And then on again, across long leagues of level plain, thickly studded with prickly pear patches and seamed with the old bison and antelope tracks leading down from the hills to the river. There are no bison now. They cannot stand before the stove-pipe hat. The sombreroed hunter, with his lasso, the necklace of death, was an annoyance to them; they spent their lives dodging him. The befeathered Indian, "the chivalry of the prairie," who pincushioned their hides full of arrows, was a terror to them, and they fell by thousands. But before the stove-pipe hat the bison fled incontinently by the herd, and have never returned. The prairie-dogs peep out of their holes at us as we passed. The bashfulness of "Wish-ton-Wish," as the Red Man calls the prairie-dog, is as nearly impudence as one thing can be another. It sits up perkily on one end at the edge of its hole till you are close upon it, and then, with a sudden affectation of being shocked at its own immodesty, dives headlong into its hole; but its hind-legs are not out of sight before the head is up again, and the next instant there is the prairie-dog sitting exactly where you first saw it! Such a burlesque of shyness I never saw in a quadruped before. A solitary coyote was loitering in a hungry way along a gulch, and I could not help thinking how the most important epochs of one's life may often turn upon the merest trifles. Now, here was a coyote ambling lazily up a certain gulch because it had happened to see some white bones bleaching a little way up it. But in the very next gulch, which the coyote had not happened to go up, were three half-bred greyhounds idling about, just in the humour for something to run after. But they could not see the coyote, though it was really only a few yards off, nor could the coyote see them. So the dogs lounged about in a listless, do-nothing, tired-of-life sort of way, thinking existence as dull as ditch water, while the coyote, unconscious of the narrow escape of its life that it ran, trotted slowly along--scrutinized the old bones--scratched its head--yawned out of sheer ennui, and then trotted along again. Now, what a difference it would have made to those three dogs if they had only happened to loaf into the next gulch! And what a prodigious difference it would have made to the coyote if it had happened to loaf into the next gulch!