out and sleep with me." She whuffed and nuzzled his pajamas. "If you had any babies," he asked her, "did you stay with them or go galloping away and leave them?" Cotton brought a bridle from the barn, helped the boy mount, and led them around the corral. The next day Lally 2 rode her. After that he was aboard the mare most of the time. He could whisper in the ear of that old crowbait and make her perform like a show horse. They won the barrel race in the camp rodeo .
Cotton was climbing, using a post for leverage, and hoisting himself. The rest were climbing, too, which he rather expected of them. Set them an example and they came through every time. Lally 2 was not all that intrepid, though. He waited for them.
The catwalk was made of two 2X6's nailed side by side and braced atop the inner wall which bisected the rectangle. In the dark the planking seemed about as wide as a snake's hips and as high as the Empire State Building. Along they crawled as though on combat patrol, noses to rumps—Kenilworth and Rocky River and Mamaroneck and Sixty-Fourth Street and Shaker Heights and Kenilworth. The system of pens began to make sense. They were holding pens, four large sections designed to hold the entire herd during roundups, to break it down into manageable bunches, and to cut individuals out for vaccination. Singly they could be driven into a small diamond-shaped squeeze pen in the center of the four-sectioned rectangle, and from it into the squeeze chute, a box of steel bars which trapped them and vised them immobile while the veterinarians gave them the needle. Fortunately, and necessarily, all the inner barriers including the gates in each were topped with catwalks, since no one in his right mind would enter a pen at ground level.
Just as the Bedwetters reached the center, the squeeze pen, the scud of clouds opened, and Lally 2, the leader, stopped. But the five behind him could not see, and cautiously, unsteadily, they stood up, and teetering, clasping hands, edged sideways on the planks. Then Lally 2 said "Oh!" And there they were, in their magnificence.
The buffalo is the largest, most awesome game animal found on the American continent. Standing six feet at the shoulders, even higher at the hump, measuring more than nine feet in length, the bulls weighed 2,000 to 2,600 pounds, the cows but a few hundred less. They tapered from mighty forequarters and heads and humps to slender hindquarters supported on delicate ankles and hooves, and beards of hair tufted from below their snouts and from their heads and legs and tails. Even in wan moonlight the curved, carved horns glinted, sleek hides tautened over muscle, eyes struck sparks of fire. And they were loco. Given reasonable situations, a man might reasonably guess how a buffalo would behave, but these beasts, deprived of the open range and comparative freedom they had known from birth, cut out from the big herd and stockaded for three days without food and water and goaded by alien sounds and smells, were totally unpredictable.
What they did now, for example, by instinct, they had never done before. In the old days, one of the most remarkable sights on the prairies each spring was the thousands of circles where the grass had been trodden bare. "Fairy rings," the pioneers called them, unaware what had made them. In reality, they were formed by bull buffalo walking circular guard round and round the cows and calves to fend off wolf packs. And now, as the animals snuffed the odor of man nearby, of man their mortal enemy now, as they drew into flaring nostrils that scent which for the first time connoted death, half the herd advanced, the bulls, and stood on guard before the cows, snorting and stamping hooves, heads lowered to hook with horns whatever might attack.
Nothing would. Instead, high on the catwalk, holding on to each other, six boys quaked before the beasts below.
They turned, they deflated, they crawled back as fast as they could along the planks to the
Cotton was climbing, using a post for leverage, and hoisting himself. The rest were climbing, too, which he rather expected of them. Set them an example and they came through every time. Lally 2 was not all that intrepid, though. He waited for them.
The catwalk was made of two 2X6's nailed side by side and braced atop the inner wall which bisected the rectangle. In the dark the planking seemed about as wide as a snake's hips and as high as the Empire State Building. Along they crawled as though on combat patrol, noses to rumps—Kenilworth and Rocky River and Mamaroneck and Sixty-Fourth Street and Shaker Heights and Kenilworth. The system of pens began to make sense. They were holding pens, four large sections designed to hold the entire herd during roundups, to break it down into manageable bunches, and to cut individuals out for vaccination. Singly they could be driven into a small diamond-shaped squeeze pen in the center of the four-sectioned rectangle, and from it into the squeeze chute, a box of steel bars which trapped them and vised them immobile while the veterinarians gave them the needle. Fortunately, and necessarily, all the inner barriers including the gates in each were topped with catwalks, since no one in his right mind would enter a pen at ground level.
Just as the Bedwetters reached the center, the squeeze pen, the scud of clouds opened, and Lally 2, the leader, stopped. But the five behind him could not see, and cautiously, unsteadily, they stood up, and teetering, clasping hands, edged sideways on the planks. Then Lally 2 said "Oh!" And there they were, in their magnificence.
The buffalo is the largest, most awesome game animal found on the American continent. Standing six feet at the shoulders, even higher at the hump, measuring more than nine feet in length, the bulls weighed 2,000 to 2,600 pounds, the cows but a few hundred less. They tapered from mighty forequarters and heads and humps to slender hindquarters supported on delicate ankles and hooves, and beards of hair tufted from below their snouts and from their heads and legs and tails. Even in wan moonlight the curved, carved horns glinted, sleek hides tautened over muscle, eyes struck sparks of fire. And they were loco. Given reasonable situations, a man might reasonably guess how a buffalo would behave, but these beasts, deprived of the open range and comparative freedom they had known from birth, cut out from the big herd and stockaded for three days without food and water and goaded by alien sounds and smells, were totally unpredictable.
What they did now, for example, by instinct, they had never done before. In the old days, one of the most remarkable sights on the prairies each spring was the thousands of circles where the grass had been trodden bare. "Fairy rings," the pioneers called them, unaware what had made them. In reality, they were formed by bull buffalo walking circular guard round and round the cows and calves to fend off wolf packs. And now, as the animals snuffed the odor of man nearby, of man their mortal enemy now, as they drew into flaring nostrils that scent which for the first time connoted death, half the herd advanced, the bulls, and stood on guard before the cows, snorting and stamping hooves, heads lowered to hook with horns whatever might attack.
Nothing would. Instead, high on the catwalk, holding on to each other, six boys quaked before the beasts below.
They turned, they deflated, they crawled back as fast as they could along the planks to the
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