Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the herds simply could not be exaggerated. In two great areas their multitude exceeded anything in the known world. These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri, fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where the buffalo have marched single file to their watering-places--trails trampled by such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the depth of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel. At fording-places on the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri, Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo have been found where the stampeding herd trampled the weak under foot, virtually building a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed. Then there were "the fairy rings," ruts like the water trail, only running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless multitudes in and outside the ring. Two explanations were given of these. When the calves were yet little, and the wild animals ravenous with spring hunger, the bucks and old leaders formed a cordon round the mothers and their young. The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who had the finest private collection of buffalo in America until his death ten years ago, when the herd was shipped to Texas, observed another occasion when the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter storm the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the thermometer forty degrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a wind-break to the young. Besides the "fairy rings" and the fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring, dried hard as rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a plaster cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo have been taking mud-baths as a refuge from vermin and summer heat, the ground is scarred and ploughed as if for ramparts. The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has become almost commonplace; but it is the sheerest nonsense. From Hearne, two hundred years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the Barren Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a caribou herd exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen. What are the facts regarding the buffalo?