Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/387

 regard to which the coyote called a council of animals after he had finished fashioning the globe and all the inferior creatures. Each speaker wanted to form man just like himself. The coyote made free to say that this was all nonsense; he did not think himself the most perfect animal that could be made, and he announced it as his theory that man should be formed by taking the best points of all the others—strong voice, like a lion; lack of tail, like a bear (since, in his opinion, a tail was only a harbor for fleas); the sharp eye of the elk, and so on. “But,” said the autocrat, “there surely is no animal from whom man can borrow wit besides myself, and therefore he shall resemble the coyote in being cunning and crafty.” Then the council broke up in a row, and there was a general battle, following which every animal set to work to make an earthen image after his own ideas. Night came before any models were finished, and all the sculptors went to sleep except the coyote, who, when the camp became still, destroyed the other models, made the composite one he had proposed, and gave it life at the coming of the dawn.

The quick wits and inquiring mind of the prairie-wolf serve him not only in chasing but in saving himself from being chased. Next to the wolverine he is perhaps the wariest of animals—not excepting the fox—against which the trapper pits himself. To poisoned meat he falls a victim through his exorbitant appetite, and in this way the ranchmen destroy great numbers annually; but he is rarely trapped. Say tells, with a touch of glee, how Titian Peale was baffled in trying to catch a coyote for his famous museum—one of the sights of old Philadelphia.

Peale's first experiment was with a “figure 4,” which came to naught because a wolf burrowed under the floor and pulled the bait down between the planks. “This procedure,” remarks Mr. Say, “would seem to be the result of a faculty beyond mere instinct.” A cage was constructed, into which the wolves might enter, but out of which they could not again escape. The coyotes came, admired this arrangement, sang doleful jeremiads over the bait which they could see and smell, but could not taste, and went away again, wondering at the heart of mankind and the malignant devices thereof.

Disappointed here, Mr. Peale next began a series of experiments with steel traps, one of which, profusely baited, was concealed among the leaves. Plenty of tracks—“you can't live on tracks!” is one of the aphorisms of the plains—alone rewarded this effort. Then a seductive bait was suspended above the trap in the midst of several other pieces, but the expected victims, stepping circumspectly, carried off all the meat except the one piece it was intended they should take. Baits were next hung up as before, the trap was buried in leaves, and these were burned, so that the trap, scorched free from any odor of human handling, lay covered with ashes; still, the one bait over the