Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

The congesting population in time increases the soil supply. In places and for a time this new soil seems to be helpful in increasing the food supply, but after a time in many towns food becomes scarce. Food scarcity causes movement. I have heard that the entire population of a dog town, like an entire species of migrating birds, will leave the old town and trek across the plains to a site of their liking.

A generation ago the prairie dog population must have exceeded two hundred millions. It was scattered over the great plains and the rocky region from the Canadian line to Mexico.

Dog towns are dry towns. My cowboy friend had repeated to me what everyone thus far had told him:

Prairie dogs dig down to water.

Prairie dogs, snakes, and owls all use the same den.

The water supply of dog towns and also their congested life so interested me that I visited a number of them to study the manners and customs of these citizens.

For two months not a drop of rain had fallen in Cactus Center. Not a bath nor a drink had the dogs enjoyed. I hurried into the town immediately after a rain thinking the dogs might be on a spree. I had supposed they would be drinking deeply again and swimming in the pools. But there was no interest. I did not even see one have a drink, although all may have had one. A few dogs were repairing the levee-crater rim of their holes, but beyond this things went on as usual. The rain did not cause dog town to celebrate.

On a visit to the “Biggest dog town in the world,” near the Staked Plains in Texas, and where there were dogs numbering many millions, I watched well drillers at a number of places. Several of these wells, in the limits of dog town, struck water at three hundred feet, none less than this depth. This told that dogs did not dig down to water. They are busy diggers and have five claws on each foot but they do not dig through geological ages to obtain water.

One day two cowboys came along with a shovel which was to be used in setting up a circular corral and I excited their interest in prairie dog dens. We made the dirt lively for two hours but we did not reach bottom. I examined old and new gullies by dog towns but learned nothing. Finally, a steam shovel revealed subterranean secrets.

This steam shovel was digging a deep railroad cut through a dog town. The dogs barked and protested, but railroads have the right of way. The holes descended straight and almost vertically into the earth to the depth of from ten to fourteen feet. From the bottom a tunnel extended horizontally for from ten to forty feet. There was a pocket or side passage in the vertical hole less than two feet below the top: and a number of pockets or niches along the tunnel with buried excrement in the farther end of the tunnel. The side niches were used for sleeping places and side tracks. There was a network of connecting tubes between the vertical holes and communicating tunnels between the deeper tunnels.