Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF AN

AMERICAN HUNTER

Copyright, 1908, by P.A. Juley, New York.

OUTDOOR PASTIMES
OF AN
AMERICAN HUNTER

BY

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ILLUSTRATED

NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1908

COPYRIGHT, 1893, 1895, 1897, 1904, BY

FOREST AND STREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY THE

MACMILLAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1905, 1907, 1908, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

All rights reserved

INTRODUCTION TO SECOND EDITION

Chapters XII and XIII relate to experiences that occurred since the first edition of this volume was published. The photographs in Chapter XII were taken by Dr. Alexander Lambert; those in Chapter XIII by Mrs. Herbert Wadsworth and Mr. Clinedinst.

Theodore Roosevelt.

The White House, January 1, 1908.

TO
JOHN BURROUGHS

Dear Oom John:—Every lover of outdoor life must feel a sense of affectionate obligation to you. Your writings appeal to all who care for the life of the woods and the fields, whether their tastes keep them in the homely, pleasant farm country or lead them into the wilderness. It is a good thing for our people that you should have lived; and surely no man can wish to have more said of him.

I wish to express my hearty appreciation of your warfare against the sham nature-writers—those whom you have called “the yellow journalists of the woods.” From the days of Æsop to the days of Reinecke Fuchs, and from the days of Reinecke Fuchs to the present time, there has been a distinct and attractive place in literature for those who write avowed fiction in which the heroes are animals with human or semi-human attributes. This fiction serves a useful purpose in many ways, even in the way of encouraging people to take the right view of outdoor life and outdoor creatures; but it is unpardonable for any observer of nature to write fiction and then publish it as truth, and he who exposes and wars against such action is entitled to respect and support. You in your own person have illustrated what can be done by the lover of nature who has trained himself to keen observation, who describes accurately what is thus observed, and who, finally, possesses the additional gift of writing with charm and interest.

You were with me on one of the trips described in this volume, and I trust that to look over it will recall the pleasant days we spent together.

Your friend,

Theodore Roosevelt.

The White House, October 2, 1905.

CONTENTS

⁂ Seven of these Chapters have been recently written; the others have been revised and added to since they originally appeared in the publications of the Boone and Crockett Club and in Mr. Caspar Whitney’s “Deer Family.”

ILLUSTRATIONS

⁂ The cuts for Chapter I are from photographs taken by Philip B. Stewart; those in Chapter II, from photographs taken by Dr. Alexander Lambert and Philip B. Stewart; those in Chapter III, from photographs taken by Dr. Lambert and Sloan Simpson; those in Chapter IX were obtained through Major Pitcher; most of the others are from photographs taken by me or by members of my family.

OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF

AN AMERICAN HUNTER

CHAPTER I
WITH THE COUGAR HOUNDS

In January, 1901, I started on a five weeks’ cougar hunt from Meeker in Northwest Colorado. My companions were Mr. Philip B. Stewart and Dr. Gerald Webb, of Colorado Springs; Stewart was the captain of the victorious Yale nine of ’86. We reached Meeker on January 11th, after a forty mile drive from the railroad, through the bitter winter weather; it was eighteen degrees below zero when we started. At Meeker we met John B. Goff, the hunter, and left town the next morning on horseback for his ranch, our hunting beginning that same afternoon, when after a brisk run our dogs treed a bobcat. After a fortnight Stewart and Webb returned, Goff and I staying out three weeks longer. We did not have to camp out, thanks to the warm-hearted hospitality of the proprietor and manager of the Keystone Ranch, and of the Mathes Brothers and Judge Foreman, both of whose ranches I also visited. The five weeks were spent hunting north of the White River, most of the time in the neighborhood of Coyote Basin and Colorow Mountain. In midwinter, hunting on horseback in the Rockies is apt to be cold work, but we were too warmly clad to mind the weather. We wore heavy flannels, jackets lined with sheepskin, caps which drew down entirely over our ears, and on our feet heavy ordinary socks, german socks, and overshoes. Galloping through the brush and among the spikes of the dead cedars, meant that now and then one got snagged; I found tough overalls better than trousers; and most of the time I did not need the jacket, wearing my old buckskin shirt, which is to my mind a particularly useful and comfortable garment.

It is a high, dry country, where the winters are usually very cold, but the snow not under ordinary circumstances very deep. It is wild and broken in character, the hills and low mountains rising in sheer slopes, broken by cliffs and riven by deeply cut and gloomy gorges and ravines. The sage-brush grows everywhere upon the flats and hillsides. Large open groves of pinyon and cedar are scattered over the peaks, ridges, and table-lands. Tall spruces cluster in the cold ravines. Cottonwoods grow along the stream courses, and there are occasional patches of scrub-oak and quaking asp. The entire country is taken up with cattle ranges wherever it is possible to get a sufficient water-supply, natural or artificial. Some thirty miles to the east and north the mountains rise higher, the evergreen forest becomes continuous, the snow lies deep all through the winter, and such Northern animals as the wolverene, lucivee, and snowshoe rabbit are found. This high country is the summer home of the Colorado elk, now woefully diminished in numbers, and of the Colorado blacktail deer, which are still very plentiful, but which, unless better protected, will follow the elk in the next few decades. I am happy to say that there are now signs to show that the State is waking up to the need of protecting both elk and deer; the few remaining mountain sheep in Colorado are so successfully protected that they are said to be increasing in numbers. In winter both elk and deer come down to the lower country, through a part of which I made my hunting trip. We did not come across any elk, but I have never, even in the old days, seen blacktail more abundant than they were in this region. The bucks had not lost their antlers, and were generally, but not always, found in small troops by themselves; the does, yearlings, and fawns—now almost yearlings themselves—went in bands. They seemed tame, and we often passed close to them before they took alarm. Of course at that season it was against the law to kill them; and even had this not been so none of our party would have dreamed of molesting them.

Flocks of Alaskan long-spurs and of rosy finches flitted around the ranch buildings; but at that season there was not very much small bird life.

The midwinter mountain landscape was very beautiful, whether under the brilliant blue sky of the day, or the starlight or glorious moonlight of the night, or when under the dying sun the snowy peaks, and the light clouds above, kindled into flame, and sank again to gold and amber and sombre purple. After the snow-storms the trees, almost hidden beneath the light, feathery masses, gave a new and strange look to the mountains, as if they were giant masses of frosted silver. Even the storms had a beauty of their own. The keen, cold air, the wonderful scenery, and the interest and excitement of the sport, made our veins thrill and beat with buoyant life.

In cougar hunting the success of the hunter depends absolutely upon his hounds. As hounds that are not perfectly trained are worse than useless, this means that success depends absolutely upon the man who trains and hunts the hounds. Goff was one of the best hunters with whom I have ever been out, and he had trained his pack to a point of perfection for its special work which I have never known another such pack to reach. With the exception of one new hound, which he had just purchased, and of a puppy, which was being trained, not one of the pack would look at a deer even when they were all as keen as mustard, were not on a trail, and when the deer got up but fifty yards or so from them. By the end of the hunt both the new hound and the puppy were entirely trustworthy; of course, Goff can only keep up his pack by continually including new or young dogs with the veterans. As cougar are only plentiful where deer are infinitely more plentiful, the first requisite for a good cougar hound is that it shall leave its natural prey, the deer, entirely alone. Goff’s pack ran only bear, cougar, and bobcat. Under no circumstances were they ever permitted to follow elk, deer, antelope or, of course, rabbit. Nor were they allowed to follow a wolf unless it was wounded; for in such a rough country they would at once run out of sight and hearing, and moreover if they did overtake the wolf they would be so scattered as to come up singly and probably be overcome one after another. Being bold dogs they were always especially eager after wolf and coyote, and when they came across the trail of either, though they would not follow it, they would usually challenge loudly. If the circumstances were such that they could overtake the wolf in a body, it could make no effective fight against them, no matter how large and powerful. On the one or two occasions when this had occurred, the pack had throttled “Isegrim” without getting a scratch.

GOFF AND THE PACK
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

As the dogs did all the work, we naturally became extremely interested in them, and rapidly grew to know the voice, peculiarities, and special abilities of each. There were eight hounds and four fighting dogs. The hounds were of the ordinary Eastern type, used from the Adirondacks to the Mississippi and the Gulf in the chase of deer and fox. Six of them were black and tan and two were mottled. They differed widely in size and voice. The biggest, and, on the whole, the most useful, was Jim, a very fast, powerful, and true dog with a great voice. When the animal was treed or bayed, Jim was especially useful because he never stopped barking; and we could only find the hounds, when at bay, by listening for the sound of their voices. Among the cliffs and precipices the pack usually ran out of sight and hearing if the chase lasted any length of time. Their business was to bring the quarry to bay, or put it up a tree, and then to stay with it and make a noise until the hunters came up. During this hunt there were two or three occasions when they had a cougar up a tree for at least three hours before we arrived, and on several occasions Goff had known them to keep a cougar up a tree overnight and to be still barking around the tree when the hunters at last found them the following morning. Jim always did his share of the killing, being a formidable fighter, though too wary to take hold until one of the professional fighting dogs had seized. He was a great bully with the other dogs, robbing them of their food, and yielding only to Turk. He possessed great endurance, and very stout feet.

On the whole the most useful dog next to Jim was old Boxer. Age had made Boxer slow, and in addition to this, the first cougar we tackled bit him through one hind leg, so that for the remainder of the trip he went on three legs, or, as Goff put it, “packed one leg”; but this seemed not to interfere with his appetite, his endurance, or his desire for the chase. Of all the dogs he was the best to puzzle out a cold trail on a bare hillside, or in any difficult place. He hardly paid any heed to the others, always insisting upon working out the trail for himself, and he never gave up. Of course, the dogs were much more apt to come upon the cold than upon the fresh trail of a cougar, and it was often necessary for them to spend several hours in working out a track which was at least two days old. Both Boxer and Jim had enormous appetites. Boxer was a small dog and Jim a very large one, and as the relations of the pack among themselves were those of brutal wild-beast selfishness, Boxer had to eat very quickly if he expected to get anything when Jim was around. He never ventured to fight Jim, but in deep-toned voice appealed to heaven against the unrighteousness with which he was treated; and time and again such appeal caused me to sally out and rescue his dinner from Jim’s highway robbery. Once, when Boxer was given a biscuit, which he tried to bolt whole, Jim simply took his entire head in his jaws, and convinced him that he had his choice of surrendering the biscuit, or sharing its passage down Jim’s capacious throat. Boxer promptly gave up the biscuit, then lay on his back and wailed a protest to fate—his voice being deep rather than loud, so that on the trail, when heard at a distance, it sounded a little as if he was croaking. After killing a cougar we usually cut up the carcass and fed it to the dogs, if we did not expect another chase that day. They devoured it eagerly, Boxer, after his meal, always looking as if he had swallowed a mattress.

Next in size to Jim was Tree’em. Tree’em was a good dog, but I never considered him remarkable until his feat on the last day of our hunt, to be afterward related. He was not a very noisy dog, and when “barking treed” he had a meditative way of giving single barks separated by intervals of several seconds, all the time gazing stolidly up at the big, sinister cat which he was baying. Early in the hunt, in the course of a fight with one of the cougars, he received some injury to his tail, which made it hang down like a piece of old rope. Apparently it hurt him a good deal and we let him rest for a fortnight. This put him in great spirits and made him fat and strong, but only enabled him to recover power over the root of the tail, while the tip hung down as before; it looked like a curved pump-handle when he tried to carry it erect.

Lil and Nel were two very stanch and fast bitches, the only two dogs that could keep up to Jim in a quick burst. They had shrill voices. Their only failing was a tendency to let the other members of the pack cow them so that they did not get their full share of the food. It was not a pack in which a slow or timid dog had much chance for existence. They would all unite in the chase and the fierce struggle which usually closed it; but the instant the quarry was killed each dog resumed his normal attitude of greedy anger or greedy fear toward the others.

Another bitch rejoiced in the not very appropriate name of Pete. She was a most ardent huntress. In the middle of our trip she gave birth to a litter of puppies, but before they were two weeks old she would slip away after us and join with the utmost ardor in the hunting and fighting. Her brother Jimmie, although of the same age (both were young), was not nearly as far advanced. He would run well on a fresh trail, but a cold trail or a long check always discouraged him and made him come back to Goff. He was rapidly learning; a single beating taught him to let deer alone. The remaining hound, Bruno, had just been added to the pack. He showed tendencies both to muteness and babbling, and at times, if he thought himself unobserved, could not resist making a sprint after a deer; but he occasionally rendered good service. If Jim or Boxer gave tongue every member of the pack ran to the sound; but not a dog paid any heed to Jimmie or Bruno. Yet both ultimately became first-class hounds.

The fighting dogs always trotted at the heels of the horses, which had become entirely accustomed to them, and made no objection when they literally rubbed against their heels. The fighters never left us until we came to where we could hear the hounds “barking treed,” or with their quarry at bay. Then they tore in a straight line to the sound. They were the ones who were expected to do the seizing and take the punishment, though the minute they actually had hold of the cougar, the hounds all piled on too, and did their share of the killing; but the seizers fought the head while the hounds generally took hold behind. All of them, fighters and hounds alike, were exceedingly good-natured and affectionate with their human friends, though short-tempered to a degree with one another. The best of the fighters was old Turk, who was by blood half hound and half “Siberian bloodhound.” Both his father and his mother were half-breeds of the same strains, and both were famous fighters. Once, when Goff had wounded an enormous gray wolf in the hind leg, the father had overtaken it and fought it to a standstill. The two dogs together were an overmatch for any wolf. Turk had had a sister who was as good as he was; but she had been killed the year before by a cougar which bit her through the skull; accidents being, of course, frequent in the pack, for a big cougar is an even more formidable opponent to dogs than a wolf. Turk’s head and body were seamed with scars. He had lost his lower fangs, but he was still a most formidable dog. While we were at the Keystone Ranch a big steer which had been driven in, got on the fight, and the foreman, William Wilson, took Turk out to aid him. At first Turk did not grasp what was expected of him, because all the dogs were trained never to touch anything domestic—at the different ranches where we stopped the cats and kittens wandered about, perfectly safe, in the midst of this hard-biting crew of bear and cougar fighters. But when Turk at last realized that he was expected to seize the steer, he did the business with speed and thoroughness; he not only threw the steer, but would have killed it then and there had he not been, with much difficulty, taken away. Three dogs like Turk, in their prime and with their teeth intact, could, I believe, kill an ordinary female cougar, and could hold even a big male so as to allow it to be killed with the knife.

Next to Turk were two half-breeds between bull and shepherd, named Tony and Baldy. They were exceedingly game, knowing-looking little dogs, with a certain alert swagger that reminded one of the walk of some light-weight prize-fighters. In fights with cougars, bears, and lynx, they too had been badly mauled and had lost a good many of their teeth. Neither of the gallant little fellows survived the trip. Their place was taken by a white bulldog bitch, Queen, which we picked up at the Keystone Ranch; a very affectionate and good-humored dog, but, when her blood was aroused, a dauntless though rather stupid fighter. Unfortunately she did not seize by the head, taking hold of any part that was nearest.

The pack had many interesting peculiarities, but none more so than the fact that four of them climbed trees. Only one of the hounds, little Jimmie, ever tried the feat; but of the fighters, not only Tony and Baldy but big Turk climbed every tree that gave them any chance. The pinyons and cedars were low, multi-forked, and usually sent off branches from near the ground. In consequence the dogs could, by industrious effort, work their way almost to the top. The photograph of Turk and the bobcat in the pinyon (facing p. [12]) shows them at an altitude of about thirty feet above the ground. Now and then a dog would lose his footing and come down with a whack which sounded as if he must be disabled, but after a growl and a shake he would start up the tree again. They could not fight well while in a tree, and were often scratched or knocked to the ground by a cougar; and when the quarry was shot out of its perch and seized by the expectant throng below, the dogs in the tree, yelping with eager excitement, dived headlong down through the branches, regardless of consequences.

The horses were stout, hardy, sure-footed beasts, not very fast, but able to climb like goats, and to endure an immense amount of work. Goff and I each used two for the trip.

The bear were all holed up for the winter, and so our game was limited to cougars and bobcats. In the books the bobcat is always called a lynx, which it of course is; but whenever a hunter or trapper speaks of a lynx (which he usually calls “link,” feeling dimly that the other pronunciation is a plural), he means a lucivee. Bobcat is a good distinctive name, and it is one which I think the book people might with advantage adopt; for wildcat, which is the name given to the small lynx in the East, is already pre-empted by the true wildcat of Europe. Like all people of European descent who have gone into strange lands, we Americans have christened our wild beasts with a fine disregard for their specific and generic relations. We called the bison “buffalo” as long as it existed, and we still call the big stag an “elk,” instead of using for it the excellent term wapiti; on the other hand, to the true elk and the reindeer we gave the new names moose and caribou—excellent names, too, by the way. The prong buck is always called antelope, though it is not an antelope at all; and the white goat is not a goat; while the distinctive name of “bighorn” is rarely used for the mountain sheep. In most cases, however, it is mere pedantry to try to upset popular custom in such matters; and where, as with the bobcat, a perfectly good name is taken, it would be better for scientific men to adopt it. I may add that in this particular of nomenclature we are no worse sinners than other people. The English in Ceylon, the English and Dutch in South Africa, and the Spanish in South America, have all shown the same genius for misnaming beasts and birds.

