11. The shedding of the winter pelage.—­In personal appearance the buffalo is subject to striking, and even painful, variations, and the estimate an observer forms of him is very apt to depend upon the time of the year at which the observation is made.  Toward the end of the winter the whole coat has become faded and bleached by the action of the sun, wind, snow, and rain, until the freshness of its late autumn colors has totally disappeared.  The bison takes on a seedy, weathered, and rusty look.  But this is not a circumstance to what happens to him a little later.  Promptly with the coming of the spring, if not even in the last week of February, the buffalo begins the shedding of his winter coat.  It is a long and difficult task, and with commendable energy he sets about it at the earliest possible moment.  It lasts him more than half the year, and is attended with many positive discomforts.

The process of shedding is accomplished in two ways:  by the new hair growing into and forcing off the old, and by the old hair falling off in great patches, leaving the skin bare.  On the heavily-haired portions—­the head, neck, fore quarters, and hump—­the old hair stops growing, dies, and the new hair immediately starts through the skin and forces it off.  The new hair grows so rapidly, and at the same time so densely, that it forces itself into the old, becomes hopelessly entangled with it, and in time actually lifts the old hair clear of the skin.  On the head the new hair is dark brown or black, but on the neck, fore quarters, and hump it has at first, and indeed until it is 2 inches in length, a peculiar gray or drab color, mixed with brown, totally different from its final and natural color.  The new hair starts first on the head, but the actual shedding of the old hair is to be seen first along the lower parts of the neck and between the fore legs.  The heavily-haired parts are never bare, but, on the contrary, the amount of hair upon them is about the same all the year round.  The old and the new hair cling together with provoking tenacity long after the old coat should fall, and on several of the bulls we killed in October there were patches of it still sticking tightly to the shoulders, from which it had to be forcibly plucked away.  Under all such patches the new hair was of a different color from that around them.

The other process of shedding takes place on the body and hind quarters, from which the old hair loosens and drops off in great woolly flakes a foot square, more or less.  The shedding takes place very unevenly, the old hair remaining much longer in some places than in others.  During April, May, and June the body and hind quarters present a most ludicrous and even pitiful spectacle.  The island-like patches of persistent old hair alternating with patches of bare brown skin are adorned (?) by great ragged streamers of loose hair, which flutter in the wind like signals of distress.  Whoever sees a bison at this period