Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/378

 has ever been my fortune to read, detailed such a chase as witnessed by him in the grand forests near Lake Nicaragua. “Certainly,” he exclaims at the conclusion of his account, “certainly no training could have bettered that dog's run. To drive a grown buck back to his starting-place, to send on a portion of the pack to that point where he would strive to break cover, to head him again and again into the cover where his speed could not be exerted to the full, were feats which might well puzzle all the best dogs in England, and the human intelligence which directs them.”

His game and its getting are not always so noble as this, however, and the coyote knows well the pinch of famine, especially in winter. “The main object of his life seems to be the satisfying of a hunger which is always craving; and to this aim all his cunning, impudence, and audacity are mainly directed.” Nothing comes amiss. Though by no means the swiftest-footed quadruped upon the plains, he runs down the deer, the pronghorn, and others, tiring them out by trickery and then overpowering them by force of numbers. The buffalo formerly afforded him an unfailing supply, in the shape of carrion or chance fragments left him by his Brahmans—the white wolves—who steadily followed the herds, and seized upon decrepit or aged stragglers, or upon any calves they were able to surround and pull down. In such piracy the coyotes themselves often engaged, though it tried their highest powers; and success followed a system of tireless worrying. The poor bison or elk, upon which they concentrated, might trample and gore half the pack, but the rest would “stay by him,” and finally nag him to death. I remember once reading an account of the strategy by which a large stag was forced to succumb to a pack that had driven it upon the ice of a frozen lake. Part of the wolves formed a circle about the pond, within which the exhausted and slipping deer was chased round and round, by patrols frequently relieved, until, fainting with fatigue and loss of blood, the noble animal fell, to be torn to pieces in an instant.

Far less worthy game attracts this wild dog as well. In California and Mexico he has been so destructive to the sheep that incessant war is waged upon him by the ranchmen. In Kansas and Nebraska he is accused of making havoc among domestic poultry, suffering, no doubt, the discredit of many additional depredations by foxes, skunks, and weasels. Similar misdeeds were charged against him by the farmers of Illinois and Wisconsin, when, forty years ago, those prairies were the frontier. Two or three times a year, therefore, a general holiday would be declared, and a wolf-hunt would be organized.

Such a battue would take place just before the spring thawing. Word would be sent out, instructing the different villages concerned to elect their captains and furnish their quota of willing gunners in the ring that was to concentrate upon a point indicated by a tall flag-staff far out in the prairie. These rings were, sometimes, twenty or