Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/283

Rh, prairies, rolling hills, and fantastically carved and colored "bad lands." The country was won from the Indians only about half a dozen years ago, and was almost immediately occupied by the cattle herders, owning from hundreds to tens of thousands of head, and occupying land of extent to correspond, with not very exactly defined boundaries and no legal titles. With them came the now famous cowboys, of whom and their habits Mr. Roosevelt gives a very interesting description. The home-life of this wild region, which is, of course, usually a bachelor's life, with cowboys for neighbors, and rough enough, forms the subject of a lively running sketch, passing from topic to topic, after which the reader is introduced to the game in its several kinds—waterfowl, grouse, jack-rabbits, wild turkeys, and the larger animals. The white tailed deer is the best known and most widely distributed of all the large game of the United States, and the kind which under any sort of decent treatment is probably likely to stay longest at large among us. These deer have the capacity of living in a region even when it has become thickly settled, and making themselves at home among tame cattle, and still exist in nearly every State. They "are very canny, and know perfectly well what threatens danger and what does not; keep themselves concealed in the densest thickets of the river bottoms, and at the first intimation of danger steal off noiselessly almost from under the eyes of the hunter." Mr. Roosevelt tells of the best ways of killing them, but our interest is in the ways they have of keeping from being killed, in which we hope they will improve. The black-tail deer, more important animals in some respects, in their unsophisticated state are very easy to approach, but a short experience of danger on their part changes their character, and when hunters are often afoot, they become "as wild and wary as may be." They would be extremely difficult to hunt except for their inordinate curiosity, which gives them the habit of turning round every once in a while, stopping, and looking at their pursuer. Antelopes, or prong-horns, are also very wary game, but may be betrayed by their morbid curiosity or their unhappy liability to be thrown into a panic. No other plains game, except the big-horn, is as shy and sharp-sighted; "and if a man is once seen by the game the latter will not let him get out of sight again, unless it decides to go off at a gait that soon puts half a dozen miles between them. It shifts its position so as to keep the hunter continually in sight, . . . and after it has once caught a glimpse of the foe, the latter might as well give up all hopes of getting the game." The bighorn, or mountain sheep, "are extremely wary and cautious animals, and are plentiful in but few places." They are almost the only kind of game on whose haunts cattle do not trespass. They live on the rocks, and are not annoyed by rival claimants to their sterile estates. Their movements are not light and graceful like those of the antelopes, but they have a marvelous agility which proceeds "from sturdy strength and wonderful command over iron sinews and muscles." There is probably no animal in the world their superior in climbing; and "the way that one will vanish over the roughest and most broken ground is a perpetual surprise to any one that has hunted them." Regarding the buffalo, Mr. Roosevelt observes that its rapid extermination "affords an excellent instance of how a race that has thriven and multiplied for ages under conditions of life to which it has slowly fitted itself by a process of natural selection continued for countless generations, may succumb at once when these surrounding conditions are varied by the introduction of one or more new elements, immediately becoming the chief forces with which it has to contend in the struggle for life." These new elements are the barbarity of civilized man in hunting the buffalo, and the greed of the cattle-herders for its pasture-lands; and their presence has made the other conditions and habits which were most favorable to the preservation of the animal to contribute to its extinction. Happily, "events have developed a race of this species, known either as the wood or mountain buffalo, which is acquiring, and has already largely acquired, habits widely different from those of the others of its kind. It is found in the wooded and most precipitous portions of the mountains, instead of on the level and open plains; it goes singly or in small parties, instead of in