You say that buffaloes just eat
Such things as spinach, never meat?
That they are satisfied with grass,
And let all live meat safely pass?
Now son, you listen here to me--
There's facts that no geography
Has ever heard about--why say,
I've seen a whale in Baffin's Bay
That had two legs and walked like you,
And cackled like a kangaroo!
Well, getting back to buffaloes--
'Twas down where Powder River flows,
One spring that me and Pie-Face Pete
Had started out to hunt some meat,
When on a hill above a lake
We saw a sight that made us quake--
A buffalo of such great size
That we could scarce believe our eyes.
He must have weighed at least six ton,
And looked like four rolled into one.
I dropped upon my knee, took aim--
When snorting from the woods there came
A grizzly bear, so big, I know
In size he matched the buffalo.
They looked at one another and,
They woofed and growled and pawed the sand,
They charged and clashed with horns and teeth,
And roared and fought, till underneath
The earth just trembled and the sky
Was filled with fur that seemed to fly
Like snow, until we couldn't see.
I said the earth shook--so did we.
We heard their shrieks of wrath and pain,
We felt blood spatter down like rain.
Then, as the noise at length abated,
We listened, looked, and also waited.
At last the sun shone through and we
Stood up and breathed. What did we see?
Well sir, a most amazing thing--
At first we thought they'd taken wing,
Or else some monster from the air
Had gobbled buffalo and bear.
But coming closer, soon we found
Some scattered remnants on the ground.
Two horns, four hooves, an under jaw
Was all the buffalo we saw.
And of the grizzly bear, there was
An ear, some teeth, his tail and claws,
"Each of these birds has et the other,"
Says I, and Pete replies, "Yep brother,
But which one ate the other first?"
"For asking questions you're the worst,"
Says I ...At least there is no question
They both had died of indigestion.
--Author: LeRoy W. Snell
--Source: OCR scan of a copy of text typed on a manual typewriter by LeRoy Behling (with some minor corrections for OCR and typing errors and to clean up the formatting)