perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well. I never became more than a
fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either
failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some
blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired. Looking back,
I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was
that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many
other things. Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were very
hungry, I never killed anything but bucks.

Occasionally I made long trips away from the ranch and among the Rocky
Mountains with my ranch foreman Merrifield; or in later years with
Tazewell Woody, John Willis, or John Goff. We hunted bears, both the
black and the grizzly, cougars and wolves, and moose, wapiti, and white
goat. On one of these trips I killed a bison bull, and I also killed a
bison bull on the Little Missouri some fifty miles south of my ranch on
a trip which Joe Ferris and I took together. It was rather a rough trip.
Each of us carried only his slicker behind him on the saddle, with some
flour and bacon done up in it. We met with all kinds of misadventures.
Finally one night, when we were sleeping by a slimy little prairie pool
where there was not a stick of wood, we had to tie the horses to the
horns of our saddles; and then we went to sleep with our heads on the
saddles. In the middle of the night something stampeded the horses, and
away they went, with the saddles after them. As we jumped to our feet
Joe eyed me with an evident suspicion that I was the Jonah of the party,
and said: "O Lord! I've never done anything to deserve this. Did you
ever do anything to deserve this?"

In addition to my private duties, I sometimes served as deputy sheriff
for the northern end of our county. The sheriff and I crisscrossed in
our public and private relations. He often worked for me as a hired hand