During that fatal period the state of the buffalo mind was nothing less than a tragedy. "The bunch" would hear a report two hundred yards away, they would see a grazing cow suddenly and mysteriously fall, struggle, kick the air, and presently lie still. The individuals nearest dully wondered what it was all about. Those farthest away looked once only, and went on grazing. If an experienced old cow grew suspicious and wary, and quietly set out to walk away from those mysterious noises, "bang!" said the Mystery once more, and she would be the one to fall. On this murderous plan, a lucky and experienced hunter could kill from twenty to sixty head of buffaloes, mostly cows, on a space of three or four acres. The fatal trouble was that each buffalo felt that the presence of a hundred or a thousand others feeding close by was an insurance of _security_ to the individual, and so there was no stampede. But after all, the bison is not so big a fool as he looks. He can think; and he can _learn._ In 1886, when we were about to set out for Montana to try to find a few wild buffaloes for the National Museum, before the reckless cowboys could find, kill and waste absolutely the last one, a hilarious friend said: "Pshaw! You don't need to take any rifles! Just get a rusty old revolver, mount a good, sensible horse, ride right up alongside the lumbering old beasts, and shoot them down at arm's length." We went; but not armed with "a rusty old revolver." We found a few buffaloes, but ye gods! How changed they were from the old days! Although only two short years had elapsed since the terminal slaughter of the hundreds of thousands whose white skeletons then thickly dotted the Missouri-Yellowstone divide, _they had learned fear of man,_ and also how to preserve themselves from that dangerous wild beast. They sought the remotest bad lands, they hid in low grounds, they watched sharply during every daylight hour, and whenever a man on horseback was sighted they were off like a bunch of racers, for a long and frantic run straight away from the trouble-maker. Even at a distance of two miles, or as far as they could see a man, they would run from him,--not one mile, or two, but five miles, or seven or eight miles, to another wild and rugged hiding-place.