“How does a coyote walk?” screeched out the littlest one, aimin’ his finger at me.
Well, I felt huffy—never’d saw him before or his partner neither—didn’t catch the joke—but he wasn’t jokin’. The big one arrives and he yells:—
“Don’t he walk separate?”
“He walks together, don’t he?” yells the little one.
Little one had scrambled hair, white, and it hadn’t been cut lately. Big partner had left his hair behind him somewheres along life’s journey. They was glarin’ up at me for an answer.
So I said: “Tell me what you mean.”
So they did. They was trappers. One claimed you could always tell a coyote’s tracks by the way he put his right foot and his left foot down in different places, so you could tell he was a four-footed animal; and the other he said that was the way the bobcat and the link and the mountain-lion walked. And then the first one he yelled out that they struck one foot right in the other foot’s track, so it looked like a two-footed animal had been walkin’ there.
“That’s all easy,” I said; for I’ve trapped some myself.
So I set ’em straight as to the facts. Thing was, they quieted down right off and took my say-so. But that was their way, I found—get up a regular state-of-things that would mean trouble, you’d suppose, and drop it as if nobody’d said a word.
“Come and finish dinner,” says the little one to the big one.