TURK AND A BOBCAT IN TOP OF A PINYON
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

Bobcats were very numerous where we were hunting. They fed chiefly upon the rabbits, which fairly swarmed; mostly cotton-tails, but a few jacks. Contrary to the popular belief, the winter is in many places a time of plenty for carnivorous wild beasts. In this place, for instance, the abundance of deer and rabbits made good hunting for both cougar and bobcat, and all those we killed were as fat as possible, and in consequence weighed more than their inches promised. The bobcats are very fond of prairie-dogs, and haunt the dog towns as soon as spring comes and the inhabitants emerge from their hibernation. They sometimes pounce on higher game. We came upon an eight months’ fawn—very nearly a yearling—which had been killed by a big male bobcat; and Judge Foreman informed me that near his ranch, a few years previously, an exceptionally large bobcat had killed a yearling doe. Bobcats will also take lambs and young pigs, and if the chance occurs will readily seize their small kinsman, the house cat.

Bobcats are very fond of lurking round prairie-dog towns as soon as the prairie-dogs come out in spring. In this part of Colorado, by the way, the prairie-dogs were of an entirely different species from the common kind of the plains east of the Rockies.

We found that the bobcats sometimes made their lairs along the rocky ledges or in holes in the cut banks, and sometimes in thickets, prowling about during the night, and now and then even during the day. We never chased them unless the dogs happened to run across them by accident when questing for cougar, or when we were returning home after a day when we had failed to find cougar. Usually the cat gave a good run, occasionally throwing out the dogs by doubling or jack-knifing. Two or three times one of them gave us an hour’s sharp trotting, cantering, and galloping through the open cedar and pinyon groves on the table-lands; and the runs sometimes lasted for a much longer period when the dogs had to go across ledges and through deep ravines.

On one of our runs a party of ravens fluttered along from tree to tree beside us, making queer gurgling noises and evidently aware that they might expect to reap a reward from our hunting. Ravens, multitudes of magpies, and golden and bald eagles were seen continually, and all four flocked to any carcass which was left in the open. The eagle and the raven are true birds of the wilderness, and in a way their presence both heightened and relieved the iron desolation of the wintry mountains.

Over half the cats we started escaped, getting into caves or deep holes in washouts. In the other instances they went up trees and were of course easily shot. Tony and Baldy would bring them out of any hole into which they themselves could get. After their loss, Lil, who was a small hound, once went into a hole in a washout after a cat. After awhile she stopped barking, though we could still hear the cat growling. What had happened to her we did not know. We spent a couple of hours calling to her and trying to get her to come out, but she neither came out nor answered, and, as sunset was approaching and the ranch was some miles off, we rode back there, intending to return with spades in the morning. However, by breakfast we found that Lil had come back. We supposed that she had got on the other side of the cat and had been afraid or unable to attack it; so that as Collins the cow-puncher, who was a Southerner, phrased it, “she just naturally stayed in the hole” until some time during the night the cat went out and she followed. When once hunters and hounds have come into the land, it is evident that the bobcats which take refuge in caves have a far better chance of surviving than those which make their lairs in the open and go up trees. But trees are sure havens against their wilderness foes. Goff informed me that he once came in the snow to a place where the tracks showed that some coyotes had put a bobcat up a tree, and had finally abandoned the effort to get at it. Any good fighting dog will kill a bobcat; but an untrained dog, even of large size, will probably fail, as the bobcat makes good use of both teeth and claws. The cats we caught frequently left marks on some of the pack. We found them very variable in size. My two largest—both of course males—weighed respectively thirty-one and thirty-nine pounds. The latter, Goff said, was of exceptional size, and as large as any he had ever killed. The full-grown females went down as low as eighteen pounds, or even lower.

When the bobcats were in the tree-tops we could get up very close. They looked like large malevolent pussies. I once heard one of them squall defiance when the dogs tried to get it out of a hole. Ordinarily they confined themselves to a low growling. Stewart and Goff went up the trees with their cameras whenever we got a bobcat in a favorable position, and endeavored to take its photograph. Sometimes they were very successful. Although they were frequently within six feet of a cat, and occasionally even poked it in order to make it change its position, I never saw one make a motion to jump on them. Two or three times on our approach the cat jumped from the tree almost into the midst of the pack, but it was so quick that it got off before they could seize it. They invariably put it up another tree before it had gone any distance.

Hunting the bobcat was only an incident. Our true quarry was the cougar. I had long been anxious to make a regular hunt after cougar in a country where the beasts were plentiful and where we could follow them with a good pack of hounds. Astonishingly little of a satisfactory nature has been left on record about the cougar by hunters, and in most places the chances for observation of the big cats steadily grow less. They have been thinned out almost to the point of extermination throughout the Eastern States. In the Rocky Mountain region they are still plentiful in places, but are growing less so; while on the contrary the wolf, which was exterminated even more quickly in the East, in the West has until recently been increasing in numbers. In northwestern Colorado a dozen years ago, cougars were far more plentiful than wolves; whereas at the present day the wolf is probably the more numerous. Nevertheless, there are large areas, here and there among the Rockies, in which cougars will be fairly plentiful for years to come.

BOBCAT IN PINYON
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

No American beast has been the subject of so much loose writing or of such wild fables as the cougar. Even its name is unsettled. In the Eastern States it is usually called panther or painter; in the Western States, mountain lion, or, toward the South, Mexican lion. The Spanish-speaking people usually call it simply lion. It is, however, sometimes called cougar in the West and Southwest of our country, and in South America, puma. As it is desirable where possible not to use a name that is misleading and is already appropriated to some entirely different animal, it is best to call it cougar.

The cougar is a very singular beast, shy and elusive to an extraordinary degree, very cowardly and yet bloodthirsty and ferocious, varying wonderfully in size, and subject, like many other beasts, to queer freaks of character in occasional individuals. This fact of individual variation in size and temper is almost always ignored in treating of the animal; whereas it ought never to be left out of sight.

The average writer, and for the matter of that, the average hunter, where cougars are scarce, knows little or nothing of them, and in describing them merely draws upon the stock of well-worn myths which portray them as terrible foes of man, as dropping on their prey from trees where they have been lying in wait, etc., etc. Very occasionally there appears an absolutely trustworthy account like that by Dr. Hart Merriam in his “Adirondack Mammals.” But many otherwise excellent writers are wholly at sea in reference to the cougar. Thus one of the best books on hunting in the far West in the old days is by Colonel Dodge. Yet when Colonel Dodge came to describe the cougar he actually treated of it as two species, one of which, the mountain lion, he painted as a most ferocious and dangerous opponent of man; while the other, the panther, was described as an abject coward, which would not even in the last resort defend itself against man—the two of course being the same animal.

However, the wildest of all fables about the cougar has been reserved not for hunter or popular writer, but for a professed naturalist. In his charmingly written book, “The Naturalist in La Plata,” Mr. Hudson actually describes the cougar as being friendly to man, disinterestedly adverse to harming him, and at the same time an enemy of other large carnivores. Mr. Hudson bases his opinion chiefly upon the assertions of the Gauchos. The Gauchos, however, go one degree beyond Mr. Hudson, calling the puma the “friend of Christians”; whereas Mr. Hudson only ventures to attribute to the beast humanitarian, not theological, preferences. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hudson’s belief in the cougar’s peculiar friendship for man, and peculiar enmity to other large beasts of prey, has not one particle of foundation in fact as regards at any rate the North American form—and it is hardly to be supposed that the South American form would alone develop such extraordinary traits. For instance, Mr. Hudson says that the South American puma when hunted will attack the dogs in preference to the man. In North America he will fight the dog if the dog is nearest, and if the man comes to close quarters at the same time as the dog he will attack the man if anything more readily, evidently recognizing in him his chief opponent. He will often go up a tree for a single dog. On Mr. Hudson’s theory he must do this because of his altruistic feeling toward the dog. In fact, Mr. Hudson could make out a better case of philo-humanity for the North American wolf than for the North American cougar. Equally absurd is it to talk, as Mr. Hudson does, of the cougar as the especial enemy of other ferocious beasts. Mr. Hudson speaks of it as attacking and conquering the jaguar. Of this I know nothing, but such an extraordinary statement should be well fortified with proofs; and if true it must mean that the jaguar is an infinitely less formidable creature than it has been painted. In support of his position Mr. Hudson alludes to the stories about the cougar attacking the grizzly bear. Here I am on ground that I do know. It is true that an occasional old hunter asserts that the cougar does this, but the old hunter who makes such an assertion also invariably insists that the cougar is a ferocious and habitual man-killer, and the two statements rest upon equally slender foundations of fact. I have never yet heard of a single authentic instance of a cougar interfering with a full-grown big bear. It will kill bear cubs if it gets a chance; but then so will the fox and the fisher, not to speak of the wolf. In 1894, a cougar killed a colt on a brushy river bottom a dozen miles below my ranch on the Little Missouri. I went down to visit the carcass and found that it had been taken possession of by a large grizzly. Both I and the hunter who was with me were very much interested in what had occurred, and after a careful examination of the tracks we concluded that the bear had arrived on the second night after the kill. He had feasted heartily on the remains, while the cougar, whose tracks were evident here and there at a little distance from the carcass, had seemingly circled around it, and had certainly not interfered with the bear, or even ventured to approach him. Now, if a cougar would ever have meddled with a large bear it would surely have been on such an occasion as this. If very much pressed by hunger, a large cougar will, if it gets the chance, kill a wolf; but this is only when other game has failed, and under all ordinary circumstances neither meddles with the other. When I was down in Texas, hunting peccaries on the Nueces, I was in a country where both cougar and jaguar were to be found; but no hunter had ever heard of either molesting the other, though they were all of the opinion that when the two met the cougar gave the path to his spotted brother. Of course, it is never safe to dogmatize about the unknown in zoology, or to generalize on insufficient evidence; but as regards the North American cougar there is not a particle of truth of any kind, sort, or description in the statement that he is the enemy of the larger carnivores, or the friend of man; and if the South American cougar, which so strongly resembles its Northern brother in its other habits, has developed on these two points the extraordinary peculiarities of which Mr. Hudson speaks, full and adequate proof should be forthcoming; and this proof is now wholly wanting.

Fables aside, the cougar is a very interesting creature. It is found from the cold, desolate plains of Patagonia to north of the Canadian line, and lives alike among the snow-clad peaks of the Andes and in the steaming forests of the Amazon. Doubtless careful investigation will disclose several varying forms in an animal found over such immense tracts of country and living under such utterly diverse conditions. But in its essential habits and traits, the big, slinking, nearly uni-colored cat seems to be much the same everywhere, whether living in mountain, open plain, or forest, under arctic cold or tropic heat. When the settlements become thick, it retires to dense forest, dark swamp or inaccessible mountain gorge, and moves about only at night. In wilder regions it not infrequently roams during the day and ventures freely into the open. Deer are its customary prey where they are plentiful, bucks, does, and fawns being killed indifferently. Usually the deer is killed almost instantaneously, but occasionally there is quite a scuffle, in which the cougar may get bruised, though, as far as I know, never seriously. It is also a dreaded enemy of sheep, pigs, calves, and especially colts, and when pressed by hunger a big male cougar will kill a full-grown horse or cow, moose or wapiti. It is the special enemy of mountain sheep. In 1886, while hunting white goats north of Clarke’s fork of the Columbia, in a region where cougar were common, I found them preying as freely on the goats as on the deer. It rarely catches antelope, but is quick to seize rabbits, other small beasts, and even porcupines, as well as bobcats, coyotes and foxes.

No animal, not even the wolf, is so rarely seen or so difficult to get without dogs. On the other hand, no other wild beast of its size and power is so easy to kill by the aid of dogs. There are many contradictions in its character. Like the American wolf, it is certainly very much afraid of man; yet it habitually follows the trail of the hunter or solitary traveller, dogging his footsteps, itself always unseen. I have had this happen to me personally. When hungry it will seize and carry off any dog; yet it will sometimes go up a tree when pursued even by a single small dog wholly unable to do it the least harm. It is small wonder that the average frontier settler should grow to regard almost with superstition the great furtive cat which he never sees, but of whose presence he is ever aware, and of whose prowess sinister proof is sometimes afforded by the deaths not alone of his lesser stock, but even of his milch cow or saddle horse.

The cougar is as large, as powerful, and as formidably armed as the Indian panther, and quite as well able to attack man; yet the instances of its having done so are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of the tales to this effect are undoubtedly inventions. But it is foolish to deny that such attacks on human beings ever occur. There are a number of authentic instances, the latest that has come to my knowledge being related in the following letter, of May 15, 1893, written to Dr. Merriam by Professor W. H. Brewer, of Yale: “In 1880 I visited the base of Mount Shasta, and stopped a day to renew the memories of 1862, when I had climbed and measured this mountain. Panthers were numerous and were so destructive to sheep that poisoning by strychnine was common. A man living near who had (as a young hunter) gone up Mount Shasta with us in ’62, now married (1880) and on a ranch, came to visit me, with a little son five or six years old. This boy when younger, but two or three years old, if I recollect rightly, had been attacked by a panther. He was playing in the yard by the house when a lean two-thirds grown panther came into the yard and seized the child by the throat. The child screamed, and alarmed the mother (who told me the story). She seized a broom and rushed out, while an old man at the house seized the gun. The panther let go the child and was shot. I saw the boy. He had the scars of the panther’s teeth in the cheek, and below on the under side of the lower jaw, and just at the throat. This was the only case that came to my knowledge at first hand of a panther attacking a human being in that State, except one or two cases where panthers, exasperated by wounds, had fought with the hunters who had wounded them.” This was a young cougar, bold, stupid, and very hungry. Goff told me of one similar case where a cougar stalked a young girl, but was shot just before it was close enough to make the final rush. As I have elsewhere related, I know of two undoubted cases, one in Mississippi, one in Florida, where a negro was attacked and killed by a cougar, while alone in a swamp at night. But these occurred many years ago. The instance related by Professor Brewer is the only one I have come across happening in recent years, in which the cougar actually seized a human being with the purpose of making prey of it; though doubtless others have occurred. I have never known the American wolf actually to attack a human being from hunger or to make prey of him; whereas the Old-World wolf, like the Old-World leopard, undoubtedly sometimes turns man-eater.

Even when hunted the cougar shows itself, as a rule, an abject coward, not to be compared in courage and prowess with the grizzly bear, and but little more dangerous to man than is the wolf under similar circumstances. Without dogs it is usually a mere chance that one is killed. Goff has killed some 300 cougars during the sixteen years he has been hunting in northwestern Colorado, yet all but two of them were encountered while he was with his pack; although this is in a region where they were plentiful. When hunted with good dogs their attention is so taken up with the pack that they have little time to devote to men. When hunted without dogs they never charge unless actually cornered, and, as a general rule, not even then, unless the man chooses to come right up to them. I knew of one Indian being killed in 1887, and near my ranch a cowboy was mauled; but in the first instance the cougar had been knocked down and the Indian was bending over it when it revived; and in the next instance, the cowboy literally came right on top of the animal. Now, under such circumstances either a bull elk or a blacktail buck will occasionally fight; twice I have known of wounded wapiti regularly charging, and one of my own cowboys, George Myer, was very roughly handled by a blacktail buck which he had wounded. In all his experience Goff says that save when he approached one too close when it was cornered by the dogs, he never but once had a cougar start to charge him, and on that occasion it was promptly killed by a bullet. Usually the cougar does not even charge at the dogs beyond a few feet, confining itself to seizing or striking any member of the pack which comes close up; although it will occasionally, when much irritated, make a rapid dash and seize some bold assailant. While I was on my hunt, one of Goff’s brothers lost a hound in hunting a cougar; there were but two hounds, and the cougar would not tree for them, finally seizing and killing one that came too near. At the same time a ranchman not far off set his cattle dog on a cougar, which after a short run turned and killed the dog. But time and again cougars are brought to bay or treed by dogs powerless to do them the slightest damage; and they usually meet their death tamely when the hunter comes up. I have had no personal experience either with the South American jaguar or the Old-World leopard or panther; but these great spotted cats must be far more dangerous adversaries than the cougar.

It is true, as I have said, that a cougar will follow a man; but then a weasel will sometimes do the same thing. Whatever the cougar’s motive, it is certain that in the immense majority of cases there is not the slightest danger of his attacking the man he follows. Dr. Hart Merriam informs me, however, that he is satisfied that he came across one genuine instance of a cougar killing a man whose tracks he had dogged. It cannot be too often repeated, that we must never lose sight of the individual variation in character and conduct among wild beasts. A thousand times a cougar might follow a man either not intending or not daring to attack him, while in the thousandth and first case it might be that the temper of the beast and the conditions were such that the attack would be made.

Other beasts show almost the same wide variation in temper. Wolves, for instance, are normally exceedingly wary of man. In this Colorado hunt I often came across their tracks, and often heard their mournful, but to my ears rather attractive, baying at night, but I never caught a glimpse of one of them; nor during the years when I spent much of my time on my ranch did I ever know of a wolf venturing to approach anywhere near a man in the day-time, though I have had them accompany me after nightfall, and have occasionally come across them by accident in daylight. But on the Keystone Ranch, where I spent three weeks on this particular trip, an incident which occurred before my arrival showed that wolves occasionally act with extraordinary boldness. The former owner of the ranch, Colonel Price, and one of the cowhands, Sabey (both of whom told me the story), were driving out in a buggy from Meeker to the ranch accompanied by a setter dog. They had no weapon with them. Two wolves joined them and made every effort to get at the dog. They accompanied the wagon for nearly a mile, venturing to within twenty yards of it. They paid no heed whatever to the shouts and gestures of the men, but did not quite dare to come to close quarters, and finally abandoned their effort. Now, this action on their part was, as far as my experience goes, quite as exceptional among American wolves as it is exceptional for a cougar to attack a man. Of course, these wolves were not after the men. They were simply after the dog; but I have never within my own experience come upon another instance of wolves venturing to attack a domestic animal in the immediate presence of and protected by a man. Exactly as these two wolves suddenly chose to behave with an absolutely unexpected daring, so a cougar will occasionally lose the fear of man which is inherent in its race.

