Buffalo Land: Authentic Account of the Discoveries, Adventures, and Mishaps of a Scientific and Sporting Party in the Wild WestWebb, W. E. (William Edward)
History
Buffalo Land: Authentic Account of the Discoveries, Adventures, and Mishaps of a Scientific and Sporting Party in the Wild West
Webb, W. E. (William Edward)
Hunting -- West (U.S.); Paleontology -- Kansas; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
Our wounded game looked formidable, and we approached cautiously. He
made several efforts to run, but each time fell forward, in plunging
slides, on his nose and side, rubbing the hair from the latter, and
daubing the ground with blood from his nostrils. Muggs felt free to
confess that even the pampered stags of England, when perilously roused
from their well-kept glens, by over-fed hunters in killing coats and
boots, never presented such a picture of wild beauty and agony, colored
just the least bit with danger. At this "kill" we lost our black hound.
Tempted to incaution by the sight of the noble elk standing wounded and
at bay, or else excited by its blood, the dog sprang forward. A chance
blow of the massive horns knocked him over, and in an instant more the
beast had stamped him to death.
We finished the elk by a united volley, and added him to our trophies.
The horns, resting upon their tips, gave space for one of our Mexicans,
five feet two in stature, to pass beneath them erect. Elk hairs are
remarkably elastic. Single ones obtained from this specimen stretched by
trial with the fingers, and detached from the skin so easily that the
latter seemed worthless.
During the day we found and secured the remains of two saurians--one
about eight and the other ten feet in length, and also the tooth of a
fossil horse, quite a number of curious bubble-shaped pieces of iron
pyrites, and some fine petrifactions, in the way of butternuts and
fragments of trees. The soft, white limestone, mentioned more than once
before in this record of our expedition, appeared along our paths in
fine outcrops, and contained very perfect fossil shells.
Abe, our guide, told us that a year or two previous, during a winter of
unusual severity, he had found a flock of Rocky Mountain sheep feeding
near the Solomon. This was the only instance which came to our knowledge
of that animal having been seen upon the plains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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