"Why, Hugh," exclaimed Jack, "I didn't know there were any buffalo about here. Of course, I've heard that there is a little bunch up in the Rattlesnake Mountains, but I've never seen any sign down this way." "No," returned Hugh; "I don't guess there are any buffalo around here. The carcass to-day is the first I've seen for six or seven years. I remember about the time you first came out to the ranch we ran across a buffalo that had been killed not very long before. I figured that it had wandered out from the Rattlesnake Mountains and crossed the Platte, but I never knew what had killed it. I don't know what killed this one that I found to-day. It was killed this spring sometime, but had been dead too long for me to find out much about it. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a very few buffalo up in the Rattlesnake hills; and every now and then, if one comes out and goes down to the Platte River, somebody takes a shot or two at it, and it gets killed. I haven't heard of anybody killing a buffalo around here for a good many years. "I reckon I've told you, son, about what Uncle Jack Robinson used to say about buffalo on the Laramie Plains, and in this high country, away back long before I came out here, and in fact I guess when Uncle Jack was quite a young man--anyway, not more than a middle-aged man. He said that in his young days, when he first came into the country, the Laramie Plains and all this high country was full of buffalo, but that one winter there came a terrible snowstorm without any wind, and the snow lay four or five feet deep on the ground. After this snow came a change of weather, either a big thaw or a warm rain, and then a freeze, and the whole country was crusted over so that none of the animals could get down to the grass to feed. That winter, Uncle Jack said, killed just about everything in the country and, among the other things, the buffalo. He said that since that time there never had been any buffalo on the Laramie Plains, or in this high country. I always figured from what he told me that this big storm must have come in the winter of 1839-40. Uncle Jack said that for years after that it was hard to find any game up in this country, but, of course, as time went on the deer and the elk and the antelope got plentiful again, but the buffalo never came back." "I suppose the fact is, Hugh," said Jack, "that by that time the people on the plains were killing them so that they had no chance to work back into the mountains." "Likely that was so," assented Hugh. "There's another thing about buffalo I want to ask you," said Jack; "though I think you've told me about it before. Some of the old books talk, as I remember it, about buffalo spending the summer up in the north, and then migrating south in the fall, spending the winter down in Texas or Mexico, and then going back again when spring came. I'm pretty sure you told me once that there was never anything like this."