Suddenly Sam reined up his horse, and looked ahead earnestly through half-closed lids. “By George,” he cried excitedly, “there they are! Actually there they are, the very first ones.”
“What?” I asked. I saw at some distance ahead of us perhaps eighteen or twenty dark forms moving slowly.
“What!” repeated Sam, bouncing up and down in his saddle. “I’d be ashamed to ask such a question; you are indeed a precious greenhorn. Can’t you guess, my learned sir, what those things are before your eyes there?”
“I should take them for deer if I didn’t know there were none about here; and though those animals look so small from here, I should say they were larger than deer.”
“Deer in this locality! That’s a good one! But your other guess is not so bad; they certainly are larger than deer.”
“They surely can. Bisons they are, genuine bisons beginning their travels, and the first I have seen. You see Mr. White was right: buffaloes and Indians. We saw only a footprint of the red men, but the buffaloes are there before our eyes in all their strength. What do you say about it?”
“Study them? Really study them?” he asked, glancing at me sidewise in surprise.
“Yes; I never saw a buffalo, and I’d like to watch them.”
I felt the interest of a naturalist, which was perfectly incomprehensible to little Sam. He rubbed his hands together, saying: “Watch them, only watch them! Like a child putting his eye to a rabbit’s hole to see the little bunnies! O you young tenderfoot, what I must put up with in you! I don’t want to watch them or study them, I tell you, hut hunt them. They mean meat—meat, do you understand? and such meat! A buffalo-steak is more glorious than ambrosia, or ambrosiana, or whatever you call the stuff the old Greeks fed their gods with. I must have a buffalo if it costs me my life. The wind is towards us; that’s good. The sun’s on the left, towards the valley, but it’s shady on the right, and if we keep in the shade the animals won’t see us. Come on.”
He looked to see if his gun, “Liddy,” as he called it, was all right, and I hastily overhauled my own weapon. Seeing this, Sam held up his horse and asked: “Do you want to take a hand in this?”
“Well, you let that thing alone if you don’t want to be trampled to jelly in the next ten minutes. A buffalo isn’t a canary bird for a man to take on his finger and let it sing.”