Occasionally I killed the prongbuck in a day’s hunt from my ranch. If I started with the intention of prongbuck hunting, I always went on horseback; but twice I killed them on foot when I happened to run across them by accident while looking for mule-deer. I shall always remember one of these occasions. I was alone in the Elkhorn ranch-house at the time, my foreman and the only cow-puncher who was not on the round-up having driven to Medora, some forty miles away, in order to bring down the foreman’s wife and sister, who were going to spend the summer with him. It was the fourth day of his absence. I expected him in the evening and wanted to have fresh meat, and so after dinner I shouldered my rifle and strolled off through the hills. It was too early in the day to expect to see anything, and my intention was simply to walk out until I was five or six miles from the ranch, and then work carefully home through a likely country toward sunset, as by this arrangement I would be in a good game region at the very time that the animals were likely to stir abroad. It was a glaring, late-spring day, and in the hot sun of mid-afternoon I had no idea that anything would be moving, and was not keeping a very sharp lookout. After an hour or two’s steady tramping I came into a long, narrow valley, bare of trees and brushwood, and strolled along it, following a cattle trail that led up the middle. The hills rose steeply into a ridge crest on each side, sheer clay shoulders breaking the mat of buffalo-grass which elsewhere covered the sides of the valley as well as the bottom. It was very hot and still, and I was paying but little attention to my surroundings, when my eye caught a sudden movement on the ridge crest to my right, and, dropping on one knee as I wheeled around, I saw the head and neck of a prongbuck rising above the crest. The animal was not above a hundred yards off, and stood motionless as it stared at me. At the crack of the rifle the head disappeared; but as I sprang clear of the smoke I saw a cloud of dust rise on the other side of the ridge crest, and felt convinced that the quarry had fallen. I was right. On climbing the ridge crest I found that on the other side it sank abruptly in a low cliff of clay, and at the foot of this, thirty feet under me, the prongbuck lay with its neck broken. After dressing it I shouldered the body entire, thinking that I should like to impress the new-comers by the sight of so tangible a proof of my hunting prowess as whole prongbuck hanging up in the cottonwoods by the house. As it was a well-grown buck the walk home under the hot sun was one of genuine toil.