It was a strange place, indeed, in which I found myself. Our eyes were unbandaged after we entered the portal of the ranch house, and when Big Pete and I turned toward our guide, we were facing in a direction that gave us a sweeping view of the entire ranch. And what we saw made us marvel. This farm, between the towering, almost insurmountable mountains, had evidently been wrenched from what two decades before had been as much of a wilderness as the Darlinkel Park across the divide. Timber clothed the mountains on either hand but the fertile valley bottom was as rural as a district of the middle west. On one hand stretched acres and acres of ripened grain. Beyond was pasture land dotted with strange whitefaced animals, which later proved to be hybrid buffalos, a strange cross between wild and domestic cattle.[3] In other pastures and on the hillsides I could see goats and sheep, and these too were evidently a cross breed of wild and domestic stock, the goats having a very strange resemblance to the fleet-footed shaggy old fellows we had seen on the mountains, while the sheep closely resembled usual domestic sheep. [Footnote 3: Since that time the late Buffalo Jones has bred buffalo and domestic cattle and called the offspring “catelow.”] There were stables, too, and corrals, all made of logs, as was the ranch house, but what seemed very strange to me was the fact that there were no horses in sight. All of the animals at work in the fields were those strange hybrid buffalo-oxen, all save one, a single, lame and apparently almost blind burro that I saw lying in the sun. From his grayness about the head I had little doubt that he was of great age. There were hordes of strange poultry too,—strange to me at least, for never had I expected to find flocking together wild turkeys, Canadian geese, black ducks, wood ducks, and mallards (all with wings clipped so that they never again could fly), sage hens, quail, spruce-grouse, partridge, ptarmigan and western mountain quail. All seemed perfectly at home and comfortably domesticated. Beyond the poultry houses was still another outhouse, a long, low, log building before which was a lawn. On the lawn were all manner of perches and roosts and on these, sunning themselves and preening their feathers, were several types of predaceous birds, ranging from huge and powerful female eagles to smaller hawks and true falcons. This evidently was the Wild Hunter’s falconry.