CHAPTER XI.
COYOTE HUNTING—MY DOMINIONS ARE INVADED—THOMAS KILLS A BEAR—A TRIAL OF STRENGTH—ROWE’S “LOTâ€�—CHOCTAW ELK—A BUTCHERY—ROUGH LIFE—FERTILITY OF THE SOIL.
June, 1851.
Our first duty, on arriving at Vallejo, was to erect a temporary shanty, and before we had been long there the materials for about fifty houses were scattered over the ground by various speculators. Ramsey laid the foundation of a small village on his own account, and built a dwelling-house, a livery stable, and another grog-shop, in which his champagne and tin pannikins were soon rattling away, as of old, to the sound of the fiddle.
As soon as I had erected the iron house, to which I have already alluded in terms of bitterness, we tried the projected coyote hunt. I had two horses; one was an old grey “Texian Ranger,� who had seen so much hard service that, when once adrift, he was neither to be caught with chaff or the best of oats, but had to be lassoed and dragged home by main force; once assured, by means of spurs, and bottles of water broken on his head when he reared, and sticks broken on his side when he buck-jumped, that he was “bound to go,� as they say here, “the Old Soldier� (for so I named him) proved an animal of great speed and endurance, and afterwards performed his eighty miles in a day with me without flinching. The other was a handsome bay that I had bought from a retiring watchmaker, and he retained the name his last master had bestowed in honour of his shop, “Main Spring.�
My Australian Kangaroo dogs were a cross between the bull-dog or bull-mastiff and the greyhound; like the generality of cross-bred greyhounds, they differed only from the thoroughbreds in increased size, muscle, and breadth of chest; they ran of course from sight, but were not devoid of nose.
Of the three I had procured but two proved of any value, Tiger and Bevis, and these I coupled for an experimental hunt. I trust I may be excused from the charge of egotism in thus mentioning these animals in detail; they were my companions up to the very day I left the country; and being associated with the adventures I am sketching they will appear in my narrative from time to time. With all his faults I owe a debt of gratitude to the “Old Soldier.�
Stealing quietly away to the surrounding hills, with Ramsey on the “Old Soldier,� we soon found a coyote, and I slipped the dogs; he made a straight run, but there was no chance for him, and in less than five hundred yards he was caught and worried without a fight, and I whipped the dogs off. I was disappointed; I had hoped that the coyote would not only run well, but would make some kind of stand at the finish; but we found him invariably devoid of any pluck. Some that we afterwards saw would make an excellent start and then turn round and attempt to fraternise with the dogs, and these, after a time, began to recognise something of the nature of the cur in this conduct, and, after rolling the coyote over, would turn back without injuring him.[10] So that our coursing was deferred until we reached the hare country, where the dogs showed to better advantage, and generally killed, the hare of the country being rather a fool than otherwise.
It became necessary now for me to return to Russian River, and, as Ramsey and a Mr. Bottomly were anxious to accompany me, we made up a four-in-hand out of a pair of Ramsey’s horses and mine, and, throwing our blankets into the old waggon that constituted our drag, we put Tiger and Bevis inside to save their feet, and started.
We arrived without accident at the river, and I found that now the rains were over, settlers were flocking in from all sides. The river was still very high owing to the melting snow at its source; and when the waggon floated for a minute or two as we crossed the centre of the ford, and then filled to my companions’ knees, they evidently viewed with great interest this, to them, novel feature in “tooling a four in hand.