Normally, then, the cougar is not in any way a formidable foe to man, and it is certainly by no means as dangerous to dogs as it could be if its courage and intelligence equalled its power to do mischief. It strikes with its forepaw like a cat, lacerating the foe with its sharp claws; or else it holds the animal with them, while the muscular forearm draws it in until the fatal bite may be inflicted. Whenever possible it strives to bite an assailant in the head. Occasionally, when fighting with a large dog, a cougar will throw itself on its back and try to rip open its antagonist with its hind feet. Male cougars often fight desperately among themselves.

Although a silent beast, yet at times, especially during the breeding season, the males utter a wild scream, and the females also wail or call. I once heard one cry repeatedly after nightfall, seemingly while prowling for game. On an evening in the summer of 1897 Dr. Merriam had a rather singular experience with a cougar. His party was camped in the forest by Tannum Lake, on the east slope of the Cascades, near the headwaters of a branch of the Yakima. The horses were feeding near by. Shortly after dark a cougar cried loudly in the gloom, and the frightened horses whinnied and stampeded. The cougar cried a number of times afterward, but the horses did not again answer. None of them was killed, however; and next morning, after some labor, all were again gathered together. In 1884 I had a somewhat similar experience with a bear, in the Big Horn Mountains.

Occasionally, but not often, the cougars I shot snarled or uttered a low, thunderous growl as we approached the tree, or as the dogs came upon them in the cave. In the death-grapple they were silent, excepting that one young cougar snarled and squalled as it battled with the dogs.

The cougar is sometimes tamed. A friend of mine had one which was as good-natured as possible until it was a year old, when it died. But one kept by another friend, while still quite young, became treacherous and dangerous. I doubt if they would ever become as trustworthy as a tame wolf, which, if taken when a very young puppy, will often grow up exactly like a dog. Two or three years ago there was such a tame wolf with the Colorado Springs greyhounds. It was safer and more friendly than many collies, and kept on excellent terms with the great greyhounds; though these were themselves solely used to hunt wolves and coyotes, and tackled them with headlong ferocity, having, unaided, killed a score or two of the large wolves and hundreds of coyotes.

Hunting in the snow we were able to tell very clearly what the cougars whose trails we were following had been doing. Goff’s eye for a trail was unerring, and he read at a glance the lesson it taught. All the cougars which we came across were living exclusively upon deer, and their stomachs were filled with nothing else; much hair being mixed with the meat. In each case the deer was caught by stalking and not by lying in wait, and the cougar never went up a tree except to get rid of the dogs. In the day-time it retired to a ledge, or ravine, or dense thicket, starting to prowl as the dark came on. So far as I could see the deer in each case was killed by a bite in the throat or neck. The cougar simply rambled around in likely grounds until it saw or smelled its quarry, and then crept up stealthily until with one or two tremendous bounds it was able to seize its prey. If, as frequently happened, the deer took alarm in time to avoid the first few bounds, it always got away, for though the cougar is very fast for a short distance, it has no wind whatever. It cannot pursue a deer for any length of time, nor run before a dog for more than a few hundred yards, if the dog is close up at the start. I was informed by the ranchmen that when in May the deer leave the country, the cougars turn their attention to the stock, and are very destructive. They have a special fondness for horseflesh and kill almost every colt where they are plentiful, while the big males work havoc with the saddle bands on the ranches, as well as among the brood mares. Except in the case of a female with young they are roving, wandering beasts, and roam great distances. After leaving their day lairs, on a ledge, or in a gorge or thicket, they spend the night travelling across the flats, along the ridges, over the spurs. When they kill a deer they usually lie not very far away, and do not again wander until they are hungry. The males travel very long distances in the mating season. Their breeding-time is evidently irregular. We found kittens with their eyes not yet open in the middle of January. Two of the female cougars we killed were pregnant—in one case the young would have been born almost immediately, that is, in February; and in the other case in March. One, which had a partially grown young one of over fifty pounds with it, still had milk in its teats. At the end of January we found a male and female together, evidently mating. Goff has also found the young just dropped in May, and even in June. The females outnumber the males. Of the fourteen we killed, but three were males.

When a cougar kills a deer in the open it invariably drags it under some tree or shelter before beginning to eat. All the carcasses we came across had been thus dragged, the trail showing distinctly in the snow. Goff, however, asserted that in occasional instances he had known a cougar to carry a deer so that only its legs trailed on the ground.

The fourteen cougars we killed showed the widest variation not only in size but in color, as shown by the following table. Some were as slaty-gray as deer when in the so-called “blue”; others, rufous, almost as bright as deer in the “red.” I use these two terms to describe the color phases; though in some instances the tint was very undecided. The color phase evidently has nothing to do with age, sex, season, or locality. In this table the first cougar is the one killed by Stewart, the sixth by Webb. The length is measured in a straight line, “between uprights,” from the nose to the extreme tip of the tail, when the beast was stretched out. The animals were weighed with the steelyard and also spring scales. Before measuring, we pulled the beast out as straight as we possibly could; and as the biggest male represents about, or very nearly, the maximum for the species, it is easy to see that there can be no basis for the talk one sometimes hears about ten and eleven foot cougars. No cougar, measured at all fairly, has ever come anywhere near reaching the length of nine feet. The fresh hide can easily be stretched a couple of feet extra. Except the first two, all were full-grown; the biggest male was nearly three times the size of the smallest female.

[1]. Young.

I shot five bobcats: two old males weighing 39 and 31 pounds respectively; and three females, weighing, respectively, 25, 21, and 18 pounds. Webb killed two, a male of 29 pounds and a female of 20; and Stewart two females, one of 22 pounds, and the other a young one of 11 pounds.

I sent the cougar and bobcat skulls to Dr. Merriam, at the Biological Survey, Department of Agriculture, Washington. He wrote me as follows: “The big [cougar] skull is certainly a giant. I have compared it with the largest in our collection from British Columbia and Wyoming, and find it larger than either. It is in fact the largest skull of any member of the Felis concolor group I have seen. A hasty preliminary examination indicates that the animal is quite different from the northwest coast form, but that it is the same as my horse-killer from Wyoming—Felis hippolestes. In typical Felis concolor from Brazil the skull is lighter, the brain-case thinner and more smoothly rounded, devoid of the strongly developed sagittal crest; the under jaw straighter and lighter.

“Your series of skulls from Colorado is incomparably the largest, most complete and most valuable series ever brought together from any single locality, and will be of inestimable value in determining the amount of individual variation.”

STARTING FOR A HUNT
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

We rode in to the Keystone Ranch late on the evening of the second day after leaving Meeker. We had picked up a couple of bobcats on the way, and had found a cougar’s kill (or bait, as Goff called it)—a doe, almost completely eaten. The dogs puzzled for several hours over the cold trail of the cougar; but it was old, and ran hither and thither over bare ground, so that they finally lost it. The ranch was delightfully situated at the foot of high wooded hills broken by cliffs, and it was pleasant to reach the warm, comfortable log buildings, with their clean rooms, and to revel in the abundant, smoking-hot dinner, after the long, cold hours in the saddle. As everywhere else in the cattle country nowadays, a successful effort had been made to store water on the Keystone, and there were great stretches of wire fencing—two improvements entirely unknown in former days. But the foreman, William Wilson, and the two punchers or cowhands, Sabey and Collins, were of the old familiar type—skilled, fearless, hardy, hard-working, with all the intelligence and self-respect that we like to claim as typical of the American character at its best. All three carried short saddle guns when they went abroad, and killed a good many coyotes, and now and then a gray wolf. The cattle were for the most part grade Herefords, very different from the wild, slab-sided, long-horned creatures which covered the cattle country a score of years ago.

The next day, January 14th, we got our first cougar. This kind of hunting was totally different from that to which I had been accustomed. In the first place, there was no need of always being on the alert for a shot, as it was the dogs who did the work. In the next place, instead of continually scanning the landscape, what we had to do was to look down so as to be sure not to pass over any tracks; for frequently a cold trail would be indicated so faintly that the dogs themselves might pass it by, if unassisted by Goff’s keen eyes and thorough knowledge of the habits of the quarry. Finally, there was no object in making an early start, as what we expected to find was not the cougar, but the cougar’s trail; moreover, the horses and dogs, tough though they were, could not stand more than a certain amount, and to ride from sunrise to sunset, day in and day out, for five weeks, just about tested the limits of their endurance.

We made our way slowly up the snow-covered, pinyon-clad side of the mountain back of the house, and found a very old cougar trail which it was useless to try to run, and a couple of fresh bobcat trails which it was difficult to prevent the dogs from following. After criss-crossing over the shoulders of this mountain for two or three hours, and scrambling in and out of the ravines, we finally struck another cougar trail, much more recent, probably made thirty-six hours before. The hounds had been hunting free to one side or the other of our path. They were now summoned by a blast of the horn, and with a wave of Goff’s hand away they went on the trail. Had it been fresh they would have run out of hearing at once, for it was fearfully rough country. But they were able to work but slowly along the loops and zigzags of the trail, where it led across bare spaces, and we could keep well in sight and hearing of them. Finally they came to where it descended the sheer side of the mountain and crossed the snow-covered valley beneath. They were still all together, the pace having been so slow, and in the snow of the valley the scent was fresh. It was a fine sight to see them as they rushed across from one side to the other, the cliffs echoing their chiming. Jim and the three bitches were in the lead, while Boxer fell behind, as he always did when the pace was fast.

Leading our horses, we slid and scrambled after the hounds; but when we reached the valley they had passed out of sight and sound, and we did not hear them again until we had toiled up the mountain opposite. They were then evidently scattered, having come upon many bare places; but while we were listening, and working our way over to the other side of the divide, the sudden increase in the baying told Goff that they had struck the fresh trail of the beast they were after; and in two or three minutes we heard Jim’s deep voice “barking treed.” The three fighters, who had been trotting at our heels, recognized the difference in the sound quite as quickly as we did, and plunged at full speed toward it down the steep hillside, throwing up the snow like so many snowploughs. In a minute or two the chorus told us that all the dogs were around the tree, and we picked our way down toward them.

While we were still some distance off we could see the cougar in a low pinyon moving about as the dogs tried to get up, and finally knocking one clean out of the top. It was the first time I had ever seen dogs with a cougar, and I was immensely interested; but Stewart’s whole concern was with his camera. When we were within fifty yards of the tree, and I was preparing to take the rifle out of the scabbard, Stewart suddenly called “halt,” with the first symptoms of excitement he had shown, and added, in an eager undertone: “Wait, there is a rabbit right here, and I want to take his picture.” Accordingly we waited, the cougar not fifty yards off and the dogs yelling and trying to get up the tree after it, while Stewart crept up to the rabbit and got a kodak some six feet distant. Then we resumed our march toward the tree, and the cougar, not liking the sight of the reinforcements, jumped out. She came down just outside the pack and ran up hill. So quick was she that the dogs failed to seize her, and for the first fifty yards she went a great deal faster than they did. Both in the jump and in the run she held her tail straight out behind her; I found out afterward that sometimes one will throw its tail straight in the air, and when walking along, when first roused by the pack, before they are close, will, if angry, lash the tail from side to side, at the same time grinning and snarling.

In a minute the cougar went up another tree, but, as we approached, again jumped down, and on this occasion, after running a couple of hundred yards, the dogs seized it. The worry was terrific; the growling, snarling, and yelling rang among the rocks; and leaving our horses we plunged at full speed through the snow down the rugged ravine in which the fight was going on. It was a small though old female, only a few pounds heavier than either Turk or Jim, and the dogs had the upper hand when we arrived. They would certainly have killed it unassisted, but as it was doing some damage to the pack, and might at any moment kill a dog, I ended the struggle by a knife-thrust behind the shoulder. To shoot would have been quite as dangerous for the dogs as for their quarry. Three of the dogs were badly scratched, and Turk had been bitten through one foreleg, and Boxer through one hind leg.

THE FIRST COUGAR KILLED
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

As will be seen by the measurements given before, this was much the smallest full-grown cougar we got. It was also one of the oldest, as its teeth showed, and it gave me a false idea of the size of cougars; although I knew they varied in size I was not prepared for the wide variation we actually found.

The fighting dogs were the ones that enabled me to use the knife. All three went straight for the head, and when they got hold they kept their jaws shut, worrying and pulling, and completely absorbing the attention of the cougar, so as to give an easy chance for the deathblow. The hounds meanwhile had seized the cougar behind, and Jim, with his alligator jaws, probably did as much damage as Turk. However, neither in this nor in any other instance, did any one of the dogs manage to get its teeth through the thick skin. When cougars fight among themselves their claws and fangs leave great scars, but their hides are too thick for the dogs to get their teeth through. On the other hand, a cougar’s jaws have great power, and dogs are frequently killed by a single bite, the fangs being driven through the brain or spine; or they break a dog’s leg or cut the big blood-vessels of the throat.

I had been anxious to get a set of measurements and weights of cougars to give to Dr. Hart Merriam. Accordingly I was carrying a tape, while Goff, instead of a rifle, had a steelyard in his gun scabbard. We weighed and measured the cougar, and then took lunch, making as impartial a distribution of it as was possible among ourselves and the different members of the pack; for, of course, we were already growing to have a hearty fellow-feeling for each individual dog.

The next day we were again in luck. After about two hours’ ride we came upon an old trail. It led among low hills, covered with pinyon and cedar, and broken by gullies or washouts, in whose sharp sides of clay the water had made holes and caves. Soon the hounds left it to follow a bobcat, and we had a lively gallop through the timber, dodging the sharp snags of the dead branches as best we might. The cat got into a hole in a side washout; Baldy went in after it, and the rest of us, men and dogs, clustered about to look in. After a considerable time he put the cat out of the other end of the hole, nearly a hundred yards off, close to the main washout. The first we knew of it we saw it coming straight toward us, its tail held erect like that of a whitetail deer. Before either we or the dogs quite grasped the situation it bolted into another hole almost at our feet, and this time Baldy could not find it, or else could not get at it. Then we took up the cougar trail again. It criss-crossed in every direction. We finally found an old “bait,” a buck. It was interesting to see the way in which the cougar had prowled from point to point, and the efforts it had made to approach the deer which it saw or smelled. Once we came to where it had sat down on the edge of a cliff, sitting on its haunches with its long tail straight behind it and looking out across the valley. After it had killed, according to the invariable custom of its kind, it had dragged the deer from the open, where it had overtaken it, to the shelter of a group of trees.

We finally struck the fresh trail; but it, also, led hither and thither, and we got into such a maze of tracks that the dogs were completely puzzled. After a couple of hours of vain travelling to and fro, we gave up the effort, called the dogs off, and started back beside a large washout which led along between two ridges. Goff, as usual, was leading, the dogs following and continually skirting to one side or the other. Suddenly they all began to show great excitement, and then one gave furious tongue at the mouth of a hole in some sunken and broken ground not thirty yards to our right. The whole pack rushed toward the challenge, the fighters leaped into the hole, and in another moment the row inside told us that they had found a cougar at home. We jumped off and ran down to see if we could be of assistance. To get into the hole was impossible, for two or three hounds had jumped down to join the fighters, and we could see nothing but their sterns. Then we saw Turk backing out with a dead kitten in his mouth. I had supposed that a cougar would defend her young to the last, but such was not the case in this instance. For some minutes she kept the dogs at bay, but then gradually gave ground, leaving her three kittens. Of course, the dogs killed them instantly, much to our regret, as we would have given a good deal to have kept them alive. As soon as she had abandoned them, away she went completely through the low cave or hole, leaped out of the other end, which was some thirty or forty yards off, scaled the bank, and galloped into the woods, the pack getting after her at once. She did not run more than a couple of hundred yards, and as we tore up on our horses we saw her standing in the lower branches of a pinyon only six or eight feet from the ground. She was not snarling or grinning, and looked at us as quietly as if nothing had happened. As we leaped out of the saddles she jumped down from the tree and ran off through the pack. They were after her at once, however, and a few yards farther on she started up another tree. Either Tony or Baldy grabbed her by the tip of the tail, she lost her footing for a moment, and the whole pack seized her. She was a powerful female of about the average size, being half as heavy again as the one we first got, and made a tremendous fight; and savage enough she looked, her ears tight back against her head, her yellow eyes flashing, and her great teeth showing as she grinned. For a moment the dogs had her down, but biting and striking she freed her head and fore quarters from the fighters, and faced us as we ran up, the hounds still having her from behind. This was another chance for the knife, and I cheered on the fighters. Again they seized her by the head, but though absolutely stanch dogs, their teeth, as I have said, had begun to suffer, and they were no longer always able to make their holds good. Just as I was about to strike her she knocked Turk loose with a blow, bit Baldy, and then, her head being free, turned upon me. Fortunately, Tony caught her free paw on that side, while I jammed the gun-butt into her jaws with my left hand and struck home with the right, the knife driving straight to the heart. The deep fang marks she left in the stock, biting the corner of the shoulder clean off, gave an idea of the power of her jaws. If it had been the very big male cougar which I afterward killed, the stock would doubtless have been bitten completely in two.

