Hunting in Many Lands: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club

by Unknown

Of all animals that I have hunted, I consider the wolf the hardest to capture or kill. There is only one way in which he can be successfully coped with, and that is with a pack of dogs trained to the purpose and thoroughly understanding their business. Dogs, as a rule, have sufficient combativeness to assail any animal, and, as a general thing, two or three of them can easily kill another animal of same size and weight; but the wolf, with his wonderful vitality and tenacity of life, combined with his thickness of skin, matted hair and resistant muscles, is anything but an easy victim for even six or eight times his number.

I spent the winter of 1874-75 in a portion of the Rocky Mountains uninhabited except by our own party. Wolves were very plentiful, and we determined to secure as many pelts as possible. Owing to the rough nature of the country and our inability to keep up with the dogs on horseback, we tried poisoning, but with only moderate success. While others claim it is an easy matter to poison wolves, we did not find it so. In a country where game is plentiful, it is almost impossible to poison them. We tried trapping them, with like results. Always mistrustful and intensely suspicious, they imagine everything unusual they see is a trap laid to betray or capture them, and with extreme sagacity avoid everything strange and new. When caught, they frequently gnaw off a foot or leg rather than be taken. Our cabin was surrounded by a stockade wall, over which we could throw such portions of deer carcasses as we did not use, and at nightfall the wolves, attracted by the smell of the meat, would assemble on the outside, and we shot them from the portholes. It required a death shot; for, if only wounded, no matter how badly, they would manage to get far enough away from the stockade to be torn into shreds by the survivors before we could drive them off. I have always found the wolf a most difficult animal to shoot. Endowed with wonderful powers of scent and extremely cunning, it is almost impossible to stalk them. Frequently, after a long stalk after one, have I raised my head to find him gone, his nose having warned him of my approach.

The successful chase of the wolf requires a species of knowledge that can be acquired only by experience. It also requires men, horses and dogs trained and disciplined for the purpose; and woe to the man, horse or dog that undertakes it without such preparation. The true sportsman is not a blood-thirsty animal. The actual killing of an animal, its mere death, is not sport. Therefore, upon several occasions, I have declined to join a general wolf round-up, where men form a cordon, and, by beating the country, drive them to a common center and kill them indiscriminately. I have always preferred hunting them with hounds to any other method of extermination. The enjoyment of sport increases in proportion to the amount of danger to man and beast engaged in it, and for this reason coursing wolves has always held a peculiar fascination for me. A number of years spent in the far West afforded me ample opportunity to indulge my tastes in this line of sport, so my knowledge of wolf-hunting and the habits of the wolf has been derived from personal experience and from association with famous hunters.

The principal drawback to the pleasure of wolf-coursing is the danger to a good horse from bad footing, and the possible mutilation and death of a favorite dog—death and destruction of hounds being often attendant upon the capture and death of a full-grown wolf. I do not know that I can give a better idea of the sport than by describing a day's wolf-hunting I enjoyed in the early seventies near Raw Hide Butte, in Wyoming.

We had notified the cook, an odd character who went by the name of Steamboat, to call us by daybreak. As we sat up late talking about the anticipated pleasures of the morrow, it seemed to me that I had hardly closed my eyes when Steamboat's heavy cavalry boots were heard beating a tattoo on the shack door. I rolled out of my bunk, to find Maje and Zach, my companions in the hunt, dressed and pulling on their shaps. Hastily dressing, I followed them out to the corral just as the gray tints of earliest morning were gathering in the sky. The horses had been corralled the night before, and, with Steamboat standing in the door, using anything but choice language at our delay in coming to breakfast, we saddled up. Having ridden my own horse, a sturdy half-breed from Salt Lake, very hard the day before in running down a wounded antelope, I decided on a fresh mount; and, as luck would have it, I selected one of the best lookers in the band, only to find out later, to my sorrow, that I had fallen upon the only bucking horse in the lot. While we breakfasted upon antelope steak, flapjacks and strong coffee, Steamboat was harnessing a couple of wiry cayuses to a buckboard, and, as we came out, we found him with the strike dogs chained to the seat behind him, impatient to be off. The party consisted of Maje, a long-legged, slab-sided, six-foot Kentuckian, mounted on a "States" horse; Zach, an out-and-out typical cowboy, who had come up from Texas on the trail, mounted on a pinto that did not look as though he had been fed since his arrival in the territory, but, as Zach knowingly remarked, "No route was too long or pace too hot for him"; Steamboat in the buckboard, holding with a pair of slips Dan, an English greyhound, and Scotty, a Scotch deerhound; while the other dogs, consisting of a pair of young greyhounds, a pair of cross-bred grey and deerhounds, and Lead, an old-time Southern foxhound, were making the horses miserable by jumping first at their heads, then at their heels, in their eagerness to facilitate the start; and myself on the bucking broncho.

