Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/10

 of peaks and valleys feeds the headwaters of a score of rivers. The Wind River and the Greybull; the Gibbon and the Firehole; the Shoshone, Yellowstone, Green River and the Buffalo Fork of the Snake, each finds its course in one wild whirl of interlacing, tributary streams.

Here, in the Bighorns, the Tetons and the Sunlight peaks, the herd scattered in small bands through the high mountain valleys in one last effort to exist. The bleached white skulls that dot the green meadows on the head reaches of Thoroughfare River and the basins of the upper Yellowstone, mark the spots where they died in the deep snow of the high country while the buffalo hunters of Dodge still waited for the fabled return of the lost herd.

Stockmen grazed their cows on the old range of the bison, pushing farther to the west each year until their cows fed on the first roll of the hills; farther north until they came to a spot where Nature, as if exhausted from piling wonder upon wonder with lavish hand, had left the badlands of the Little Bighorn and the desolate foothills of the Greybull nestled under the very shadow of the Rainbow Peaks.

Then great wolves appeared, coming down out