The dogs were pretty well damaged, and all retired and lay down under the trees, where they licked their wounds, and went to sleep; growling savagely at one another when they waked, but greeting us with demonstrative affection, and trotting eagerly out to share our lunch as soon as we began to eat it. Unaided, they would ultimately have killed the cougar, but the chance of one or two of them being killed or crippled was too great for us to allow this to be done; and in the mix-up of the struggle it was not possible to end it with the rifle. The writhing, yelling tangle offered too shifting a mark; one would have been as apt to hit a dog as the cougar. Goff told me that the pack had often killed cougars unassisted; but in the performance of such feats the best dogs were frequently killed, and this was not a risk to be taken lightly.

In some books the writers speak as if the male and female cougar live together and jointly seek food for the young. We never found a male cougar anywhere near either a female with young or a pregnant female. According to my observation the male only remains with the female for a short time, during the mating season, at which period he travels great distances in search of his temporary mates—for the females far outnumber the males. The cougar is normally a very solitary beast. The young—two to four in number, though more than one or two rarely grow up—follow the mother until over half grown. The mother lives entirely alone with the kittens while they are small. As the males fight so fiercely among themselves, it may be that the old he-cougars kill the young of their own sex; a ranchman whom I knew once found the body of a young male cougar which had evidently been killed by an old one; but I cannot say whether or not this was an exceptional case.

During the next ten days Stewart and Webb each shot a cougar. Webb’s was got by as pretty an exhibition of trailing on the part of Goff and his hounds as one could wish to see. We ran across its old tracks while coming home on Wednesday, January 16th. The next day, Thursday, we took up the trail, but the animal had travelled a long distance; and, as cougars so often do, had spent much of its time walking along ledges, or at the foot of the cliffs, where the sun had melted the snow off the ground. In consequence, the dogs were often at fault. Moreover, bobcats were numerous, and twice the pack got after one, running a couple of hours before, in one instance, the cat went into a cave, and, in the other, took to a tree, where it was killed by Webb. At last, when darkness came on, we were forced to leave the cougar trail and ride home; a very attractive ride, too, loping rapidly over the snow-covered flats, while above us the great stars fairly blazed in the splendor of the winter night.

Early next morning we again took up the trail, and after a little while found where it was less than thirty-six hours old. The dogs now ran it well, but were thrown out again on a large bare hillside, until Boxer succeeded in recovering the scent. They went up a high mountain and we toiled after them. Again they lost the trail, and while at fault jumped a big bobcat which they ran up a tree. After shooting him we took lunch, and started to circle for the trail. Most of the dogs kept with Goff, but Jim got off to one side on his own account; and suddenly his baying told us that he had jumped the cougar. The rest of the pack tore toward him and after a quarter of a mile run they had the quarry treed. The ground was too rough for riding, and we had to do some stiff climbing to get to it on foot.

Stewart’s cougar was a young of the year, and, according to his custom, he took several photographs of it. Then he tried to poke it so that it would get into a better position for the camera; whereupon it jumped out of the tree and ran headlong down hill, the yelling dogs but a few feet behind. Our horses had been left a hundred yards or so below, where they all stood, moping, with their heads drooped and their eyes half shut, in regular cow-pony style. The chase streamed by not a yard from their noses, but evidently failed to arouse even an emotion of interest in their minds, for they barely looked up, and made not a movement of any kind when the cougar treed again just below them.

We killed several bobcats; and we also got another cougar, this time in rather ignominious fashion. We had been running a bobcat, having an excellent gallop, during the course of which Stewart’s horse turned a somersault. Without our knowledge the dogs changed to the fresh trail of a cougar, which they ran into its den in another cut bank. When we reached the place they had gone in after it, Baldy dropping into a hole at the top of the bank, while the others crawled into the main entrance, some twenty-five yards off at the bottom. It was evidently a very rough house inside, and above the baying, yelping, and snarling of the dogs we could hear the rumbling overtone of the cougar’s growl. On this day we had taken along Queen, the white bull bitch, to “enter” her at cougar. It was certainly a lively experience for a first entry. We reached the place in time to keep Jim and the hound bitches out of the hole. It was evident that the dogs could do nothing with the cougar inside. They could only come at it in front, and under such circumstances its claws and teeth made the odds against them hopeless. Every now and then it would charge, driving them all back, and we would then reach in, seize a dog and haul him out. At intervals there would be an awful yelling and a hound would come out bleeding badly, quite satisfied, and without the slightest desire to go in again. Poor Baldy was evidently killed inside. Queen, Turk, and Tony were badly clawed and bitten, and we finally got them out too; Queen went in three times, and came out on each occasion with a fresh gash or bite; Turk was, at the last, the only one really anxious to go in again. Then we tried to smoke out the cougar, for as one of the dogs had gotten into the cave through an upper entrance, we supposed the cougar could get out by the same route. However, it either could not or would not bolt; coming down close to the entrance where we had built the sage-brush fire, there it stayed until it was smothered. We returned to the ranch carrying its skin, but not over-pleased, and the pack much the worse for wear. Dr. Webb had to sew up the wounds of three of the dogs. One, Tony, was sent back to the home ranch, where he died. In such rough hunting as this, it is of course impossible to prevent occasional injuries to the dogs when they get the cougar in a cave, or overtake him on the ground. All that can be done is to try to end the contest as speedily as possible, which we always did.

AFTER THE FIGHT
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

Judging from the experience of certain friends of mine in the Argentine, I think it would be safe to crawl into a cave to shoot a cougar under normal circumstances; but in this instance the cave was a long, winding hole, so low that we could not get in on hands and knees, having to work our way on our elbows. It was pitch dark inside, so that the rifle sights could not be seen, and the cougar was evidently very angry and had on two or three occasions charged the dogs, driving them out of the entrance of the hole. In the dark, the chances were strongly against killing it with a single shot; while if only wounded, and if it had happened to charge, the man, in his cramped position, would have been utterly helpless.

The day after the death of the smoked-out cougar Stewart and Webb started home. Then it snowed for two days, keeping us in the ranch. While the snow was falling, there was no possibility of finding or following tracks; and as a rule wild creatures lie close during a storm. We were glad to have fresh snow, for the multitude of tracks in the old snow had become confusing; and not only the southern hillsides but the larger valleys had begun to grow bare, so that trailing was difficult.

The third day dawned in brilliant splendor, and when the sun arose all the land glittered dazzling white under his rays. The hounds were rested, we had fresh horses, and after an early breakfast we started to make a long circle. All the forenoon and early afternoon we plodded through the snowdrifts, up and down the valleys, and along the ridge crests, without striking a trail. The dogs trotted behind us or circled from one side to the other. It was no small test of their stanchness, eager and fresh as they were, for time after time we aroused bands of deer, to which they paid no heed whatever. At last, in mid-afternoon, we suddenly struck the tracks of two cougars, one a very large one, an old male. They had been playing and frolicking together, for they were evidently mating, and the snow in the tracks showed that they had started abroad before the storm was entirely over. For three hours the pack followed the cold trail, through an exceedingly rugged and difficult country, in which Goff helped them out again and again.

Just at sunset the cougars were jumped, and ran straight into and through a tangle of spurs and foothills, broken by precipices, and riven by long deep ravines. The two at first separated and then came together, with the result that Tree’em, Bruno, and Jimmie got on the back trail and so were left far behind; while old Boxer also fell to the rear, as he always did when the scent was hot, and Jim and the bitches were left to do the running by themselves. In the gathering gloom we galloped along the main divide, my horse once falling on a slippery sidehill, as I followed headlong after Goff—whose riding was like the driving of the son of Nimshi. The last vestige of sunlight disappeared, but the full moon was well up in the heavens when we came to a long spur, leading off to the right for two or three miles, beyond which we did not think the chase could have gone. It had long run out of hearing. Making our way down the rough and broken crest of this spur, we finally heard far off the clamorous baying which told us that the hounds had their quarry at bay. We did not have the fighters with us, as they were still under the weather from the results of their encounter in the cave.

As it afterward appeared, the cougars had run three miles before the dogs overtook them, making their way up, down and along such difficult cliffs that the pack had to keep going round. The female then went up a tree, while the pack followed the male. He would not climb a tree and came to bay on the edge of a cliff. A couple of hundred yards from the spot, we left the horses and scrambled along on foot, guided by the furious clamor of the pack. When we reached them, the cougar had gone along the face of the cliff, most of the dogs could not see him, and it was some time before we could make him out ourselves. Then I got up quite close. Although the moonlight was bright I could not see the sights of my rifle, and fired a little too far back. The bullet, however, inflicted a bad wound, and the cougar ran along a ledge, disappearing around the cliff-shoulder. The conduct of the dogs showed that he had not left the cliff, but it was impossible to see him either from the sides or from below. The cliff was about a hundred feet high and the top overhung the bottom, while from above the ground sloped down to the brink at a rather steep angle, so that we had to be cautious about our footing. There was a large projecting rock on the brink; to this I clambered down, and, holding it with one hand, peeped over the edge. After a minute or two I made out first the tail and then the head of the cougar, who was lying on a narrow ledge only some ten feet below me, his body hidden by the overhang of the cliff. Thanks to the steepness of the incline, I could not let go of the rock with my left hand, because I should have rolled over; so I got Goff to come down, brace his feet against the projection, and grasp me by my legs. He then lowered me gently down until my head and shoulders were over the edge and my arms free; and I shot the cougar right between the ears, he being in a straight line underneath me. The dogs were evidently confident that he was going to be shot, for they had all gathered below the cliff to wait for him to fall; and sure enough, down he came with a crash, luckily not hitting any of them. We could hear them seize him, and they all, dead cougar and worrying dogs, rolled at least a hundred yards down the steep slope before they were stopped by a gully. It was an interesting experience, and one which I shall not soon forget. We clambered down to where the dogs were, admired our victim, and made up our minds not to try to skin him until the morning. Then we led down our horses, with some difficulty, into the snow-covered valley, mounted them, and cantered home to the ranch, under the cold and brilliant moon, through a white wonderland of shimmering light and beauty.

Next morning we came back as early as possible, intending first to skin the male and then to hunt up the female. A quarter of a mile before we reached the carcass we struck her fresh trail in the snow of the valley. Calling all the dogs together and hustling them forward, we got them across the trail without their paying any attention to it; for we wanted to finish the job of skinning before taking up the hunt. However, when we got off our horses and pulled the cougar down to a flat place to skin it, Nellie, who evidently remembered that there had been another cougar besides the one we had accounted for, started away on her own account while we were not looking. The first thing we knew we heard her giving tongue on the mountains above us, in such rough country that there was no use in trying to head her off. Accordingly we jumped on the horses again, rode down to where we had crossed the trail and put the whole pack on it. After crossing the valley the cougar had moved along the ledges of a great spur or chain of foothills, and as this prevented the dogs going too fast we were able to canter alongside them up the valley, watching them and listening to their chiming. We finally came to a large hillside bare of snow, much broken with rocks, among which grew patches of brush and scattered pinyons. Here the dogs were at fault for over an hour. It had evidently been a favorite haunt of the cougars; they had moved to and fro across it, and had lain sunning themselves in the dust under the ledges. Owing to the character of the ground we could give the hounds no assistance, but they finally puzzled out the trail for themselves. We were now given a good illustration of the impossibility of jumping a cougar without dogs, even when in a general way its haunt is known. We rode along the hillside, and quartered it to and fro, on the last occasion coming down a spur where we passed within two or three rods of the brush in which the cougar was actually lying; but she never moved and it was impossible to see her. When we finally reached the bottom, the dogs had disentangled the trail; and they passed behind us at a good rate, going up almost where we had come down. Even as we looked we saw the cougar rise from her lair, only fifty yards or so ahead of them, her red hide showing bright in the sun. It was a very pretty run to watch while it lasted. She left them behind at first, but after a quarter of a mile they put her up a pinyon. Approaching cautiously—for the climbing was hard work and I did not wish to frighten her out of the tree if it could be avoided, lest she might make such a run as that of the preceding evening—I was able to shoot her through the heart. She died in the branches, and I climbed the tree to throw her down. The only skill needed in such shooting is in killing the cougar outright so as to save the dogs. Six times on the hunt I shot the cougar through the heart. Twice the animal died in the branches. In the other four cases it sprang out of the tree, head and tail erect, eyes blazing, and the mouth open in a grin of savage hate and anger; but it was practically dead when it touched the ground.

COUGAR IN A TREE
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

Although these cougars were mates, they were not of the same color, the female being reddish, while the male was slate-colored. In weighing this male we had to take off the hide and weigh it separately (with the head and paws attached), for our steelyard only went up to 150 pounds. When we came to weigh the biggest male we had to take off the quarters as well as the hide.

Thinking that we had probably exhausted the cougars around the Keystone Ranch, we spent the next fortnight off on a trip. We carried only what we could put in the small saddle-pockets—our baggage being as strictly limited as it ought to be with efficient cavalry who are on an active campaign. We worked hard, but, as so often happens, our luck was not in proportion to our labor.

The first day we rode to the Mathes brothers’ ranch. On the high divides it was very cold, the thermometer standing at nearly twenty degrees below zero. But we were clad for just such weather, and were not uncomfortable. The three Mathes brothers lived together, with the wives and children of the two married ones. Their ranch was in a very beautiful and wild valley, the pinyon-crowned cliffs rising in walls on either hand. Deer were abundant and often in sight from the ranch doors. At night the gray wolves came down close to the buildings and howled for hours among the precipices, under the light of the full moon. The still cold was intense; but I could not resist going out for half an hour at a time to listen to them. To me their baying, though a very eerie and lonesome sound, full of vaguely sinister associations, has, nevertheless, a certain wild music of its own which is far from being without charm.

We did not hear the cougars calling, for they are certainly nothing like as noisy as wolves; yet the Mathes brothers had heard them several times, and once one of them had crept up and seen the cougar, which remained in the same place for many minutes, repeating its cry continually. The Mathes had killed but two cougars, not having any dogs trained to hunt them. One of these was killed under circumstances which well illustrate the queer nature of the animal. The three men, with one of their two cattle dogs, were walking up the valley not half a mile above the ranch-house, when they saw a cougar crossing in front of them, a couple of hundred yards off. As soon as she saw them she crouched flat down with her head toward them, remaining motionless. Two, with the dog, stayed where they were, while the other ran back to the ranch-house for a rifle and for the other dog. No sooner had he gone than the cougar began deliberately to crawl toward the men who were left. She came on slowly but steadily, crouched almost flat to the ground. The two unarmed men were by no means pleased with her approach. They waved their hands and jumped about and shouted; but she kept approaching, although slowly, and was well within a hundred yards when the other brother arrived, out of breath, accompanied by the other dog. At sight of him she jumped up, ran off a couple of hundred yards, went up a tree, and was killed. I do not suppose she would have attacked the men; but as there was an unpleasant possibility that she might, they both felt distinctly more comfortable when their brother rejoined them with the rifle.

There was a good deal of snowy weather while we were at the Mathes ranch, but we had fair luck, killing two cougars. It was most comfortable, for the ranch was clean and warm, and the cooking delicious. It does not seem to me that I ever tasted better milk and butter, hot biscuits, rice, potatoes, pork and bulberry and wild-plum jam; and of course the long days on horseback in the cold weather gave an edge to our appetites. One stormy day we lost the hounds, and we spent most of the next day in finding such of them as did not come straggling in of their own accord. The country was very rough, and it was astounding to see some of the places up and down which we led the horses. Sometimes I found that my horse climbed rather better than I did, for he would come up some awkward-looking slope with such a rush that I literally had to scramble on all-fours to get out of his way.

There was no special incident connected with killing either of these two cougars. In one case Goff himself took the lead in working out the trail and preventing the hounds getting off after bobcats. In the other case the trail was fresher and the dogs ran it by themselves, getting into a country where we could not follow; it was very rough, and the cliffs and gorges rang with their baying. In both cases they had the cougar treed for about three hours before we were able to place them and walk up to them. It was hard work, toiling through the snow over the cliffs toward the baying; and on each occasion the cougar leaped from the tree at our approach, and ran a quarter of a mile or so before going up another, where it was shot. As I came up to shoot, most of the dogs paid no attention, but Boxer and Nellie always kept looking at me until I actually raised the rifle, when they began to spring about the spot where they thought the cougar would come down. The cougar itself always seemed to recognize the man as the dangerous opponent; and as I strode around to find a place from whence I could deliver an instantaneously fatal shot, it would follow me steadily with its evil yellow eyes. I came up very close, but the beasts never attempted to jump at me. Judging from what one reads in books about Indian and African game, a leopard under such circumstances would certainly sometimes charge.

Three days of our trip were spent on a ride to Colorow Mountain; we went down to Judge Foreman’s ranch on White River to pass the night. We got another cougar on the way. She must really be credited to Jim. The other dogs were following in our footsteps through the snow, after having made various futile excursions of their own. When we found that Jim was missing, we tried in vain to recall him with the horn, and at last started to hunt him up. After an hour’s ride we heard him off on the mountain, evidently following a trail, but equally evidently not yet having jumped the animal. The hounds heard him quite as quickly as we did, and started toward him. Soon we heard the music of the whole pack, which grew fainter and fainter, and was lost entirely as they disappeared around a spur, and then began to grow loud again, showing that they were coming toward us. Suddenly a change in the note convinced us that they had jumped the quarry. We stood motionless; nearer and nearer they came; and then a sudden burst of clamor proclaimed that they were barking treed. We had to ride only a couple of hundred yards; I shot the cougar from across a little ravine. She was the largest female we got.

The dogs were a source of unceasing amusement, not merely while hunting, but because of their relations to one another when off duty. Queen’s temper was of the shortest toward the rest of the pack, although, like Turk, she was fond of literally crawling into my lap, when we sat down to rest after the worry which closed the chase. As soon as I began to eat my lunch, all the dogs clustered close around and I distributed small morsels to each in turn. Once Jimmie, Queen, and Boxer were sitting side by side, tightly wedged together. I treated them with entire impartiality; and soon Queen’s feelings overcame her, and she unostentatiously but firmly bit Jimmie in the jaw. Jimmie howled tremendously and Boxer literally turned a back somersault, evidently fearing lest his turn should come next.

