We were close at his heels when the level of the plain was reached, and pursuer and pursued shot out upon it together. A large herd, feeding not five hundred yards away, was speedily in full flight northward. "A stern chase is a long chase," is no less true in buffalo hunting than in nautical matters. After considerable experience in the sport, I would recommend amateurs to get as near their game as possible before starting, and then try their horses' full metal. Once by the side of the game, he can keep there to the end. And so, after a terrible chase, when at times we had almost despaired of overtaking the old fellow, we now found it easy to keep alongside.
Our bull was a huge one, even among his species, and in such moments of excitement the imagination seems to have a trick of entering the chambers of the eye, and sliding its mirrors into a sort of double focus arrangement. With blood boiling until my heart seemed to bob up and down on its surface, I found myself riding parallel with the brute, and had I never seen him afterward, would have been almost willing to make oath that his size could be represented only by throwing a covering of buffalo robes over an elephant.
Every one in the party was firing, some having dropped their reins to use their carbines, and others yet guiding their horses with one hand, while they fired their holster revolvers with the other. Shooting from the saddle, with a horse going at full speed, needs practice to enable one to hit any thing smaller than a mammoth. You point the weapon, but at the instant your finger presses the trigger, the muzzle may be directed toward the zenith or the earth. An experienced hunter steadies his arm, not allowing it to take part in the motion of his body, no matter how rough the latter may be. But we were not experienced hunters, and so, although such exclamations as, "That told!" "Mine went through!" and "Perfectly riddled!" were almost as numerous as the bullets, it was easy to see that the flying monster remained unharmed.
From the first, Mr. Colon had fired without taking any aim whatever, and so it happened that his gun, in describing its half circle consequent upon the rising and falling motion of the horse, at length went off at the proper moment, and we heard the thud of the ball as it struck. Dropping his head into position as if for a charge, the buffalo whirled sharply to the right, and passing directly between our horses, made off toward the main herd. But he soon slowed down to a walk, and as we again came up with him, we could see the blood trickling from his nose, which he held low like a sick ox.
In the excitement of the chase, and perhaps from being well blown before coming near the buffalo, our horses had hitherto shown no fear, but now, as the old bull stood there in all his savage hugeness, and the smell of blood tainted the air, they pushed, jostled, snorted, and pranced, so that it required all our efforts to keep them from downright flight. Even Dobeen's donkey kept his rider uncertain whether his destiny was to seek the ground or abide in the saddle.
The brute stood facing us, perhaps fifty yards off, his eyes rolling wildly from pain and fury, and the blood flowing freely through his nostrils.
We were waiting patiently for him to die, when suddenly the head went into position, like a Roman battering ram, and down he came upon us. We were utterly routed. No spur was necessary to prompt the horses, and I doubt if their former owners had ever known what latent speed their hides concealed. The whole thing was so sudden there was no time for thought, and all that I can remember is a confused sort of idea that each animal was going off at a tremendous pace, with the rider devoting his energies to sticking on. After the first few jumps, we were no longer an organized company, each brute taking his own course, and carrying us, like fragments of an explosion, in different directions. A marked exception, however, was Muggs' mule, which for the only time in his life, seemed unwilling to run away. After being the first to start, and assisting the others to stampede, he stopped suddenly short, depositing his rider something like ten yards ahead of him, in a manner quite the reverse of gentle.