"Some of our bullets are telling; you can hear them crack on his hide. There is a red spot now, not bigger than the point of one's finger, opposite a lung, and drops of blood trickle with the saliva from his jaws.... He is bleeding internally.... Now he stands sullen glaring at us. The wounds look like little points of red paint, put deftly on his shaggy hide.... The large eyes roll and swell with pain and fury.... See him blow the blood from his nostrils. The drops scatter like red-hot shot around him, seeming to hiss in globules of fury, as they spatter upon the dry grass."[13] [Illustration: Head of Bison Bull. Specimen Shot by Theodore Roosevelt. Dec. 17, 1883. (From Roosevelt's _Hunting Trips of a Ranchman_.)] When finally the railways began to push across the plains, passengers would amuse themselves by shooting buffalo from the windows. The animals had a habit of trying to cross the track ahead of the engine, and sometimes would rush beside the train a long distance, for in the early days trains had to run slowly, thus giving passengers the opportunity. If the train did not stop, the herd would perhaps butt up against it, so the engineers learned to stand still, and, with due respect, wait for the bison to pass. When wounded, they became dangerous, especially the vigorous bulls, and the novice then had to look sharp for his own life, like the _matador_ in the bull-ring. The advance of one of the enormous herds was a terrific sight. Great clouds of dust rolled up, there was bellowing and bawling, and the thunder of the thousand hoof-beats on the hard ground. The herd came as one animal, sweeping everything before it as an avalanche descends some precipice in the Alps. "Their lion-like fronts and dangling beards—their open mouths and hanging tongues—as they come puffing like a locomotive engine at every bound do at first make the blood settle a little heavy about the heart." Woe to the caravan or horseman who failed to evade this resistless approach! The forward animals were borne ahead by the pressure from behind, and the mass swept on like some tremendous flood. Should a river or other obstacle come in the way there was no halt. Whole herds were sometimes dashed to death over some precipice, or drowned in a river where quicksand prevented fording or swimming. Four thousand once crossed the Platte when it was a foot or two deep and full of quicksand. The animals in the lead mired, but those behind prevented their return, and rushing on over the ones already entangled in the fatal sands, themselves fell in, till finally the bed of the stream, nearly half a mile wide, was covered with dead and dying buffalo, two thousand, at least, having been killed in the attempt to cross. Gregg[14] asserts that any herd was easily turned aside, but others give a different opinion, and judging from all the data, it seems that Gregg's experience in this particular must have been unusual.