The various ways of hunting the buffalo and other wild beasts of the plains and mountainous country, as practiced by the different tribes, have been described by many writers. The several methods of hunting the buffalo were often forced through natural conditions, but nothing could have exceeded the excitement produced during the chase by well-mounted Indian hunters. This was the usual custom of the tribes of the plains after horses had become plentiful and the buffalo continued numerous. The paintings reproduced in plates 2 and 3 vividly portray this phase of the hunt. In the north the hunters were compelled during the long winters to attack the herds on the frozen, snow-covered prairies, and plate 4 shows a party of hunters, wearing snowshoes, mingled with the buffalo. This sketch, made about the year 1825, bears the legend: "Indian Hunters pursuing the Buffalo early in the spring when the snow is sufficiently frozen to bear the men but the Animal breaks through and cannot run." This graphic sketch may represent a party of Cree or Assiniboin hunters, probably the latter, and it will be noticed that they are using bows and arrows, not firearms, although other drawings by the same artist representing a summer hunt shows them having guns. Another custom in the North was that of constructing inclosures of logs and branches of trees, leaving one opening through which the buffalo were driven, and when thus secured were killed. Such an inclosure, or pound, is shown in plate 5, _a_. This is a reproduction of the original painting made by Paul Kane, September, 1845. In describing it he wrote: "These pounds can only be made in the vicinity of forests, as they are composed of logs piled up roughly, five feet high, and enclose about two acres. At one side an entrance is left, about ten feet wide, and from each side of this, to the distance of half a mile, a row of posts or short stumps, called dead men, are planted, at the distance of twenty feet each, gradually widening out into the plain from the entrance. When we arrived at the pound we found a party there anxiously awaiting the arrival of the buffaloes, which their companions were driving in. This is accomplished as follows:--A man, mounted on a fleet horse, usually rides forward till he sees a band of buffaloes. This may be sixteen or eighteen miles distant from the ground, but of course the nearer to it the better. The hunter immediately strikes a light with a flint and steel, and places the lighted spunk in a handful of dried grass, the smoke arising from which the buffaloes soon smell and start away from it at the top of their speed. The man now rides up alongside of the herd, which, from some unaccountable propensity, invariably endeavour to cross in front of his horse. I have had them follow me for miles in order to do so. The hunter thus possesses an unfailing means, wherever the pound may be situated, of conducting them to it by the dexterous management of his horse.