Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/53

Rh forming for a short time a cool and comfortable bath, in which he wallows like a hog in the mire, swinging himself round and round on his side, and thus enlarging the pool until he is nearly immersed. At length he rises besmeared with a coating of mud, which, drying,insures him immunity from insect pests for many hours. Others follow, each enlarging the “wallow” until it becomes twenty feet in diameter, remains a prominent feature in the landscape, and forms a cistern where a grateful supply of water is often long retained for the thirsty denizens of that dry region.

Like the other species of the bovine group the bison is of a sluggish disposition, and mild and timid, ferocious as his shaggy head and vicious eye make him look. He rarely attacks, except in the last hopeless effort of self-defense. “Endowed with the smallest possible amount of instinct,” says Colonel R. I. Dodge, “the little he has seems adapted rather for getting him into difficulties than out of them. If not alarmed at sight or smell of a foe, he will stand stupidly gazing at his companions in their death-throes until the whole herd is shot down. He will walk unconsciously into a quicksand or quagmire already choked with struggling, dying victims.” Having made up his mind to go a certain way, it is almost impossible to swerve him from his purpose, and he will rush heedless into sure destruction. Two trains were “ditched”in one week on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad by herds of buffaloes rushing blindly against and in front of them. Finally the conductors “got the idea,” and gave the original occupants of the soil the right of way whenever they asked it. During a voyage down the upper Missouri in 1877, our steamer more than once had to stop to allow swimming herds to get out of the way, and once we completely keel-hauled a sorry old bull. Yet, as Mr. Allen suggests, their inertness may be exaggerated by writers, as their sagacity certainly has been. This stupidity, unwariness, or liability to demoralizing panic, places them at the mercy of the hunter, who is their only enemy besides the wolves. In former times, young or weak animals straying from the herds, and all the wounded and aged that could be separated from their fellows, were quickly set upon and worried to death by wolves; but now these brutes have become so reduced as not to form a serious check upon their increase.

The early explorers of the Mississippi Valley believed that the buffalo might be made to take the place of the domestic ox in agricultural pursuits, and at the same time yield a fleece of wool equal in quality to that of the sheep; but no persistent attempts have yet been made to utilize it by domestication. That the buffalo-calf may be easily reared and thoroughly tamed has been conclusively proved, but little attention has been paid to their reproduction in confinement, or to training them to labor. During the last century they were domesticated in various parts of the colonies, and interbred with domestic cows, producing a half-breed race which is fertile, and which readily amalgamates