"He'd paw down through the snow to the grass," said Jesse. "Again you are wrong. A horse paws snow. The buffalo threw the snow aside with his hairy jaws or his whole head--he rooted for the grass!" "Well, I didn't know that." "A good many things are now forgotten," said his friend. "Writers and artists and even scientists quite often are wrong. For instance, in pictures you almost always see the herd led by the biggest buffalo bull. In actual fact it was always an old cow that led the herd. The bulls usually were at the rear, to defend against wolves. And when a buffalo ran, he ran into the wind, not downwind, like the deer. Few remember that now. "Take the antelope, too. The old hunters always knew that the antelope shed his horns, same as a deer, but scientists denied that for years, because they didn't happen to see any shed horns. I have had an antelope buck's horn pull off in my hand, in the month of May, and it left the soft core exposed, covered with coarse black filaments like black hairs. Naturally, in the fall, at the time Lewis and Clark got their 'goat,' as they called the antelope, the horns were on tight, so they supposed they didn't shed. "They sent President Jefferson specimens of the new animals they found--the antelope, prairie dog, prairie badger, magpie, bighorn, and a grizzly-hide or so. They got their four bighorn heads at the Mandans, none very large, though 'two feet long and four inches diameter' seemed big to them. And I shouldn't wonder if those horns could have been pulled off the pith after they got good and dry. The horns of the bighorn will dry out and lose at least ten per cent of their measurement, in a few years' hanging on a wall. I have had a bighorn's curly horn come off the pith in rough handling three or four years after it was killed; but of course the horns never were shed in life." "Did they get them along the Missouri?" asked Jesse, now. "Not until they got above the mouth of the Yellowstone. There they killed a lot of them." "They saw one big grizzly track before they got to the Mandans," said Rob, who was listening. "Oh yes--that might have been. Alexander Henry the younger tells us of grizzlies in northern Minnesota in early days. In all the range country along the Missouri from lower South Dakota the grizzly used to range, and he was on the Plains all the way to the Rockies, and from Alaska to New Mexico and Utah, as I can personally testify. Just how far south he ran in here I don't know--some think as far south as upper Iowa, but we can't tell. He couldn't do much with deer and antelope, and worked more on elk and buffalo, when it came to big meat. He'd dig out mice and eat crickets, though, as well. "Yes, he'd been all along this country, I'm sure.