“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow.”
Scartoe stood on a butte, with his nose pointing to the moon, his tail between his legs, and weirdly gave vent to his feelings in song. It began with two short barks and trailed into a succession of piercing, reverberating yelps, that melted into one another and rolled and echoed, as by the ventriloquist’s art, until the night grew hideous with the clamor. One would have sworn that a hundred coyotes held the hill, and were indulging in some funereal close-harmony.
This was his evensong. It came welling from his throat in a flood, in spite of him, and the coyote could no more control the impulse, the inheritance of ages, than a man can choke back the hiccoughs. His stomach would retch and his neck muscles work in the throes of it until the song was released. Once again, in the course of twenty-four hours, did the impulse seize him. Just before the sun crept over the edge of the world his nose would be tilted toward the gray vault of heaven.
“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow!”
He desisted at last and, considerably uplifted, departed on his hunt for food. A score of his fellows he met in his prowling, some hunting in couples; but Scartoe was a family man and a lone marauder, and would have none of them. In the half million acres composing the ranch were fully four hundred of his brethren. This in spite of a once vigorous warfare, in which poison and trap and gun and dog had been the weapons. In the last three years the campaign against the coyotes had waned, though each head would bring the taker a bounty at the county-seat and another at headquarters.
It is not to be wondered at that the thieves became arrogant and venturesome. They reveled in their depredations and pitted their keen wits against man’s intelligence with increasing boldness. What if twenty thousand of their brethren had been killed in the previous twelvemonth, in the national forest preserves alone? Many times twenty thousand survived in the cattle country; and official estimate gives it that each coyote does damage to stock to the amount of one hundred dollars annually. Scartoe must have passed, on the silent trails in his night hunt, the destroyers of ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock in a year.
Once he paused in a patch of broomweed to send his doleful cry to the stars. It gurgled from his throat like water from a bottle. He gave tongue no more that night. From the mouth of a cañon, far to his right, sounded a long-drawn howl, plaintive, threatening. Hardly had it ceased than a piercing scream broke from a hackberry tree within a hundred yards of where Scartoe crouched. Truly the lords of the wilds were abroad to-night; but it was not the panther’s cry which drove Scartoe from the trail. What he was giving right-of-way to was the lobo.
The coyote drew off a short distance and sank humbly to earth as a loafer wolf came running out of the shadows. He was a huge fellow, almost red along the back, gray as to his underbody, and he loped purposefully, bent on slaughter. Scartoe sank lower and groveled. In imagination he was fawning upon this mighty creature that inspired him with dread and respect; for, though of the same race, they were far apart as the poles. He knew the magnificent courage of the loafer and, when the King hunted, to him belonged the trail.
He watched him go by, and once more wended his devious way across country. A nice little scheme had hatched in his brain as he lay there, born of a long-time feud. Forty turkeys, eighty chickens and nineteen cocks were now to his credit; to the credit of the ranch-house cook stood the toes of his left foreleg. One turkey-gobbler remained--that he knew with accuracy, and Scartoe speculated pleasurably thereon.
Had he been a human being, he would have laughed as he slid under the outer barb-wire fence at headquarters. Ten paces away he had scented the handiwork of man. Sprinkle and smooth the sand as he might, set bait and lay trap ever so cunningly, the cook could not foil that marvelous instinct. There were but two holes by which Scartoe could enter the pen; before he started he was well aware that a trap lay in each. Approaching one, three feet from it, he scratched loose stones and earth behind him in a shower on a spot which looked too smooth and inviting to his eye and where his nose told him a man had fussed with his hands.