Jack, the Young Ranchman: A Boy's Adventures in the Rockies

by George Bird Grinnell

"Yes, of course, you will have to learn. You will pick up riding and roping readily enough, but to learn the ways of the prairie and the mountains is not so easy, and unless you are with some one that knows all that and tries to teach you, it will take you a long time to learn. You can easily learn the cowboy part of your education from almost any of us out at the ranch, but there is only one man there who can teach you how to become a good mountain man; that is old Hugh Johnson. He has lived on the plains and in the mountains for more than forty years, and has hunted, trapped and fought Indians from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande. He knows the plains and the mountains better than any one I ever saw, and is like an Indian for reading sign."

"What do you mean by reading sign, Uncle Will?" said Jack.

"Sign is a word which may mean a great many things. Sign may be the tracks of animals, or of people, or the smoke of fires, or an old camp, or clothing dropped by some one who has passed along. Anything that shows that animals or people have been in a certain place is called sign. Sign may be old or fresh, and there is always something about it that should tell you more than the mere fact that whatever made it has been there. You ought to be able to tell when the sign was made, and sometimes how it came to be made. Sometimes the sign is merely the way the wild animals act. I remember years ago, when the Sioux and Cheyennes were troublesome, I was travelling alone with Hugh, and one night when we camped, he rode out to kill a buffalo heifer. Before long he came back and told me that he had seen Indian sign, and that as soon as it was dark we must start and travel on all night. When I asked him what he had seen, he said that the animals were uneasy and the buffalo were running, and that some one was chasing them not far off. We hid our horses in a ravine and crept on top of a near-by hill from which we could see a good stretch of country. Sure enough, before long we saw buffalo running as if frightened, and a little later we saw, far off, two Indians chasing a little bunch. We lighted no fire that evening, but soon after dark rode away, and did not rest till we had put forty miles behind us."

"Do you think they would have tried to kill you, if they had seen you?" asked Jack.

"I don't know," said his uncle, "we were not taking any chances.

"Now, when you get to the ranch," he went on, "you will learn a lot about the birds and animals, and if your tastes lie that way, and you keep your eyes open, you will find out much of the life of these wild things that few people know. Although I have been out there so many years and have always tried to observe things, I see every season something that I never saw before, and learn more and more how little I really know about the beasts and the birds of the west—even those that are most common about the ranch. Only last year I saw for the first time a little blind coyote puppy dug out from a hole in a ravine and was astonished to find that, instead of being yellow it was dark blue, almost black in fact. You could get a great collection of pets together at the ranch. Young elk, young antelope and deer and wolves, possibly a buffalo calf, some foxes, and birds of a dozen different kinds, grouse, ducks, magpies, young hawks. Why, you could have a regular menagerie."

"Oh, what fun that would be," said Jack. "I should like that. But how do you catch all these things? I supposed that young deer and antelope could run so fast that they could not be caught. I thought that they ran even faster than the old ones."

"They can run very fast and they are hard to catch as soon as they are a few weeks old," said his uncle; "but when they are quite young—for the first few days after they are born—they can scarcely run at all. During this time the mother hides them, telling them, I suppose, in her own language, to lie perfectly still until she returns. The young one lies flat on the ground, and the old mother goes off a little way—not far though—and feeds about. If she sees any one coming, or if danger of any kind threatens, she runs away and only returns after it is past. Meanwhile, the little one, lying there among the grass or weeds or undergrowth, and keeping perfectly still, is not noticed by the hunter or the wild animal that is passing along, and when the mother returns, she finds it just where she left it. It is said that at this time of their lives, these young animals give out no scent, and so they are not found by the wolves, unless these brutes happen to come right upon them."

"Well, but how do you catch them then?" said Jack.

"When we see an old doe antelope by herself on the prairie at about the season of the year when the young are born, we watch her and we can tell pretty well whether she has a young one or not. If we think she has a kid, we can get some idea of where it is hidden by the way the mother acts. Then the only way to find it is to go to the place and search the ground over foot by foot, until the young one is found or the task is given up. Usually both kids will be found side by side, but sometimes they are three or four feet apart. When they are taken up, they do not struggle or try to get away. They hang perfectly limp, and if you try to make them stand up, their legs give way under them and they sink down again. It is often twenty-four hours before they seem to take any interest in what is going on about them, but when they get hungry, and after they have once drunk some milk, they are tame, and as soon as they become strong, very playful. Young antelope are not always easily reared, but young deer and elk are more hardy. If a buffalo calf is caught it can be given to a cow to rear. Wolf or coyote puppies can be reared on a bottle. Those animals do not easily become tame and trustful. They are likely to be shy and to dodge and jump away if any sudden motion is made, but when they are pleased, when any one in whom they have confidence approaches them, they lay back their ears and wag their tails and wriggle their bodies just like an affectionate dog. Once we had a young bear at the ranch for a year and a half, and he was an amusing pet. If you gave him a bottle of milk he would stand on his hind legs, and holding the bottle in both hands he would tilt it up and let the milk trickle down his throat until the bottle was empty, when he would throw it away."