It has been proved that the whole populations of Europe, whose existence has been revealed to us in this way, consisted of savages, such as the Esquimaux are now; that, in the country which is now France, they hunted the reindeer, and were familiar with the ways of the mammoth and the bison.

" Down a narrow pass they wandered, Where a brooklet led them onward, Where the trail of deer and bison Marked the soft mud on the margin, Till they found all further passage Shut against them, barred securely By the trunks of trees uprooted, Lying lengthwise, lying crosswise, And forbidding further passage.

A score of such outfits, each with its Red River carts and its oxen, its dogs, its women and children, traveled to the plains each spring to hunt the bison.

It had been several years since Colonel Dodge reported that he had halted his party of railroad builders two days to let a herd of over half a million bison pass.

To the unthinking man a bison, a wapiti, a deer, a pronghorn antelope, is a matter of hide and meat; to the real nature lover, the true sportsman, the scientific student, each of these types is a subject of intense admiration.

One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet Rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty feet of leaf-and-timber mould.

[domesticated mammals] horse &c (beast of burden) 271; cattle, kine^, ox; bull, bullock; cow, milch cow, calf, heifer, shorthorn; sheep; lamb, lambkin^; ewe, ram, tup; pig, swine, boar, hog, sow; steer, stot^; tag, teg^; bison, buffalo, yak, zebu, dog, cat.

In a glade of the forest they had a magnificent sight of a large herd of bison peacefully grazing in the dewy grass.

They could hear tigers and bears passing back through the jungles to their dens in the deeper forest, and as the men stood there admiring the grand heads of the bison a monstrous tiger passed along quite close to one of the party, the Maharajah's brother-in-law.

The animal is the bison, and bears no resemblance whatever to the buffalo proper; but as the hunters of the far west, and, indeed, travellers generally, have adopted the misnomer, we bow to the authority of custom and adopt it too.

Not quite so savage is this frontier, indeed, as the wild precincts described by the Nebraska editor, whose meditations for a leader used to be cut short, occasionally, by the bellowing of the shaggy bison at his window, or the incursion of the redoubtable "grizzly" into his wood-shed where the elk-meat hung.

The huge bison must have gone over that well-beaten track one by one, to judge by its narrowness.

The X bar X boys on Big Bison Trail. SEE Ferris, James Cody.

Bison Bill and Johnnie Bull.

Bison Bill and Johnnie Bull.

MEWBORN, WINIFRED KNIGHT. Bison Bill and Johnnie Bull.

Bison Bill and Johnnie Bull.

The X bar X boys on Big Bison Trail. SEE Ferris, James Cody.

<pb id='057.png' /> The X Bar X boys on Big Bison Trail, by James Cody Ferris, pseud.

MEWBORN, WINIFRED KNIGHT. Bison Bill and Johnnie Bull.

Bison Bill and Johnnie Bull.

We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies.

Elk had ceased to be common, though they hung on here and there in out of the way localities for many years; and by the close of the century the herds of bison had been driven west of the Mississippi.

Man was present when rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent.

The former, who has been listening attentively, says that, from my description, stalking a stag must be very much the same as hunting the double-humped bison in Mwangumbloola, and that the only weapon he shall take with him will be a pickaxe.