Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/217

] ravine of the Wynnetts and the pass by Mam Tor lead from the vale of Hope and Castleton into the plains of Cheshire and Lancashire, and it evidently marks the route by which the animals passed to and fro from one set of pastures to another, after the manner of the bison in North America and the reindeer in Siberia.

The bisons in North America, so rapidly disappearing—like the Red Indian—at the advance of the white man, are described as forming herds of enormous size, going wherever instinct leads them in search of pastures, "now through the dark gorges of the Rocky Mountains, now trailing into the valleys of the Rio del Norte, now pouring down the wooded slopes of the Saskatchewan." "Nothing could stop them on their march; great rivers stretched before them with steep overhanging banks, and beds treacherous with quicksands and shifting bar; huge chasms and earth rents, the work of subterranean forces, crossed their line of march, but still the countless thou- sands swept on. Through day and night the earth trembled beneath their tramp, and the air was filled with the deep bellowing of their unnumbered throats. Crowds of wolves and flocks of vultures dogged and hovered along their way, for many a huge beast half sunk in quicksand, or bruised and maimed at the foot of some precipice, marked their line of march like the wrecks lying spread behind a routed army." The bison are also described, by the Northern Boundary Commissioners, as wintering in vast herds in the fertile grass lands of Dakota. They were shot from the waggons with pistols, and pressed in such numbers upon the party that the