On February 11th we rode back to the Keystone Ranch, carrying the three cougar skins behind our saddles. It was again very cold, and the snow on the divides was so deep that our horses wallowed through it up to their saddle-girths. I supposed that my hunt was practically at an end, for I had but three days left; but as it turned out these were the three most lucky days of the whole trip.

The weather was beautiful, the snow lying deep enough to give the dogs easy trailing even on the southern slopes. Under the clear skies the landscape was dazzling, and I had to wear snow-glasses. On the first of the three days, February 12th, we had not ridden half an hour from the ranch before we came across the trail of a very big bobcat. It was so heavy that it had broken through the crust here and there, and we decided that it was worth following. The trail went up a steep mountain to the top, and we followed on foot after the dogs. Among the cliffs on the top they were completely at fault, hunting every which way. After awhile Goff suddenly spied the cat, which had jumped off the top of a cliff into a pinyon. I killed it before any of the dogs saw it, and at the shot they all ran in the wrong direction. When they did find us skinning it, they were evidently not at all satisfied that it was really their bobcat—the one which they had been trailing. Usually as soon as the animal was killed they all lay down and dozed off; but on this occasion they kept hurrying about and then in a body started on the back trail. It was some time before we could get them together again.

After we had brought them in we rode across one or two ridges, and up and down the spurs without finding anything, until about noon we struck up a long winding valley where we came across one or two old cougar trails. The pack were following in our footsteps behind the horses, except Jim, who took off to one side by himself. Suddenly he began to show signs that he had come across traces of game; and in another moment he gave tongue and all the hounds started toward him. They quartered around in the neighborhood of a little gulch for a short while, and then streamed off up the mountain-side; and before they had run more than a couple of minutes we heard them barking treed. By making a slight turn we rode almost up to the tree, and saw that their quarry was a young cougar. As we came up, it knocked Jimmie right out of the tree. On seeing us it jumped down and started to run, but it was not quite quick enough. Turk seized it and in a minute the dogs had it stretched out. It squalled, hissed, and made such a good fight that I put an end to the struggle with the knife, fearing lest it might maim one of the hounds.

While Goff was skinning it I wandered down to the kill near which it had been lying. This was a deer, almost completely devoured. It had been killed in the valley and dragged up perhaps a hundred yards to some cedars. I soon saw from the tracks around the carcass that there was an older cougar with the younger one—doubtless its mother—and walked back to Goff with the information. Before I got there, however, some of the pack had made the discovery for themselves. Jim, evidently feeling that he had done his duty, had curled up and gone to sleep, with most of the others; but old Boxer and the three bitches (Pete had left her pups and joined us about the time we roused the big bobcat), hunted about until they struck the fresh trail of the old female. They went off at a great rate, and the sleeping dogs heard them and scampered away to the sound. The trail led them across a spur, into a valley, and out of it up the precipitous side of another mountain. When we got to the edge of the valley we could hear them barking treed nearly at the summit of the mountain opposite. It was over an hour’s stiff climbing before we made our way around to them, although we managed to get the horses up to within a quarter of a mile of the spot. On approaching we found the cougar in a leaning pinyon on a ledge at the foot of a cliff. Jimmie was in the lower branches of the pinyon, and Turk up above him, within a few feet of the cougar. Evidently he had been trying to tackle her and had been knocked out of the tree at least once, for he was bleeding a good deal and there was much blood on the snow beneath. Yet he had come back into the tree, and was barking violently not more than three feet beyond her stroke. She kept up a low savage growling, and as soon as I appeared, fixed her yellow eyes on me, glaring and snarling as I worked around into a place from which I could kill her outright. Meanwhile Goff took up his position on the other side, hoping to get a photograph when I shot. My bullet went right through her heart. She bit her paw, stretched up her head and bit a branch, and then died where she was, while Turk leaped forward at the crack of the rifle and seized her in the branches. I had some difficulty in bundling him and Jimmie out of the tree as I climbed up to throw down the cougar.

Next morning we started early, intending to go to Juniper Mountain, where we had heard that cougars were plentiful; but we had only ridden about half an hour from the ranch when we came across a trail which by the size we knew must belong to an old male. It was about thirty-six hours old and led into a tangle of bad lands where there was great difficulty in working it out. Finally, however, we found where it left these bad lands and went straight up a mountain-side, too steep for the horses to follow. From the plains below we watched the hounds working to and fro until they entered a patch of pinyons in which we were certain the cougar had killed a deer, as ravens and magpies were sitting around in the trees. In these pinyons the hounds were again at fault for a little while, but at last evidently found the right trail, and followed it up over the hill-crest and out of sight. We then galloped hard along the plain to the left, going around the end of the ridge and turning to our right on the other side. Here we entered a deep narrow valley or gorge which led up to a high plateau at the farther end. On our right, as we rode up the valley, lay the high and steep ridge over which the hounds had followed the trail. On the left it was still steeper, the slope being broken by ledges and precipices. Near the mouth of the gorge we encountered the hounds, who had worked the trail down and across the gorge, and were now hunting up the steep cliff-shoulder on our left. Evidently the cougar had wandered to and fro over this shoulder, and the dogs were much puzzled and worked in zigzags and circles around it, gradually getting clear to the top. Then old Boxer suddenly gave tongue with renewed zest and started off at a run almost on top of the ridge, the other dogs following. Immediately afterward they jumped the cougar.

We had been waiting below to see which direction the chase would take and now put spurs to our horses and galloped up the ravine, climbing the hillside on our right so as to get a better view of what was happening. A few hundred yards of this galloping and climbing brought us again in sight of the hounds. They were now barking treed and were clustered around a pinyon below the ridge crest on the side hill opposite us. The two fighters, Turk and Queen, who had been following at our horses’ heels, appreciated what had happened as soon as we did, and, leaving us, ran down into the valley and began to work their way through the deep snow up the hillside opposite, toward where the hounds were. Ours was an ideal position for seeing the whole chase. In a minute the cougar jumped out of the tree down among the hounds, who made no attempt to seize him, but followed him as soon as he had cleared their circle. He came down hill at a great rate and jumped over a low cliff, bringing after him such an avalanche of snow that it was a moment before I caught sight of him again, this time crouched on a narrow ledge some fifteen or twenty feet below the brink from which he had jumped, and about as far above the foot of the cliff, where the steep hill-slope again began. The hounds soon found him and came along the ledge barking loudly, but not venturing near where he lay facing them, with his back arched like a great cat. Turk and Queen were meanwhile working their way up hill. Turk got directly under the ledge and could not find a way up. Queen went to the left and in a minute we saw her white form as she made her way through the dark-colored hounds straight for the cougar. “That’s the end of Queen,” said Goff; “he’ll kill her now, sure.” In another moment she had made her rush and the cougar, bounding forward, had seized her, and as we afterward discovered had driven his great fangs right through the side of her head, fortunately missing the brain. In the struggle he lost his footing and rolled off the ledge, and when they struck the ground below he let go of the bitch. Turk, who was near where they struck, was not able to spring for the hold he desired, and in another moment the cougar was coming down hill like a quarter-horse. We stayed perfectly still, as he was travelling in our direction. Queen was on her feet almost as quick as the cougar, and she and Turk tore after him, the hounds following in a few seconds, being delayed in getting off the ledge. It was astonishing to see the speed of the cougar. He ran considerably more than a quarter of a mile down hill, and at the end of it had left the dogs more than a hundred yards behind. But his bolt was shot, and after going perhaps a hundred yards or so up the hill on our side and below us, he climbed a tree, under which the dogs began to bay frantically, while we scrambled toward them. When I got down I found him standing half upright on a big branch, his forepaws hung over another higher branch, his sides puffing like bellows, and evidently completely winded. In scrambling up the pinyon he must have struck a patch of resin, for it had torn a handful of hair off from behind his right forearm. I shot him through the heart. At the shot he sprang clean into the top of the tree, head and tail up, and his face fairly demoniac with rage; but before he touched the ground he was dead. Turk jumped up, seized him as he fell, and the two rolled over a low ledge, falling about eight feet into the snow, Turk never losing his hold.

No one could have wished to see a prettier chase under better circumstances. It was exceedingly interesting. The only dog hurt was Queen, and very miserable indeed she looked. She stood in the trail, refusing to lie down or to join the other dogs, as, with prodigious snarls at one another, they ate the pieces of the carcass we cut out for them. Dogs hunting every day, as these were doing, and going through such terrific exertion, need enormous quantities of meat, and as old horses and crippled steers were not always easy to get, we usually fed them the cougar carcasses. On this occasion, when they had eaten until they could eat no longer, I gave most of my lunch to Queen—Boxer, who after his feast could hardly move, nevertheless waddling up with his ears forward to beg a share. Queen evidently felt that the lunch was a delicacy, for she ate it, and then trotted home behind us with the rest of the dogs. Rather to my astonishment, next day she was all right, and as eager to go with us as ever. Though one side of her head was much swollen, in her work she showed no signs of her injuries.

“BARKING TREED”
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

Early the following morning, February 14th, the last day of my actual hunting, we again started for Juniper Mountain, following the same course on which we had started the previous day. Before we had gone a mile, that is, only about half-way to where we had come across the cougar track the preceding day, we crossed another, and as we deemed a fresher, trail, which Goff pronounced to belong to a cougar even larger than the one we had just killed. The hounds were getting both weary and footsore, but the scent put heart into them and away they streamed. They followed it across a sage-brush flat, and then worked along under the base of a line of cliffs—cougar being particularly apt thus to travel at the foot of cliffs. The pack kept well together, and it was pleasant, as we cantered over the snowy plain beside them, to listen to their baying, echoed back from the cliffs above. Then they worked over the hill and we spurred ahead and turned to the left, up the same gorge or valley in which we had killed the cougar the day before. The hounds followed the trail straight to the cliff-shoulder where the day before the pack had been puzzled until Boxer struck the fresh scent. Here they seemed to be completely at fault, circling everywhere, and at one time following their track of yesterday over to the pinyon-tree up which the cougar had first gone.

We made our way up the ravine to the head of the plateau, and then, turning, came back along the ridge until we reached the top of the shoulder where the dogs had been; but when we got there they had disappeared. It did not seem likely that the cougar had crossed the ravine behind us—although as a matter of fact this was exactly what had happened—and we did not know what to make of the affair.

We could barely hear the hounds; they had followed their back trail of the preceding day, toward the place where we had first come across the tracks of the cougar we had already killed. We were utterly puzzled, even Goff being completely at fault, and we finally became afraid that the track which the pack had been running was one which, instead of having been made during the night, had been there the previous morning, and had been made by the dead cougar. This meant, of course, that we had passed it without noticing it, both going and coming, on the previous day, and knowing Goff’s eye for a track I could not believe this. He, however, thought we might have confused it with some of the big wolf tracks, of which a number had crossed our path. After some hesitation, he said that at any rate we could find out the truth by getting back into the flat and galloping around to where we had begun our hunt the day before; because if the dogs really had a fresh cougar before them he must have so short a start that they were certain to tree him by the time they got across the ridge crest. Accordingly we scrambled down the precipitous mountain-side, galloped along the flat around the end of the ridge and drew rein at about the place where we had first come across the cougar trail on the previous day. Not a dog was to be heard anywhere, and Goff’s belief that the pack was simply running a back track became a certainty both in his mind and mine, when Jim suddenly joined us, evidently having given up the chase. We came to the conclusion that Jim, being wiser than the other dogs, had discovered his mistake while they had not; “he just naturally quit,” said Goff.

After some little work we found where the pack had crossed the broad flat valley into a mass of very rough broken country, the same in which I had shot my first big male by moonlight. Cantering and scrambling through this stretch of cliffs and valleys, we began to hear the dogs, and at first were puzzled because once or twice it seemed as though they were barking treed or had something at bay; always, however, as we came nearer we could again hear them running a trail, and when we finally got up tolerably close we found that they were all scattered out. Boxer was far behind, and Nellie, whose feet had become sore, was soberly accompanying him, no longer giving tongue. The others were separated one from the other, and we finally made out Tree’em all by himself, and not very far away. In vain Goff called and blew his horn; Tree’em disappeared up a high hillside, and with muttered comments on his stupidity we galloped our horses along the valley around the foot of the hill, hoping to intercept him. No sooner had we come to the other side, however, than we heard Tree’em evidently barking treed. We looked at one another, wondering whether he had come across a bobcat, or whether it had really been a fresh cougar trail after all.

Leaving our horses we scrambled up the canyon until we got in sight of a large pinyon on the hillside, underneath which Tree’em was standing, with his preposterous tail arched like a pump-handle, as he gazed solemnly up in the tree, now and then uttering a bark at a huge cougar, which by this time we could distinctly make out standing in the branches. Turk and Queen had already left us and were running hard to join Tree’em, and in another minute or two all of the hounds, except the belated Boxer and Nellie, had also come up. The cougar having now recovered his wind, jumped down and cantered off. He had been running for three hours before the dogs and evidently had been overtaken again and again, but had either refused to tree, or if he did tree had soon come down and continued his flight, the hounds not venturing to meddle with him, and he paying little heed to them. It was a different matter, however, with Turk and Queen along. He went up the hill and came to bay on the top of the cliffs, where we could see him against the sky-line. The hounds surrounded him, but neither they nor Turk came to close quarters. Queen, however, as soon as she arrived rushed straight in, and the cougar knocked her a dozen feet off. Turk tried to seize him as soon as Queen had made her rush; the cougar broke bay, and they all disappeared over the hill-top, while we hurried after them. A quarter of a mile beyond, on the steep hillside, they again had him up a pinyon-tree. I approached as cautiously as possible so as not to alarm him. He stood in such an awkward position that I could not get a fair shot at the heart, but the bullet broke his back, and the dogs seized him as he struck the ground. There was still any amount of fight in him, and I ran in as fast as possible, jumping and slipping over the rocks and the bushes as the cougar and dogs rolled and slid down the steep mountain-side—for, of course, every minute’s delay meant the chance of a dog being killed or crippled. It was a day of misfortunes for Jim, who was knocked completely out of the fight by a single blow. The cougar was too big for the dogs to master, even crippled as he was; but when I came up close Turk ran in and got the great beast by one ear, stretching out the cougar’s head, while he kept his own forelegs tucked way back so that the cougar could not get hold of them. This gave me my chance and I drove the knife home, leaping back before the creature could get round at me. Boxer did not come up for half an hour, working out every inch of the trail for himself, and croaking away at short intervals, while Nellie trotted calmly beside him. Even when he saw us skinning the cougar he would not hurry nor take a short cut, but followed the scent to where the cougar had gone up the tree, and from the tree down to where we were; then he meditatively bit the carcass, strolled off, and lay down, satisfied.

It was a very large cougar, fat and heavy, and the men at the ranch believed it was the same one which had at intervals haunted the place for two or three years, killing on one occasion a milch cow, on another a steer, and on yet another a big work horse. Goff stated that he had on two or three occasions killed cougars that were quite as long, and he believed even an inch or two longer, but that he had never seen one as large or as heavy. Its weight was 227 pounds, and as it lay stretched out it looked like a small African lioness. It would be impossible to wish a better ending to a hunt.

The next day Goff and I cantered thirty miles into Meeker, and my holiday was over.

CHAPTER II
A COLORADO BEAR HUNT

In mid-April, nineteen hundred and five, our party, consisting of Philip B. Stewart, of Colorado Springs, and Dr. Alexander Lambert, of New York, in addition to myself, left Newcastle, Col., for a bear hunt. As guides and hunters we had John Goff and Jake Borah, than whom there are no better men at their work of hunting bear in the mountains with hounds. Each brought his own dogs; all told, there were twenty-six hounds, and four half-blood terriers to help worry the bear when at bay. We travelled in comfort, with a big pack-train, spare horses for each of us, and a cook, packers, and horse-wranglers. I carried one of the new model Springfield military rifles, a 30–40, with a soft-nosed bullet—a very accurate and hard-hitting gun.

STARTING FOR CAMP
From a stereograph, copyright, 1905, by Underwood and Underwood

This first day we rode about twenty miles to where camp was pitched on the upper waters of East Divide Creek. It was a picturesque spot. At this altitude it was still late winter and the snow lay in drifts, even in the creek bottom, while the stream itself was not yet clear from ice. The tents were pitched in a grove of leafless aspens and great spruces, beside the rushing, ice-rimmed brook. The cook tent, with its stove, was an attractive place on the cool mornings and in stormy weather. Fry, the cook, a most competent man, had rigged up a table, and we had folding camp-chairs—luxuries utterly unknown to my former camping trips. Each day we breakfasted early and dined ten or twelve hours later, on returning from the day’s hunt; and as we carried no lunch, the two meals were enjoyed with ravenous pleasure by the entire company. The horses were stout, tough, shaggy beasts, of wonderful staying power, and able to climb like cats. The country was very steep and rugged; the mountain-sides were greasy and slippery from the melting snow, while the snow bucking through the deep drifts on their tops and on the north sides was exhausting. Only sure-footed animals could avoid serious tumbles, and only animals of great endurance could have lasted through the work. Both Johnny Goff and his partner, Brick Wells, who often accompanied us on the hunts, were frequently mounted on animals of uncertain temper, with a tendency to buck on insufficient provocation; but they rode them with entire indifference up and down any incline. One of the riders, “Al,” a very good-tempered man, a tireless worker, had as one of his horses a queer, big-headed dun beast, with a black stripe down its back and traces of zebra-like bands on the backs of his front legs. He was an atavistic animal, looking much as the horses must have looked which an age or two ago lived in this very locality and were preyed on by sabre-toothed tigers, hyenadons, and other strange and terrible beasts of a long-vanished era. Lambert remarked to him: “Al, you ought to call that horse of yours ‘Fossil’; he is a hundred thousand years old.” To which Al, with immovable face, replied: “Gee! and that man sold him to me for a seven-year-old! I’ll have the law on him!”

