Here lay a calf beside its dam. Yonder a solitary ancient and shaggy bull stood apart, sullen and brooding. Nearer a colossal chieftain, glossy, black, and weighing two thousand pounds moved from group to group, restless and combative, wrinkling his ridiculously small nose, and uttering a deep, menacing, muttering roar. His rivals, though they slunk away, gave utterance to similar sinister snarls, as if voicing bitter resentment. They did not bellow, they _growled_, low down in their cavernous throats, like angry lions. Nothing that I had ever heard or read of buffaloes had given me the quality of this majestic clamor. Occasionally one of them, tortured by flies, dropped to earth, and rolled and tore the sod, till a dome of dust arose and hid him. Out of this gray curtain he suddenly reappeared, dark and savage, like a dun rock emerging from mist. One furious giant, moving with curling upraised tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way, reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like elephants--clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet with astonishing celerity. It was worth a long journey to stand thus and watch that small band of bison, representatives of a race whose myriads once covered all America, for though less than two hundred in number, they were feeding and warring precisely as their ancestors had fed and warred for a million years. Small wonder that the red men believe the white invader must have used some evil medicine, some magic power in sweeping these majestic creatures from the earth. Once they covered the hills like a robe of brown, now only a few small bands are left to perpetuate the habits and the customs of the past. As we watched, they fed, fought, rose up and lay down in calm disdain of our presence. It was as if, unobserved, and yet close beside them, we were studying the denizens of a small corner of aboriginal America, America in pre-Columbian times. Reluctantly, slowly we turned and rode away, back to our tent, back to the railway and the present day. * * * * * On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway--the way we came out--means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June."