In a couple of minutes her body sways unsteadily, she staggers, tries hard to keep her feet, but soon gives a lurch sidewise and falls.  Some of the other members of the herd come around her and stare and sniff in wide-eyed wonder, and one of the more wary starts to lead the herd away.  But before she takes half a dozen steps “bang!” goes the hidden rifle again, and her leadership is ended forever.  Her fall only increases the bewilderment of the survivors over a proceeding which to them is strange and unaccountable, because the danger is not visible.  They cluster around the fallen ones, sniff at the warm blood, bawl aloud in wonderment, and do everything but run away.

The policy of the hunter is to not fire too rapidly, but to attend closely to business, and every time a buffalo attempts to make off, shoot it down.  One shot per minute was a moderate rate of firing, but under pressure of circumstances two per minute could be discharged with deliberate precision.  With the most accurate hunting rifle ever made, a “dead rest,” and a large mark practically motionless, it was no wonder that nearly every shot meant a dead buffalo.  The vital spot on a buffalo which stands with its side to the hunter is about a foot in diameter, and on a full-grown bull is considerably more.  Under such conditions as the above, which was called getting “a stand,” the hunter nurses his victims just as an angler plays a big fish with light tackle, and in the most methodical manner murders them one by one, either until the last one falls, his cartridges are all expended, or the stupid brutes come to their senses and run away.  Occasionally the poor fellow was troubled by having his rifle get too hot to use, but if a snow-bank was at hand he would thrust the weapon into it without ceremony to cool it off.

A success in getting a stand meant the slaughter of a good-sized herd.  A hunter whom I met in Montana, Mr. Harry Andrews, told me that he once fired one hundred and fifteen shots from one spot and killed sixty-three buffalo in less than an hour.  The highest number Mr. McNaney ever knew of being killed in one stand was ninety-one head, but Colonel Dodge once counted one hundred and twelve carcasses of buffalo “inside of a semicircle of 200 yards radius, all of which were killed by one man from the same spot, and in less than three-quarters of an hour.”

The “kill” being completed, the hunter then addressed himself to the task of skinning his victims.  The northern hunters were seldom guilty of the reckless carelessness and lack of enterprise in the treatment of robes which at one time was so prominent a feature of work on the southern range.  By the time white men began to hunt for robes on the northern range, buffalo were becoming comparatively scarce, and robes were worth from $2 to $4 each.  The fur-buyers had taught the hunters, with the potent argument of hard cash, that a robe carefully and neatly taken off, stretched, and kept reasonably free from