About three o'clock that afternoon they overtook the "Reds," but found to their chagrin that a dozen bucks were ready to give battle, while still four or five were left to attend to the stolen horses, and as neither Johnson nor any of his companions were burning for a fight, in which there was no promise of getting anything but bullet holes, Johnson decided that he would rather go home without the horses.
In the Bull Mountains a hunter followed a wolf trail into a ravine from which there was no escape for the "varmint" except past him, and he was promptly attacked by a half-dozen wolves. He killed four after a hard fight, but he was pretty well chewed up at the finish. Of course he had expected to find only one in the gulch.
As a rule the wolf is not anxious to fight, although not so cowardly as most other animals—the cougar for example—yet I have seen a single specimen follow a hunter, a boy of twelve years, but the best rifle shot I ever met, about two miles. I was with him, and waited for that wolf until he was within twenty yards, when I allowed the boy to fire. His nerves were evidently too much shaken, for he missed his first wolf—nevertheless he got his pelt.
The locating of dens, as explained in the discussion of the cougar, is also applicable to wolves.
THE COYOTE
WHAT has been said in regard to the wolf and dog track, is applicable also to the track and trail of the prairie wolf, but as the latter is small there always exists the possibility that its track will be mistaken for that of the fox. Where the locality gives no clue to the identity of the maker of the trail, the tracker has no distinguishing feature whatever from which to form his judgment, since a big red fox makes as big a track as a small coyote. The writer, after hunting foxes for many years, followed what he took for fox trails quite frequently in a certain section of the country, until he discovered that there was no fox within a couple of hundred miles of the place. A big coyote, of course, makes a larger track than a fox, but here all difference stops. For comparison's sake the track and trail of the average coyote and of the average fox are shown.
COYOTE. (TWO-THIRDS NATURAL SIZE)