Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/53

 Flash raised his head and listened to a distant call. There is no animal sound in the world so distinctive—so impossible to describe or imitate—as the clear, silvery bugle of a bull elk.

“There!” Moran exclaimed. “What do you think of that? He’s a small one, a five pointer, and he’s rushing the season some. He’ll prance around the cows now because he knows the old herd bulls will come down out of their bachelor nooks in a few days and drive him off.”

Each day the pealing bugles of the younger bulls grew more insistent. Then there sounded the fuller, rounder notes of the old herd bulls, the big six pointers. Every band of cows now had a tyrannical male who herded them jealously and bugled his defiance to the less fortunate bulls who tried to cut out a few stragglers from his harem.

The blacktail bucks, casual free lovers of the hills, made no pretense of holding their own bunch of does but kept ever on the move, philandering from one love to the next.

Rams with great, curling horns traveled with every bunch of ewes in the rough peaks above the the timberline.

One night when the running season was in full swing, Flash lay listening to the bugling of dis-