The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

What did a wild buffalo do when he found himself with a broken leg, and unable to travel, but otherwise sound? Did he go limping about over the landscape, to attract enemies from afar, and be quickly shot by a man or torn to pieces by wolves? Not he! With the keen intelligence of the wounded wild ruminant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going, until he reached the bottom of the biggest and most tortuous coulee in his neighborhood. And then what? Instead of coming to rest in a reposeful little valley a hundred feet wide, he chose the most rugged branch he could find, the one with the steepest and highest banks, and up that dry bed, with many a twist and turn, he painfully limped his way. At last he found himself in a snug and safe ditch, precisely like a front line trench seven feet wide, with perpendicular walls and zig- zagging so persistently that the de'il himself could not find him save by following him up to close quarters, and landing upon his horns. There, without food or water, the wounded animal would stand for many days,--in fact, until hunger would force him back to the valley's crop of grass. His wild remedy was to keep still, and give that broken leg its chance to knit and grow strong. I have seen in buffalo skeletons healed bone fractures that filled us with wonder. One case that we shot was a big and heavy bull whose hip socket had been utterly smashed, femur head and all, by a heavy rifle ball; but the bull had escaped in spite of his wound, and he had nursed it until it had healed in good working order. We can testify that he could run as well as any of the bisons in his bunch.