The hounds were most interesting, and showed all the variations of character and temper to be expected in such a pack; a pack in which performance counted for everything and pedigree for nothing. One of the best hounds was half fox terrier. Three of Johnny’s had been with us four years before, when he and I hunted cougars together; these three being Jim, now an old dog, who dropped behind in a hard run, but still excellent on a cold trail; Tree’em, who, like Jim, had grown aged, but was very sure; and Bruno, who had become one of the best of all the pack on a hot trail, but who was apt to overrun it if it became at all difficult and cold. The biggest dog of the pack, a very powerful animal, was Badge, who was half foxhound and half what Johnny called Siberian bloodhound—I suppose a Great Dane or Ulm dog. His full brother Bill came next to him. There was a Rowdy in Jake’s pack and another Rowdy in Johnny’s, and each got badly hurt before the hunt was through. Jake’s Rowdy, as soon as an animal was killed, became very cross and wished to attack any dog that came near. One of Jake’s best hounds was old Bruise, a very sure, although not a particularly fast dog. All the members of the pack held the usual wild-beast attitude toward one another. They joined together for the chase and the fight, but once the quarry was killed, their relations among themselves became those of active hostility or selfish indifference. At feeding time each took whatever his strength permitted, and each paid abject deference to whichever animal was his known superior in prowess. Some of the younger dogs would now and then run deer or coyote. But the older dogs paid heed only to bear and bobcat; and the pack, as a body, discriminated sharply between the hounds they could trust and those which would go off on a wrong trail. The four terriers included a heavy, liver-colored half-breed bulldog, a preposterous animal who looked as if his ancestry had included a toadfish. He was a terrible fighter, but his unvarying attitude toward mankind was one of effusive and rather foolish affection. In a fight he could whip any of the hounds save Badge, and he was far more willing than Badge to accept punishment. There was also a funny little black and tan, named Skip, a most friendly little fellow, especially fond of riding in front or behind the saddle of any one of us who would take him up, although perfectly able to travel forty miles a day on his own sturdy legs if he had to, and then to join in the worry of the quarry when once it had been shot. Porcupines abounded in the woods, and one or two of the terriers and half a dozen of the hounds positively refused to learn any wisdom, invariably attacking each porcupine they found; the result being that we had to spend many minutes in removing the quills from their mouths, eyes, etc. A white bull-terrier would come in from such a combat with his nose literally looking like a glorified pincushion, and many of the spines we had to take out with nippers. The terriers never ran with the hounds, but stayed behind with the horses until they heard the hounds barking “bayed” or “treed,” when they forthwith tore toward them. Skip adopted me as his special master, rode with me whenever I would let him, and slept on the foot of my bed at night, growling defiance at anything that came near. I grew attached to the friendly, bright little fellow, and at the end of the hunt took him home with me as a playmate for the children.

It was a great, wild country. In the creek bottoms there were a good many ranches; but we only occasionally passed by these, on our way to our hunting-grounds in the wilderness along the edge of the snow-line. The mountains crowded close together in chain, peak, and tableland; all the higher ones were wrapped in an unrent shroud of snow. We saw a good many deer, and fresh sign of elk, but no elk themselves, although we were informed that bands were to be found in the high spruce timber where the snows were so deep that it would have been impossible to go on horseback, while going on foot would have been inconceivably fatiguing. The country was open. The high peaks were bare of trees. Cottonwoods, and occasionally dwarfed birch or maple and willows, fringed the streams; aspens grew in groves higher up. There were pinyons and cedars on the slopes of the foothills; spruce clustered here and there in the cooler ravines and valleys and high up the mountains. The dense oak brush and thick-growing cedars were hard on our clothes, and sometimes on our bodies.

Bear and cougars had once been very plentiful throughout this region, but during the last three or four years the cougars have greatly diminished in numbers throughout northern Colorado, and the bears have diminished also, although not to the same extent. The great grizzlies which were once fairly plentiful here are now very rare, as they are in most places in the United States. There remain plenty of the black and brown bears, which are simply individual color phases of the same species.

Bears are interesting creatures and their habits are always worth watching. When I used to hunt grizzlies my experience tended to make me lay special emphasis on their variation in temper. There are savage and cowardly bears, just as there are big and little ones; and sometimes these variations are very marked among bears of the same district, and at other times all the bears of one district will seem to have a common code of behavior which differs utterly from that of the bears of another district. Readers of Lewis and Clark do not need to be reminded of the great difference they found in ferocity between the bears of the upper Missouri and the bears of the Columbia River country; and those who have lived in the upper Missouri country nowadays know how widely the bears that still remain have altered in character from what they were as recently as the middle of the last century.

This variability has been shown in the bears which I have stumbled upon at close quarters. On but one occasion was I ever regularly charged by a grizzly. To this animal I had given a mortal wound, and without any effort at retaliation he bolted into a thicket of what, in my hurry, I thought was laurel (it being composed in reality, I suppose, of thick-growing berry bushes). On my following him and giving him a second wound, he charged very determinedly, taking two more bullets without flinching. I just escaped the charge by jumping to one side, and he died almost immediately after striking at me as he rushed by. This bear charged with his mouth open, but made very little noise after the growl or roar with which he greeted my second bullet. I mention the fact of his having kept his mouth open, because one or two of my friends who have been charged have informed me that in their cases they particularly noticed that the bear charged with his mouth shut. Perhaps the fact that my bear was shot through the lungs may account for the difference, or it may simply be another example of individual variation.

On another occasion, in a windfall, I got up within eight or ten feet of a grizzly, which simply bolted off, paying no heed to a hurried shot which I delivered as I poised unsteadily on the swaying top of an overthrown dead pine. On yet another occasion, when I roused a big bear from his sleep, he at the first moment seemed to pay little or no heed to me, and then turned toward me in a leisurely way, the only sign of hostility he betrayed being to ruffle up the hair on his shoulders and the back of his neck. I hit him square between the eyes, and he dropped like a pole-axed steer.

AT DINNER
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

On another occasion I got up quite close to and mortally wounded a bear, which ran off without uttering a sound until it fell dead; but another of these grizzlies, which I shot from ambush, kept squalling and yelling every time I hit him, making a great rumpus. On one occasion one of my cow hands and myself were able to run down on foot a she grizzly bear and her cub, which had obtained a long start of us, simply because of the foolish conduct of the mother. The cub—or more properly the yearling, for it was a cub of the second year—ran on far ahead, and would have escaped if the old she had not continually stopped and sat up on her hind legs to look back at us. I think she did this partly from curiosity, but partly also from bad temper, for once or twice she grinned and roared at us. The upshot of it was that I got within range and put a bullet in the old she, who afterward charged my companion and was killed; and we also got the yearling.

One young grizzly which I killed many years ago dropped to the first bullet, which entered its stomach. It then let myself and my companion approach closely, looking up at us with alert curiosity, but making no effort to escape. It was really not crippled at all, but we thought from its actions that its back was broken, and my companion advanced to kill it with his pistol. The pistol, however, did not inflict a mortal wound, and the only effect was to make the young bear jump to its feet as if unhurt, and race off at full speed through the timber; for though not full-grown it was beyond cubhood, being probably about eighteen months old. By desperate running I succeeded in getting another shot, and more by luck than by anything else knocked it over, this time permanently.

Black bear are not, under normal conditions, formidable brutes. If they do charge and get home they may maul a man severely, and there are a number of instances on record in which they have killed men. Ordinarily, however, a black bear will not charge home, though he may bluster a good deal. I once shot one very close up which made a most lamentable outcry, and seemed to lose its head, its efforts to escape resulting in its bouncing about among the trees with such heedless hurry that I was easily able to kill it. Another black bear, which I also shot at close quarters, came straight for my companions and myself, and almost ran over the white hunter who was with me. This bear made no sound whatever when I first hit it, and I do not think it was charging. I believe it was simply dazed, and by accident ran the wrong way, and so almost came into collision with us. However, when it found itself face to face with the white hunter, and only four or five feet away, it prepared for hostilities, and I think would have mauled him if I had not brained it with another bullet; for I was myself standing but six feet or so to one side of it. None of the bears shot on this Colorado trip made a sound when hit; they all died silently, like so many wolves.

Ordinarily, my experience has been that bears were not flurried when I suddenly came upon them. They impressed me as if they were always keeping in mind the place toward which they wished to retreat in the event of danger, and for this place, which was invariably a piece of rough ground or dense timber, they made off with all possible speed, not seeming to lose their heads.

THE PACK STRIKES THE FRESH BEAR TRAIL
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

Frequently I have been able to watch bears for some time while myself unobserved. With other game I have very often done this even when within close range, not wishing to kill creatures needlessly, or without a good object; but with bears, my experience has been that chances to secure them come so seldom as to make it very distinctly worth while improving any that do come, and I have not spent much time watching any bear unless he was in a place where I could not get at him, or else was so close at hand that I was not afraid of his getting away. On one occasion the bear was hard at work digging up squirrel or gopher caches on the side of a pine-clad hill; while at this work he looked rather like a big badger. On two other occasions the bear was fussing around a carcass preparatory to burying it. On these occasions I was very close, and it was extremely interesting to note the grotesque, half-human movements, and giant, awkward strength of the great beast. He would twist the carcass around with the utmost ease, sometimes taking it in his teeth and dragging it, at other times grasping it in his forepaws and half lifting, half shoving it. Once the bear lost his grip and rolled over during the course of some movement, and this made him angry, and he struck the carcass a savage whack, just as a pettish child will strike a table against which it has knocked itself. At another time I watched a black bear some distance off getting his breakfast under stumps and stones. He was very active, turning the stone or log over, and then thrusting his muzzle into the empty space to gobble up the small creatures below before they recovered from their surprise and the sudden inflow of light. From under one log he put a chipmunk, and danced hither and thither with even more agility than awkwardness, slapping at the chipmunk with his paw while it zigzagged about, until finally he scooped it into his mouth.

All this was in the old days when I was still-hunting, with only the rifle. This Colorado trip was the first on which I hunted bears with hounds. If we had run across a grizzly there would doubtless have been a chance to show some prowess, at least in the way of hard riding. But the black and brown bears cannot, save under exceptional circumstances, escape from such a pack as we had with us; and the real merit of the chase was confined to the hounds and to Jake and Johnny for their skill in handling them. Perhaps I should add the horses, for their extraordinary endurance and surefootedness. As for the rest of us, we needed to do little more than to sit ten or twelve hours in the saddle and occasionally lead the horses up or down the most precipitous and cliff-like of the mountain-sides. But it was great fun, nevertheless, and usually a chase lasted long enough to be interesting.

The first day after reaching camp we rode for eleven hours over a very difficult country, but without getting above the snow-line. Finally the dogs got on the fresh trail of a bobcat, and away they went. A bobcat will often give a good run, much better, on the average, than a cougar; and this one puzzled the dogs not a little at first. It scrambled out of one deep valley, crossing and recrossing the rock ledges where its scent was hard to follow; then plunged into another valley. Meanwhile we had ridden up on the high mountain spur between the two valleys, and after scrambling and galloping to and fro as the cry veered from point to point when the dogs changed directions, we saw them cross into the second valley. Here again they took a good deal of time to puzzle out the trail, and became somewhat scattered. We had dismounted and were standing by the horses’ heads, listening to the baying and trying to decide which way we should go, when Stewart suddenly pointed us out a bear. It was on the other side of the valley from us, and perhaps half a mile away, galloping down hill, with two of the hounds after it, and in the sunlight its fur looked glossy black. In a minute or two it passed out of sight in the thick-growing timber at the bottom of the valley; and as we afterward found, the two hounds, getting momentarily thrown out, and hearing the others still baying on the cat trail, joined the latter. Jake started off to go around the head of the valley, while the rest of us plunged down into it. We found from the track that the bear had gone up the valley, and Jake found where he had come out on the high divide, and then turned and retraced his steps. But the hounds were evidently all after the cat. There was nothing for us to do but follow them. Sometimes riding, sometimes leading the horses, we went up the steep hillside, and as soon as we reached the crest heard the hounds barking treed. Shorty and Skip, who always trotted after the horses while the hounds were in full cry on a trail, recognized the change of note immediately, and tore off in the direction of the bay, while we followed as best we could, hoping to get there in time for Stewart and Lambert to take photographs of the lynx in a tree. But we were too late. Both Shorty and Skip could climb trees, and although Skip was too light to tackle a bobcat by himself, Shorty, a heavy, formidable dog, of unflinching courage and great physical strength, was altogether too much for any bobcat. When we reached the place we found the bobcat in the top of a pinyon, and Shorty steadily working his way up through the branches and very near the quarry. Evidently the bobcat felt that the situation needed the taking of desperate chances, and just before Shorty reached it out it jumped, Shorty yelling with excitement as he plunged down through the branches after it. But the cat did not jump far enough. One of the hounds seized it by the hind leg and in another second everything was over.

Shorty was always the first of the pack to attack dangerous game, and in attacking bear or cougar even Badge was much less reckless and more wary. In consequence, Shorty was seamed over with scars; most of them from bobcats, but one or two from cougars. He could speedily kill a bobcat single-handed; for these small lynxes are not really formidable fighters, although they will lacerate a dog quite severely. Shorty found a badger a much more difficult antagonist than a bobcat. A bobcat in a hole makes a hard fight, however. On this hunt we once got a bobcat under a big rock, and Jake’s Rowdy in trying to reach it got so badly mauled that he had to join the invalid class for several days.

The bobcat we killed this first day was a male, weighing twenty-five pounds. It was too late to try after the bear, especially as we had only ten or a dozen dogs out, while the bear’s tracks showed it to be a big one; and we rode back to camp.

Next morning we rode off early, taking with us all twenty-six hounds and the four terriers. We wished first to find whether the bear had gone out of the country in which we had seen him, and so rode up a valley and then scrambled laboriously up the mountain-side to the top of the snow-covered divide. Here the snow was three feet deep in places, and the horses plunged and floundered as we worked our way in single file through the drifts. But it had frozen hard the previous night, so that a bear could walk on the crust and leave very little sign. In consequence we came near passing over the place where the animal we were after had actually crossed out of the canyon-like ravine in which we had seen him and gone over the divide into another set of valleys. The trail was so faint that it puzzled us, as we could not be certain how fresh it was, and until this point could be cleared up we tried to keep the hounds from following it. Old Jim, however, slipped off to one side and speedily satisfied himself that the trail was fresh. Along it he went, giving tongue, and the other dogs were maddened by the sound, while Jim, under such circumstances, paid no heed whatever to any effort to make him come back. Accordingly, the other hounds were slipped after him, and down they ran into the valley, while we slid, floundered, and scrambled along the ridge crest parallel to them, until a couple of miles farther on we worked our way down to some great slopes covered with dwarf scrub-oak. At the edge of these slopes, where they fell off in abrupt descent to the stream at the bottom of the valley, we halted. Opposite us was a high and very rugged mountain-side covered with a growth of pinyon—never a close-growing tree—its precipitous flanks broken by ledges and scored by gullies and ravines. It was hard to follow the scent across such a mountain-side, and the dogs speedily became much scattered. We could hear them plainly, and now and then could see them, looking like ants as they ran up and down hill and along the ledges. Finally we heard some of them barking bayed. The volume of sound increased steadily as the straggling dogs joined those which had first reached the hunted animal. At about this time, to our astonishment, Badge, usually a stanch fighter, rejoined us, followed by one or two other hounds, who seemed to have had enough of the matter. Immediately afterward we saw the bear, half-way up the opposite mountain-side. The hounds were all around him, and occasionally bit at his hind quarters; but he had evidently no intention of climbing a tree. When we first saw him he was sitting up on a point of rock surrounded by the pack, his black fur showing to fine advantage. Then he moved off, threatening the dogs, and making what in Mississippi is called a walking bay. He was a sullen, powerful beast, and his leisurely gait showed how little he feared the pack, and how confident he was in his own burly strength. By this time the dogs had been after him for a couple of hours, and as there was no water on the mountain-side we feared they might be getting exhausted, and rode toward them as rapidly as we could. It was a hard climb up to where they were, and we had to lead the horses. Just as we came in sight of him, across a deep gully which ran down the sheer mountain-side, he broke bay and started off, threatening the foremost of the pack as they dared to approach him. They were all around him, and for a minute I could not fire; then as he passed under a pinyon I got a clear view of his great round stern and pulled trigger. The bullet broke both his hips, and he rolled down hill, the hounds yelling with excitement as they closed in on him. He could still play havoc with the pack, and there was need to kill him at once. I leaped and slid down my side of the gully as he rolled down his; at the bottom he stopped and raised himself on his fore quarters; and with another bullet I broke his back between the shoulders.

