"Coyote!" he announced triumphantly. "It was him that howled."
Twenty yards farther on he crossed a second coyote track, and for half a mile there were trails pointing to the north. There was one that showed evidence of a missing foot, a peg-leg such as those he had often seen on the open range. Then Collins halted and studied the next two trails that appeared side by side. One was a wolf track, and there were two toes missing from one hind foot. The smaller tracks were evenly spaced, and placed one before the other in a straight line after the manner of coyote and wolf, but ten feet beyond where Collins stood the trail showed the wavering gait of the dog with an occasional track out to either side. A sudden mist blurred Collins' eyes and he dashed it off with the back of his mitts.
"It's Shady," he said. "Old Shady and that yellow Breed,—both still alive and way off up here." Collins threw back his head and sent forth the clear piercing whistle that he had used to summon Shady in the long ago. Three times the shrill blast, long and sustained, was sent far out across the snowy hills.
Three miles to the north Shady lay curled up with Breed. She suddenly raised her head. Breed too opened his eyes and cocked one ear to listen. Shady was conscious of no actual sound. Some faint vibration reached her ears and seemed to play upon some chord deep within; the impressions were hazy and indistinct, yet she was aware of a vague sense of loss, a wave of something akin to homesickness, and she whimpered softly, then closed her eyes and slept.
Collins heard more and more coyotes howl, and in the next two months he had brief glimpses of perhaps a dozen as they moved across some opening. At least half of these seemed larger than the coyotes he had known, and they had dark fur on their backs. The Coyote Prophet studied long over these strange things. The coyote voices roused an ache for the homely cabin in Sand Coulee Basin a thousand miles to the south; and each time one howled he said:
"I'm going back. Once it comes spring I'll make tracks out of here. This here's no fit country for a white man, and me—I'm going back."
But Collins did not go back with the opening up of spring. Rumors of a gold strike sent men stampeding toward the fabled spot, a long journey to the north and east. Three parties crossed over the old trail past Collins' shack. The old wolfer caught the fever and followed the last of them. Before he left he made one last prophecy.
He predicted that the hill coyotes of the northwest from the Yukon to the Yellowstone would be larger and have dark fur on their backs from frequent infusions of wolf blood; that within a dozen years the fur markets would distinguish between these dark silky-furred ones and the woolly yellow coyotes of the plains. He scrawled this message on a wrinkled scrap of paper, signed it, tacked it on the wall, and started off down the trail.
A month later a party of five men stopped overnight in the deserted cabin. One of them deciphered the queer scrawl.
"Crazy," he announced. "Some old coot went off his nut from being holed up alone—and this is all he left."