They slit us from jaw down the belly to the tail and ripped off our skins with rope and horse. They sliced off our tongues:
2,000,000 of us cut down one year for our tongues alone. They ground up our bones for use as fertilizer. In Cansass alone,
in less than twenty years, 31,000,000 bison butchered for their bones! Meat and hides and robes - hew and hack
and slaughter: "The most remorseless and ceaseless slaughter of wild animals in all history." And
so we come back around to the question that puzzles you and tortures us: could we have escaped this slaughter to near extinction?
I don't know. How did we trip; where did we blunder? Strength, courage, agility, speed? What was lacking? Damnit,
how it torments me! Our senses were acute enough. We could smell them a mile away. We can hear the snap of a twig from five
hundred feet. We can see movement for more than a mile.
Were we starved and wasted? No! The massive and ferocious grizzly could not conquer the bison. Yes, we were unbeatable in
a fair fight. I say a FAIR fight: beast to beast - Homo sapien against bison - anytime, anywhere! But that damn
thing they called a rifle. Yet that wasn't much. The balls bounced off our foreheads. Ah, but the slugs, the bullets that
pierced the lungs and heart - two inches of lead ripping into... Is it true we did stand and sit while they did shoot and
shoot..? I don't know, I don't know... Help me my friends. Where did we stumble? This bone of contention... I must...
Craftiness and cunning! Where did we go wrong? What was missing? I must rest my mind. My mind, my brain... I weep
for the buffalo brain. And so ends the bison's tale.
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