DEATH OF THE BIG BEAR
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

Immediately all the dogs began to worry the carcass, while their savage baying echoed so loudly in the narrow, steep gully that we could with difficulty hear one another speak. It was a wild scene to look upon, as we scrambled down to where the dead bear lay on his back between the rocks. He did not die wholly unavenged, for he had killed one of the terriers and six other dogs were more or less injured. The chase of the bear is grim work for the pack. Jim, usually a very wary fighter, had a couple of deep holes in his thigh; but the most mishandled of the wounded dogs was Shorty. With his usual dauntless courage he had gone straight at the bear’s head. Being such a heavy, powerful animal, I think if he had been backed up he could have held the bear’s head down, and prevented the beast from doing much injury. As it was, the bear bit through the side of Shorty’s head, and bit him in the shoulder, and again in the hip, inflicting very bad wounds. Once the fight was over Shorty lay down on the hillside, unable to move. When we started home we put him beside a little brook, and left a piece of bear meat by him, as it was obvious we could not get him to camp that day. Next day one of the boys went back with a pack-horse to take him in; but half-way out met him struggling toward camp, and returned. Late in the afternoon Shorty turned up while we were at dinner, and staggered toward us, wagging his tail with enthusiastic delight at seeing his friends. We fed him until he could not hold another mouthful; then he curled up in a dry corner of the cook tent and slept for forty-eight hours; and two or three days afterward was able once more to go hunting.

The bear was a big male, weighing three hundred and thirty pounds. On examination at close quarters, his fur, which was in fine condition, was not as black as it had seemed when seen afar off, the roots of the hairs being brown. There was nothing whatever in his stomach. Evidently he had not yet begun to eat, and had been but a short while out of his hole. Bear feed very little when they first come out of their dens, sometimes beginning on grass, sometimes on buds. Occasionally they will feed at carcasses and try to kill animals within a week or two after they have left winter quarters, but this is rare, and as a usual thing for the first few weeks after they have come out they feed much as a deer would. Although not hog fat, as would probably have been the case in the fall, this bear was in good condition. In the fall, however, he would doubtless have weighed over four hundred pounds. The three old females we got on this trip weighed one hundred and eighty, one hundred and seventy-five, and one hundred and thirty-five pounds apiece. The yearlings weighed from thirty-one to forty pounds. The only other black bears I ever weighed all belonged to the sub-species Luteolus, and were killed on the Little Sunflower River, in Mississippi, in the late fall of nineteen hundred and two. A big old male, in poor condition, weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds, and two very fat females weighed two hundred and twenty and two hundred and thirty-five pounds respectively.

The next few days we spent in hunting perseveringly, but unsuccessfully. Each day we were from six to twelve hours in the saddle, climbing with weary toil up the mountains and slipping and scrambling down them. On the tops and on the north slopes there was much snow, so that we had to pick our trails carefully, and even thus the horses often floundered belly-deep as we worked along in single file; the men on the horses which were best at snow bucking took turns in breaking the trail. In the worst places we had to dismount and lead the horses, often over such bad ground that nothing less sure-footed than the tough mountain ponies could even have kept their legs. The weather was cold, with occasional sharp flurries of snow, and once a regular snow-storm. We found the tracks of one or two bears, but in each case several days old, and it was evident either that the bears had gone back to their dens, finding the season so late, or else that they were lying quiet in sheltered places, and travelling as little as possible. One day, after a long run of certainly five or six miles through very difficult country, the dogs treed a bobcat in a big cedar. It had run so far that it was badly out of breath. Stewart climbed the tree and took several photographs of it, pushing the camera up to within about four feet of where the cat sat. Lambert obtained photographs of both Stewart and the cat. Shorty was at this time still an invalid from his encounter with the bear, but Skip worked his way thirty feet up the tree in his effort to get at the bobcat. Lambert shot the latter with his revolver, the bobcat dying stuck in the branches; and he then had to climb the tree to get both the bobcat and Skip, as the latter was at such a height that we thought he would hurt himself if he fell. Another bobcat when treed sealed his own fate by stepping on a dead branch and falling right into the jaws of the pack.

At this camp, as everywhere, the tiny four-striped chipmunks were plentiful and tame; they are cheerful, attractive little animals. We also saw white-footed mice and a big meadow mouse around camp; and we found a young brushy-tailed pack-rat. The snowshoe rabbits were still white on the mountains, but in the lower valleys they had changed to the summer pelage. On the mountains we occasionally saw woodchucks and rock squirrels of two kinds, a large and a small—Spermophilus grammurus and armatus. The noisy, cheerful pine squirrels were common where the woods were thick. There were eagles and ravens in the mountains, and once we saw sandhill cranes soaring far above the highest peaks. The long-crested jays came familiarly around camp, but on this occasion we only saw the whiskey jacks, Clark’s nutcrackers and magpies, while off in the mountains. Among the pinyons, we several times came across straggling flocks of the queer pinyon jays or blue crows, with their unmistakable calls and almost blackbird-like habits. There were hawks of several species, and blue grouse, while the smaller birds included flickers, robins, and the beautiful mountain bluebirds. Juncos and mountain chickadees were plentiful, and the ruby-crowned kinglets were singing with astonishing power for such tiny birds. We came on two nests of the red-tailed hawk; the birds were brooding, and seemed tame and unwary.

STEWART AND THE BOBCAT
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

After a week of this we came to the conclusion that the snow was too deep and the weather too cold for us to expect to get any more bear in the immediate neighborhood, and accordingly shifted camp to where Clear Creek joins West Divide Creek.

The first day’s hunt from the new camp was successful. We were absent about eleven hours and rode some forty miles. The day included four hours’ steady snow bucking, for the bear, as soon as they got the chance, went through the thick timber where the snow lay deepest. Some two hours after leaving camp we found the old tracks of a she and a yearling, but it took us a much longer time before we finally struck the fresh trail made late the previous night or early in the morning. It was Jake who first found this fresh track, while Johnny with the pack was a couple of miles away, slowly but surely puzzling out the cold trail and keeping the dogs up to their work. As soon as Johnny came up we put all the hounds on the tracks, and away they went, through and over the snow, yelling their eager delight. Meanwhile we had fixed our saddles and were ready for what lay ahead. It was wholly impossible to ride at the tail of the pack, but we did our best to keep within sound of the baying. Finally, after much hard work and much point riding through snow, slush, and deep mud, on the level, and along, up, and down sheer slopes, we heard the dogs barking treed in the middle of a great grove of aspens high up the mountain-side. The snow was too deep for the horses, and leaving them, we trudged heavily up on foot. The yearling was in the top of a tall aspen. Lambert shot it with his rifle and we then put the dogs on the trail of the old she. Some of the young ones did not know what to make of this, evidently feeling that the tracks must be those of the bear that they had already killed; but the veterans were in full cry at once. We scrambled after them up the steep mountain, and then downward along ridges and spurs, getting all the clear ground we could. Finally we had to take to the snow, and floundered and slid through the drifts until we were in the valley. Most of the time the dogs were within hearing, giving tongue as they followed the trail. Finally a total change in the note showed that they were barking treed; and as rapidly as possible we made our way toward the sound. Again we found ourselves unable to bring the horses up to where the bear had treed, and scrambled thither on foot through the deep snow.

THE PACK BAYING THE BEAR
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

The bear was some thirty or forty feet up a tall spruce; it was a big she, with a glossy black-brown coat. I was afraid that at our approach she might come down; but she had been running hard for some four hours, had been pressed close, and evidently had not the slightest idea of putting herself of her own free will within the reach of the pack, which was now frantically baying at the foot of the tree. I shot her through the heart. As the bullet struck she climbed up through the branches with great agility for six or eight feet; then her muscles relaxed, and down she came with a thud, nearly burying herself in the snow. Little Skip was one of the first dogs to seize her as she came down; and in another moment he literally disappeared under the hounds as they piled on the bear. As soon as possible we got off the skin and pushed campward at a good gait, for we were a long way off. Just at nightfall we came out on a bluff from which we could overlook the rushing, swirling brown torrent, on the farther bank of which the tents were pitched.

The stomach of this bear contained nothing but buds. Like the other shes killed on this trip, she was accompanied by her yearling young, but had no newly born cub; sometimes bear breed only every other year, but I have found the mother accompanied not only by her cub but by her young of the year before. The yearling also had nothing but buds in its stomach. When its skin was taken off, Stewart looked at it, shook his head, and turning to Lambert said solemnly, “Alex., that skin isn’t big enough to use for anything but a doily.” From that time until the end of the hunt the yearlings were only known as “doily bears.”

Next morning we again went out, and this time for twelve hours steadily, in the saddle, and now and then on foot. Most of the time we were in snow, and it was extraordinary that the horses could get through it at all, especially in working up the steep mountain-sides. But until it got so deep that they actually floundered—that is, so long as they could get their legs down to the bottom—I found that they could travel much faster than I could. On this day some twenty good-natured, hard-riding young fellows from the ranches within a radius of a dozen miles had joined our party to “see the President kill a bear.” They were a cheerful and eagerly friendly crowd, as hardy as so many young moose, and utterly fearless horsemen; one of them rode his wild, nervous horse bareback, because it had bucked so when he tried to put the saddle on it that morning that he feared he would get left behind, and so abandoned the saddle outright. Whenever they had a chance they all rode at headlong speed, paying no heed to the slope of the mountain-side or the character of the ground. In the deep snow they did me a real service, for of course they had to ride their horses single file through the drifts, and by the time my turn came we had a good trail.

A DOILY BEAR
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

After a good deal of beating to and fro, we found where an old she-bear with two yearlings had crossed a hill during the night and put the hounds on their tracks. Johnny and Jake, with one or two of the cowboys, followed the hounds over the exceedingly difficult hillside where the trail led; or rather, they tried to follow them, for the hounds speedily got clear away, as there were many places where they could run on the crust of the snow, in which the horses wallowed almost helpless. The rest of us went down to the valley, where the snow was light and the going easier. The bear had travelled hither and thither through the woods on the sidehill, and the dogs became scattered. Moreover, they jumped several deer, and four or five of the young dogs took after one of the latter. Finally, however, the rest of the pack put up the three bears. We had an interesting glimpse of the chase as the bears quartered up across an open spot of the hillside. The hounds were but a short distance behind them, strung out in a long string, the more powerful, those which could do best in the snow bucking, taking the lead. We pushed up the mountain-side after them, horse after horse getting down in the snow, and speedily heard the redoubled clamor which told us that something had been treed. It was half an hour before we could make our way to the tree, a spruce, in which the two yearlings had taken refuge, while around the bottom the entire pack was gathered, crazy with excitement. We could not take the yearlings alive, both because we lacked the means of carrying them, and because we were anxious to get after the old bear. We could not leave them where they were, because it would have been well-nigh impossible to get the dogs away, and because, even if we had succeeded in getting them away, they would not have run any other trail as long as they knew the yearlings were in the tree. It was therefore out of the question to leave them unharmed, as we should have been glad to do, and Lambert killed them both with his revolver; the one that was first hit immediately biting its brother. The ranchmen took them home to eat.

The hounds were immediately put on the trail of the old one and disappeared over the snow. In a few minutes we followed. It was heavy work getting up the mountain-side through the drifts, but once on top we made our way down a nearly bare spur, and then turned to the right, scrambled a couple of miles along a slippery sidehill, and halted. Below us lay a great valley, on the farther side of which a spruce forest stretched up toward the treeless peaks. Snow covered even the bottom of the valley, and lay deep and solid in the spruce forest on the mountain-side. The hounds were in full cry, evidently on a hot trail, and we caught glimpses of them far on the opposite side of the valley, crossing little open glades in the spruce timber. If the crust was hard they scattered out. Where it was at all soft they ran in single file. We worked our way down toward them, and on reaching the bottom of the valley, went up it as fast as the snow would allow. Finally we heard the pack again barking treed and started toward them. They had treed the bear far up the mountain-side in the thick spruce timber, and a short experiment showed us that the horses could not possibly get through the snow. Accordingly, off we jumped and went toward the sound on foot, all the young ranchmen and cowboys rushing ahead, and thereby again making me an easy trail. On the way to the tree the rider of the bareback horse pounced on a snowshoe rabbit which was crouched under a bush and caught it with his hands. It was half an hour before we reached the tree, a big spruce, up which the bear had gone to a height of some forty feet. I broke her neck with a single bullet. She was smaller than the one I had shot the day before, but full-grown. In her stomach, as in those of the two yearlings, there were buds of rose-bushes and quaking aspens. One yearling had also swallowed a mouse. It was a long ride to camp, and darkness had fallen by the time we caught the gleam from the lighted tents, across the dark stream.

With neither of these last two bear had there been any call for prowess; my part was merely to kill the bear dead at the first shot, for the sake of the pack. But the days were very enjoyable, nevertheless. It was good fun to be twelve hours in the saddle in such wild and beautiful country, to look at and listen to the hounds as they worked, and finally to see the bear treed and looking down at the maddened pack baying beneath.

For the next two or three days I was kept in camp by a touch of Cuban fever. On one of these days Lambert enjoyed the longest hunt we had on the trip, after an old she-bear and three yearlings. The yearlings treed one by one, each of course necessitating a stoppage, and it was seven in the evening before the old bear at last went up a cottonwood and was shot; she was only wounded, however, and in the fight she crippled Johnny’s Rowdy before she was killed. When the hunters reached camp it was thirteen hours since they had left it. The old bear was a very light brown; the first yearling was reddish-brown, the second light yellowish-brown, the third dark black-brown, though all were evidently of the same litter.

Following this came a spell of bad weather, snow-storm and blizzard steadily succeeding one another. This lasted until my holiday was over. Some days we had to stay in camp. On other days we hunted; but there was three feet of new snow on the summits and foothills, making it difficult to get about. We saw no more bear, and, indeed, no more bear-tracks that were less than two or three weeks old.

We killed a couple of bobcats. The chase of one was marked by several incidents. We had been riding through a blizzard on the top of a plateau, and were glad to plunge down into a steep sheer-sided valley. By the time we reached the bottom there was a lull in the storm and we worked our way with considerable difficulty through the snow, down timber, and lava rock, toward Divide Creek. After a while the valley widened a little, spruce and aspens fringing the stream at the bottom while the sides were bare. Here we struck a fresh bobcat trail leading off up one of the mountain-sides. The hounds followed it nearly to the top, then turned and came down again, worked through the timber in the bottom, and struck out on the hillside opposite. Suddenly we saw the bobcat running ahead of them and doubling and circling. A few minutes afterward the hounds followed the trail to the creek bottom and then began to bark treed. But on reaching the point we found there was no cat in the tree, although the dogs seemed certain that there was; and Johnny and Jake speedily had them again running on the trail. After making its way for some distance through the bottom, the cat had again taken to the sidehill, and the hounds went after it hard. Again they went nearly to the top, again they streamed down to the bottom and crossed the creek. Soon afterward we saw the cat ahead of them. For the moment it threw them off the track by making a circle and galloping around close to the rearmost hounds. It then made for the creek bottom, where it climbed to the top of a tall aspen. The hounds soon picked up the trail again, and followed it full cry; but unfortunately just before they reached where it had treed they ran on to a porcupine. When we reached the foot of the aspen, in the top of which the bobcat crouched, with most of the pack baying beneath, we found the porcupine dead and half a dozen dogs with their muzzles and throats filled full of quills. Before doing anything with the cat it was necessary to take these quills out. One of the terriers, which always found porcupines an irresistible attraction, was a really extraordinary sight, so thickly were the quills studded over his face and chest. But a big hound was in even worse condition; the quills were stuck in abundance into his nose, lips, cheeks, and tongue, and in the roof of his mouth they were almost as thick as bristles in a brush. Only by use of pincers was it possible to rid these two dogs of the quills, and it was a long and bloody job. The others had suffered less.

THE BIG BEAR
From a photograph by Philip B. Stewart

The dogs seemed to have no sympathy with one another, and apparently all that the rest of the pack felt was that they were kept a long time waiting for the cat. They never stopped baying for a minute, and Shorty, as was his habit, deliberately bit great patches of bark from the aspens, to show his impatience; for the tree in which the cat stood was not one which he could climb. After attending to the porcupine dogs one of the men climbed the tree and with a stick pushed out the cat. It dropped down through the branches forty or fifty feet, but was so quick in starting and dodging that it actually rushed through the pack, crossed the stream, and, doubling and twisting, was off up the creek through the timber. It ran cunning, and in a minute or two lay down under a bush and watched the hounds as they went by, overrunning its trail. Then it took off up the hillside; but the hounds speedily picked up its track, and running in single file, were almost on it. Then the cat turned down hill, but too late, for it was overtaken within fifty yards. This ended our hunting.

One Sunday we rode down some six miles from camp to a little blue school-house and attended service. The preacher was in the habit of riding over every alternate Sunday from Rifle, a little town twenty or twenty-five miles away; and the ranchmen with their wives and children, some on horseback, some in wagons, had gathered from thirty miles round to attend the service. The crowd was so large that the exercises had to take place in the open air, and it was pleasant to look at the strong frames and rugged, weather-beaten faces of the men; while as for the women, one respected them even more than the men.

In spite of the snow-storms spring was coming; some of the trees were beginning to bud and show green, more and more flowers were in bloom, and bird life was steadily increasing. In the bushes by the streams the handsome white-crowned sparrows and green-tailed towhees were in full song, making attractive music; although the song of neither can rightly be compared in point of plaintive beauty with that of the white-throated sparrow, which, except some of the thrushes, and perhaps the winter wren, is the sweetest singer of the Northeastern forests. The spurred towhees were very plentiful; and one morning a willow-thrush sang among the willows like a veery. Both the crested jays and the Woodhouse jays came around camp. Lower down the Western meadow larks were singing beautifully, and vesper finches were abundant. Say’s flycatcher, a very attractive bird, with pretty, soft-colored plumage, continually uttering a plaintive single note, and sometimes a warbling twitter, flitted about in the neighborhood of the little log ranch houses. Gangs of blackbirds visited the corrals. I saw but one song sparrow, and curiously enough, though I think it was merely an individual peculiarity, this particular bird had a song entirely different from any I have heard from the familiar Eastern bird—always a favorite of mine.

