The second morning after the snowfall, Uncle Kit, Johnnie West and myself all started down the valley to took after our traps.  We went about a mile together, I left the other two, my traps being the farthest away, some three miles down the valley.  After leaving the other two I struck out down the valley on a turkey trot, that being my usual gait when alone.  I had not gone far when I heard two gun shots.  Thinking that Uncle Kit and Johnnie had been attacked by the Indians, I turned in the direction that I heard the shooting, and ran back much faster than I had come, but had not gone far when I saw ahead of me, up the narrow valley, a band of about twenty bison coming direct for me.  I thought by shooting the leader it might check their speed and perhaps cause them to change their course.  So I brought my gun to my face and dropped the leader, but it neither caused the others to halt or change their course, and they were making a bee line for me, and there was not a tree in reach large enough for me to climb nor a place of any kind that I could hide.

Now I was not long in making up my mind that I had a first-class foot-race on my hands—­as an Irishman might say—­and after running some distance I looked back and saw the bison were on me at every jump.  Had I only known the nature of bison, which I learned afterward were not so vicious as buffalo, I could have turned to the right or left and they would have passed on; but thinking that they were after me, I got out like a quarter-horse, putting in my best licks to try to reach a wash-out that I knew of ahead of me.  Thinking that if I only could reach that ditch I might have some possible show for my life, I lost no time in getting there, but got right down to business and did the prettiest running I have ever done in my life.  Every time I looked back I saw that the rushing herd was closer upon me, until they were within a few feet, and by the time I reached the ditch I fancied that I could feel the breath from the nostrils of a half dozen bison on the rear base of my buckskin trousers.  Then into the ditch I went, head-long and into about four feet of water.  It seemed to me that those buffalo were half an hour crossing that ditch, but I stood perfectly quiet in the water up to my waist until they had all passed over.

The ditch being deep and the banks perpendicular, I had to wade the water for some distance up the ditch before I could find a place where I could climb out.  I had just scrambled up the bank and shaken myself, when up came Uncle Kit and Johnnie, who had heard the report of my gun and had come to see whether or not I had killed anything.

“Rather cold to go bathing,” said Uncle Kit.  “When I go bathin’ I allus pull off my buckskin suit.”

But I told them I considered myself lucky to be able to find a suitable place to go swimming just at that time, and congratulated myself on being all there.

Aside from my race with the bison, I put in a very pleasant winter, and Uncle Kit said he had never spent as pleasant a time in the mountains as he did that winter in South Park.  “In fact,” said he, “it was more like a pleasure trip than anything else.”