While crossing the creek a few hundred yards above the ranch, I heard old Lead give mouth, a short distance ahead, in a chaparral rendered impenetrable by tangled undergrowth, and which formed secure covert for countless varmints. Knowing that he never threw his tongue without cause, I dug my spurs into my horse, with the intention of joining him. But I reckoned without my host, and for the next few minutes all my energies were devoted to sticking to my horse, who then and there in the creek bed proceeded to give an illustration of bucking that would have put the wild West buckers to shame. Lead had jumped a coyote that put off with all the speed that deadly terror could impart—all the dogs after him full tilt. It required quite a display of energy upon the part of Zach and his pinto to whip the dogs off; and, had it not been for the fact that Dan and Scotty—who had jerked Steamboat literally out of the buckboard and raced off together with the slips dangling about their heels—ran into a bush, and the slips catching held them fast, we would have been called upon to participate in a coyote and not a wolf-hunt—as, when once slipped, no human power could have stopped these dogs until they had tested the metal of Brer Coyote. By the time Zach and the dogs returned, I had convinced my broncho that I was not a tenderfoot, having "been there before," and he was contented to keep at least two feet upon the ground at the same time.

We rode probably five or six miles, carefully scanning the trackless plains, without sighting a wolf, when Maje, who had ridden off a mile to our right, was seen upon a butte wildly waving his hat. We instinctively knew that game was afoot, and, as he disappeared, we commenced a wild stampede for the butte. Steamboat, with slips and reins in one hand and blacksnake whip in the other, came thundering after us, lashing his team into a wild, mad run—and how he managed to hold himself and dogs on the bounding buckboard was a mystery to me. Reaching the butte, we espied Maje a mile away, riding for dear life. It did not take long to decide, from the general direction taken, that the wolf would shortly return to us. Keeping well back out of sight, we impatiently awaited his return, and, had it not been for the pure malignity of my broncho, the wolf would have doubled back within a few hundred yards of us, and a close race have resulted.

I had taken the dogs from Steamboat, and, with the release cord of the slips around my wrist, sat in the saddle ready to sight and slip the dogs. Becoming impatient under the restraint, the dogs ran behind my horse, and, as the strap of the slips got under his tail, he again commenced bucking, and before I could control him we were in full view of the wolf, which, upon sighting us, veered off to the left. Although not over a half mile away, the dogs failed to sight him. With a cheer to the loose dogs, we pushed forward at top speed, the cracking of the quirts upon our horses' flanks being echoed in the rear by the incessant popping of Steamboat's whip as he lashed the panting cayuses to the top of their speed in a vain effort to keep up with us.

We joined Maje at the point where we had last seen the wolf, which by this time had disappeared. Going over a rise, we dropped down into an arroyo, where the foxhound again gave tongue, and started back on the trail almost in the same direction in which we had come. Thinking that for once he was at fault, and back-tracking, I took the two dogs in slips up the arroyo, while Maje, Zach and the pack of dogs followed the foxhound, and were soon out of sight and hearing. Circling around for some distance and seeing no sign of the wolf, I rode upon a high point, and, searching the country carefully through my glasses, I could see the party probably a mile and a half away; and, from the manner in which they were getting over the ground, I knew they had again sighted. A hard ride of two miles, in which the dogs almost dragged me from my horse in their eagerness, brought me within sighting distance of the dogs—the voice of the foxhound, which was in the rear, floating back to me in strong and melodious tones across the plains. Slipping Dan and Scotty, they went from the slips like a pair of bullets and soon left me far behind. Upon rounding a point of rocks, I saw one of the young dogs lying upon the ground. A hasty glance showed me, from the violent manner in which he strained to catch his breath, that he had tackled the wolf and his windpipe was injured. It afterward developed that he had become separated from the pack, and, in cutting across country, had imprudently taken hold of the wolf, which, with one snap of his powerful jaws, had utterly disabled him, and then continued his flight. Like most wolves, he seemed to be able to keep up the pace he had set over all kinds of ground. It seemed to him a matter of indifference whether the way was up or down hill, and he evidently sought the roughest and stoniest ground, following ravines and coulees—this giving him a great advantage over horses and hounds. My horse beginning to show signs of distress, I realized that, if the chase was to be a straightaway, I would see but little of it and probably not be in at the death anyway; so I again sought a high point that gave a commanding view over a large area of country, and determined to await developments. Every once in a while, with the aid of my glasses, I could see the pack, fairly well bunched, straining every muscle, running as though for life. I could catch occasional glimpses of the wolf far in advance, as he scurried through the sagebrush, showing little power of strategy, but a determined obstinacy to outfoot his relentless foes.

Fortune again favored me. By degrees the superior speed and stamina of the hounds began to tell, though both seemed to be running with undiminished speed. The wolf, finding that, with all his speed and cunning, they were slowly but surely overtaking him, circled in my direction, and I was soon again an important factor in the hunt, urging the dogs with shouts of encouragement. I was now near enough to note that one of the young greyhounds, which had evidently been running cunning by lying back and cutting across, was far in advance of the pack—not over 100 yards behind the wolf, and gaining rapidly. Striking a rise in the ground, he overtook the wolf and seized him by the shoulder. The wolf seemed to drag him several yards before he reached around, and with his powerful, punishing jaws gave him a slash that laid his skull bare and rolled him over on the prairie.