Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/195

 pillars of gray hickory and mottled sycamore. Black Bull, facing into the light, failed to distinguish the buckskin-clad form of the white hunter sitting still as a graven image on his sorrel pony, which, at a whispered word, had frozen into statuelike immobility.

Burliegh gazed at the great beast before him with narrowed eyes which plainly betrayed his astonishment. Having the sun behind him, he could distinguish every detail, and he knew at once that this huge coal-black creature was of a kind which he had never met with before and which no other hunter had ever described to him. Probably because of the bull's great size and because he had never heard of an instance of the sort, Burliegh did not suspect a cross of buffalo and wild black cattle. Here, he concluded naturally enough, was a new species of buffalo the like of which no other white man had ever seen—a buffalo black instead of brown, longer horned than the common sort, lower humped, yet longer limbed, a little less shaggy, yet royally clad in a thick sable coat which would bring a high price in the fur market.

Burliegh, confident of his own invisibility and thankful that he was to leeward of his quarry, studied the bull with the most minute care to impress indelibly upon his memory every detail of the animal's appearance in life. Years might pass