But, from the moment of leaving the Buffaloes behind
him, the country begins to _shoal_, as a sailor might say, growing
rapidly sterile, treeless, and all but grassless. The scanty forage that
is still visible is confined to the immediate banks or often submerged
intervales of streams, though a little sometimes lingers in hollows or
ravines where the drifted snows of winter evidently lay melting slowly
till late in the spring. By-and-by the streams disappear, or are plainly
on the point of vanishing; of living wood there is none, and only
experienced plainsmen know where to look for the fragments of dead trees
which still linger on the banks of a few slender or dried-up brooks,
whence sweeping fires or other destructive agencies long since
eradicated all growing timber. The last living, or, indeed, standing
tree you passed was a stunted, shabby specimen of the unlovely
Cotton-wood, rooted in naked sand beside a water-course, and shielded
from prairie-fires by the high, precipitous bank; for, scanty as is the
herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet,
especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has
obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) through its dead,
tinder-like remains.
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