While up in the mountains hunting, we twice came upon owls, which were rearing their families in the deserted nests of the red-tailed hawk. One was a long-eared owl, and the other a great horned owl, of the pale Western variety. Both were astonishingly tame, and we found it difficult to make them leave their nests, which were in the tops of cottonwood trees.

On the last day we rode down to where Glenwood Springs lies, hemmed in by lofty mountain chains, which are riven in sunder by sheer-sided, cliff-walled canyons. As we left ever farther behind us the wintry desolation of our high hunting-grounds we rode into full spring. The green of the valley was a delight to the eye; bird songs sounded on every side, from the fields and from the trees and bushes beside the brooks and irrigation ditches; the air was sweet with the spring-time breath of many budding things. The sarvice bushes were white with bloom, like shadblow on the Hudson; the blossoms of the Oregon grape made yellow mats on the ground. We saw the chunky Say’s ground squirrel, looking like a big chipmunk, with on each side a conspicuous white stripe edged with black. In one place we saw quite a large squirrel, grayish, with red on the lower back. I suppose it was only a pine squirrel, but it looked like one of the gray squirrels of southern Colorado. Mountain mockers and the handsome, bold Arkansaw king birds were numerous. The blacktail sage sparrow was conspicuous in the sage-brush, and high among the cliffs the white-throated swifts were soaring. There were numerous warblers, among which I could only make out the black-throated gray, Audubon’s, and McGillivray’s. In Glenwood Springs itself the purple finches, house finches, and Bullock’s orioles were in full song. Flocks of siskins passed with dipping flight. In one rapid little stream we saw a water ousel. Humming-birds—I suppose the broad-tailed—were common, and as they flew they made, intermittently and almost rhythmically, a curious metallic sound; seemingly it was done with their wings.

But the thing that interested me most in the way of bird life was something I saw in Denver. To my delight I found that the huge hotel at which we took dinner was monopolized by the pretty, musical house finches, to the exclusion of the ordinary city sparrows. The latter are all too plentiful in Denver, as in every other city, and, as always, are noisy, quarrelsome—in short, thoroughly unattractive and disreputable. The house finch, on the contrary, is attractive in looks, in song, and in ways. It was delightful to hear the males singing, often on the wing. They went right up to the top stories of the high hotel, and nested under the eaves and in the cornices. The cities of the Southwestern States are to be congratulated on having this spirited, attractive little songster as a familiar dweller around their houses and in their gardens.

CHAPTER III
WOLF-COURSING

On April eighth, nineteen hundred and five, we left the town of Frederick, Oklahoma, for a few days’ coyote coursing in the Comanche Reserve. Lieut.-Gen. S. B. M. Young, U. S. A., retired, Lieutenant Fortescue, U. S. A., formerly of my regiment, and Dr. Alexander Lambert, of New York, were with me. We were the guests of Colonel Cecil Lyon, of Texas, of Sloan Simpson, also of Texas, and formerly of my regiment, and of two old-style Texas cattlemen, Messrs. Burnett and Wagner, who had leased great stretches of wire-fenced pasture from the Comanches and Kiowas; and I cannot sufficiently express my appreciation of the kindness of these my hosts. Burnett’s brand, the Four Sixes, has been owned by him for forty years. Both of them had come to this country thirty years before, in the days of the buffalo, when all game was very plentiful and the Indians were still on the warpath. Several other ranchmen were along, including John Abernethy, of Tesca, Oklahoma, a professional wolf hunter. There were also a number of cowhands of both Burnett and Wagner; among them were two former riders for the Four Sixes, Fi Taylor and Uncle Ed Gillis, who seemed to make it their special mission to see that everything went right with me. Furthermore there was Captain McDonald of the Texas Rangers, a game and true man, whose name was one of terror to outlaws and violent criminals of all kinds; and finally there was Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief, in his youth a bitter foe of the whites, now painfully teaching his people to travel the white man’s stony road.

STARTING TOWARDS THE WOLF GROUNDS
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

We drove out some twenty miles to where camp was pitched in a bend of Deep Red Creek, which empties into the Red River of the South. Cottonwood, elm, and pecans formed a belt of timber along the creek; we had good water, the tents were pitched on short, thick grass, and everything was in perfect order. The fare was delicious. Altogether it was an ideal camp, and the days we passed there were also ideal. Cardinals and mocking-birds—the most individual and delightful of all birds in voice and manner—sang in the woods; and the beautiful, many-tinted fork-tailed fly-catchers were to be seen now and then, perched in trees or soaring in curious zigzags, chattering loudly.

In chasing the coyote only greyhounds are used, and half a dozen different sets of these had been brought to camp. Those of Wagner, the “Big D” dogs, as his cow-punchers called them, were handled by Bony Moore, who, with Tom Burnett, the son of our host Burke Burnett, took the lead in feats of daring horsemanship, even in that field of daring horsemen. Bevins had brought both greyhounds and rough-haired staghounds from his Texas ranch. So had Cecil Lyon, and though his dogs had chiefly been used in coursing the black-tailed Texas jack-rabbit, they took naturally to the coyote chases. Finally there were Abernethy’s dogs, which, together with their master, performed the feats I shall hereafter relate. Abernethy has a homestead of his own not far from Frederick, and later I was introduced to his father, an old Confederate soldier, and to his sweet and pretty wife, and their five little children. He had run away with his wife when they were nineteen and sixteen respectively; but the match had turned out a happy one. Both were particularly fond of music, including the piano, horn, and violin, and they played duets together. General Young, whom the Comanches called “War Bonnet,” went in a buggy with Burke Burnett, and as Burnett invariably followed the hounds at full speed in his buggy, and usually succeeded in seeing most of the chase, I felt that the buggy men really encountered greater hazards than anyone else. It was a thoroughly congenial company all through. The weather was good; we were in the saddle from morning until night; and our camp was in all respects all that a camp should be; so how could we help enjoying ourselves?

The coursing was done on the flats and great rolling prairies which stretched north from our camp toward the Wichita Mountains and south toward the Red River. There was a certain element of risk in the gallops, because the whole country was one huge prairie-dog town, the prairie-dogs being so numerous that the new towns and the abandoned towns were continuous with one another in every direction. Practically every run we had was through these prairie-dog towns, varied occasionally by creeks and washouts. But as we always ran scattered out, the wonderfully quick cow-ponies, brought up in this country and spending all their time among the prairie-dog towns, were able, even while running at headlong speed, to avoid the holes with a cleverness that was simply marvellous. During our hunt but one horse stepped in a hole; he turned a complete somerset, though neither he nor his rider was hurt. Stunted mesquite bushes grew here and there in the grass, and there was cactus. As always in prairie-dog towns, there were burrowing owls and rattlesnakes. We had to be on our guard that the dogs did not attack the latter. Once we thought a greyhound was certainly bitten. It was a very fast blue bitch, which seized the rattler and literally shook it to pieces. The rattler struck twice at the bitch, but so quick were the bitch’s movements that she was not hit either time, and in a second the snake was not merely dead, but in pieces. We usually killed the rattlers with either our quirts or ropes. One which I thus killed was over five feet long.

By rights there ought to have been carts in which the greyhounds could be drawn until the coyotes were sighted, but there were none, and the greyhounds simply trotted along beside the horses. All of them were fine animals, and almost all of them of recorded pedigree. Coyotes have sharp teeth and bite hard, while greyhounds have thin skins, and many of them were cut in the worries. This was due to the fact that only two or three of them seized by the throat, the others taking hold behind, which of course exposed them to retaliation. Few of them would have been of much use in stopping a big wolf. Abernethy’s hounds, however, though they could not kill a big wolf, would stop it, permitting their owner to seize it exactly as he seized coyotes, as hereafter described. He had killed but a few of the big gray wolves; one weighed ninety-seven pounds. He said that there were gradations from this down to the coyotes. A few days before our arrival, after a very long chase, he had captured a black wolf, weighing between fifty and sixty pounds.

These Southern coyotes or prairie-wolves are only about one-third the size of the big gray timber wolves of the Northern Rockies. They are too small to meddle with full-grown horses and cattle, but pick up young calves and kill sheep, as well as any small domesticated animal that they can get at. The big wolves flee from the neighborhood of anything like close settlements, but coyotes hang around the neighborhood of man much more persistently. They show a fox-like cunning in catching rabbits, prairie-dogs, gophers, and the like. After nightfall they are noisy, and their melancholy wailing and yelling are familiar sounds to all who pass over the plains. The young are brought forth in holes in cut banks or similar localities. Within my own experience I have known of the finding of but two families. In one there was but a single family of five cubs and one old animal, undoubtedly the mother; in the other case there were ten or eleven cubs and two old females which had apparently shared the burrow or cave, though living in separate pockets. In neither case was any full-grown male coyote found in the neighborhood; as regards these particular litters, the father seemingly had nothing to do with taking care of or supporting the family. I am not able to say whether this was accidental or whether it is a rule, that only the mother lives with and takes care of the litter; I have heard contrary statements about the matter from hunters who should know. Unfortunately I have learned from long experience that it is only exceptional hunters who can be trusted to give accurate descriptions of the habits of any beast, save such as are connected with its chase.

GREYHOUNDS RESTING AFTER A RUN
From a photograph by W. Sloan Simpson

Coyotes are sharp, wary, knowing creatures, and on most occasions take care to keep out of harm’s way. But individuals among them have queer freaks. On one occasion while Sloan Simpson was on the round-up he waked at night to find something on the foot of his bed, its dark form indistinctly visible against the white tarpaulin. He aroused a friend to ask if it could be a dog. While they were cautiously endeavoring to find out what it was, it jumped up and ran off; they then saw that it was a coyote. In a short time it returned again, coming out of the darkness toward one of the cowboys who was awake, and the latter shot it, fearing it might have hydrophobia. But I doubt this, as in such case it would not have curled up and gone to sleep on Simpson’s bedding. Coyotes are subject to hydrophobia, and when under the spell of the dreadful disease will fearlessly attack men. In one case of which I know, a mad coyote coming into camp sprang on a sleeping man who was rolled in his bedding and bit and worried the bedding in the effort to get at him. Two other men hastened to his rescue, and the coyote first attacked them and then suddenly sprang aside and again worried the bedding, by which time one of them was able to get in a shot and killed it. All coyotes, like big wolves, die silently and fight to the last. I had never weighed any coyotes until on this trip. I weighed the twelve which I myself saw caught, and they ran as follows: male, thirty pounds; female, twenty-eight pounds; female, thirty-six pounds; male, thirty-two pounds; male, thirty-four pounds; female, thirty pounds; female, twenty-seven pounds; male, thirty-two pounds; male, twenty-nine pounds; young male, twenty-two pounds; male, twenty-nine pounds; female, twenty-seven pounds. Disregarding the young male, this makes an average of just over thirty pounds.[^[2]] Except the heaviest female, they were all gaunt and in splendid running trim; but then I do not remember ever seeing a really fat coyote.

[2]. I sent the skins and skulls to Dr. Hart Merriam, the head of the Biological Survey. He wrote me about them: “All but one are the plains coyote, Canis nebracensis. They are not perfectly typical, but are near enough for all practical purposes. The exception is a yearling pup of a much larger species. Whether this is frustor I dare not say in the present state of knowledge of the group.”

The morning of the first day of our hunt dawned bright and beautiful, the air just cool enough to be pleasant. Immediately after breakfast we jogged off on horseback, Tom Burnett and Bony Moore in front, with six or eight greyhounds slouching alongside, while Burke Burnett and “War Bonnet” drove behind us in the buggy. I was mounted on one of Tom Burnett’s favorites, a beautiful Kiowa pony. The chuck wagon, together with the relay of greyhounds to be used in the afternoon, was to join us about midday at an appointed place where there was a pool of water.

We shuffled along, strung out in an irregular line, across a long flat, in places covered with bright-green wild onions; and then up a gentle slope where the stunted mesquite grew, while the prairie-dogs barked spasmodically as we passed their burrows. The low crest, if such it could be called, of the slope was reached only some twenty minutes after we left camp, and hardly had we started down the other side than two coyotes were spied three or four hundred yards in front. Immediately horses and dogs were after them at a headlong, breakneck run, the coyotes edging to the left where the creek bottom, with its deep banks and narrow fringes of timber, was about a mile distant. The little wolves knew their danger and ran their very fastest, while the long dogs stretched out after them, gaining steadily. It was evident the chase would be a short one, and there was no need to husband the horses, so every man let his pony go for all there was in him. At such a speed, and especially going down hill, there was not the slightest use in trying to steer clear of the prairie-dog holes; it was best to let the veteran cow-ponies see to that for themselves. They were as eager as their riders, and on we dashed at full speed, curving to the left toward the foot of the slope; we jumped into and out of a couple of broad, shallow washouts, as we tore after the hounds, now nearing their quarry. The rearmost coyote was overtaken just at the edge of the creek; the foremost, which was a few yards in advance, made good its escape, as all the dogs promptly tackled the rearmost, tumbling it over into a rather deep pool. The scuffling and splashing told us what was going on, and we reined our horses short up at the brink of the cut bank. The water had hampered the dogs in killing their quarry, only three or four of them being in the pool with him; and of those he had seized one by the nose and was hanging on hard. In a moment one of the cowboys got hold of him, dropped a noose over his head, and dragged him out on the bank, just as the buggy came rattling up at full gallop. Burnett and the general, taking advantage of the curve in our course, had driven across the chord of the arc, and keeping their horses at a run, had seen every detail of the chase and were in at the death.

In a few minutes the coyote was skinned, the dogs rested, and we were jogging on once more. Hour after hour passed by. We had a couple more runs, but in each case the coyote had altogether too long a start and got away; the dogs no longer being as fresh as they had been. As a rule, although there are exceptions, if the greyhounds cannot catch the coyote within two or three miles the chances favor the escape of the little wolf. We found that if the wolf had more than half a mile start he got away. As greyhounds hunt by sight, cut banks enable the coyote easily to throw off his pursuers unless they are fairly close up. The greyhounds see the wolf when he is far off, for they have good eyes; but in the chase, if the going is irregular, they tend to lose him, and they do not depend much on one another in recovering sight of him; on the contrary, the dog is apt to quit when he no longer has the quarry in view.

AT THE TAIL OF THE CHUCK WAGON
From a photograph by W. Sloan Simpson

At noon we joined the chuck wagon where it stood drawn up on a slope of the treeless, bushless prairie; and the active round-up cook soon had the meal ready. It was the Four Sixes wagon, the brand burned into the wood of the chuck box. Where does a man take more frank enjoyment in his dinner than at the tail end of a chuck wagon?

Soon after eating we started again, having changed horses and dogs. I was mounted on a Big D cow-pony, while Lambert had a dun-colored horse, hard to hold, but very tough and swift. An hour or so after leaving camp we had a four-mile run after a coyote, which finally got away, for it had so long a start that the dogs were done out by the time they came within fair distance. They stopped at a little prairie pool, some of them lying or standing in it, panting violently; and thus we found them as we came stringing up at a gallop. After they had been well rested we started toward camp; but we were down in the creek bottom before we saw another coyote. This one again was a long distance ahead, and I did not suppose there was much chance of our catching him; but away all the dogs and all the riders went at the usual run, and catch him we did, because, as it turned out, the “morning” dogs, which were with the wagon, had spied him first and run him hard, until he was in sight of the “afternoon” dogs, which were with us. I got tangled in a washout, scrambled out, and was galloping along, watching the country in front, when Lambert passed me as hard as he could go; I saw him disappear into another washout, and then come out on the other side, while the dogs were driving the coyote at an angle down toward the creek. Pulling short to the right, I got through the creek, hoping the coyote would cross, and the result was that I galloped up to the worry almost as soon as the foremost riders from the other side—a piece of good fortune for which I had only luck to thank. The hounds caught the coyote as he was about crossing the creek. From this point it was but a short distance into camp.

Again next morning we were off before the sun had risen high enough to take away the cool freshness from the air. This day we travelled several miles before we saw our first coyote. It was on a huge, gently sloping stretch of prairie, which ran down to the creek on our right. We were travelling across it strung out in line when the coyote sprang up a good distance ahead of the dogs. They ran straight away from us at first. Then I saw the coyote swinging to the right toward the creek and I half-wheeled, riding diagonally to the line of the chase. This gave me an excellent view of dogs and wolf, and also enabled me to keep nearly abreast of them. On this particular morning the dogs were Bevin’s greyhounds and staghounds. From where the dogs started they ran about three miles, catching their quarry in the flat where the creek circled around in a bend, and when it was not fifty yards from the timber. By this time the puncher, Bony Moore, had passed me, most of the other riders having been so far to the left when the run began that they were unable to catch up. The little wolf ran well, and the greyhounds had about reached their limit when they caught up with it. But they lasted just long enough to do the work. A fawn-colored greyhound and a black staghound were the first dogs up. The staghound tried to seize the coyote, which dodged a little to one side; the fawn-colored greyhound struck and threw it; and in another moment the other dogs were up and the worry began. I was able to see the run so well, because Tom Burnett had mounted me on his fine roan cutting horse. We sat around in a semicircle on the grass until the dogs had been breathed, and then started off again. After some time we struck another coyote, but rather far off, and this time the dogs were not fresh. After running two or three miles he pulled away and we lost him, the dogs refreshing themselves by standing and lying in a shallow prairie pool.

In the afternoon we again rode off, and this time Abernethy, on his white horse, took the lead, his greyhounds trotting beside him. There was a good deal of rivalry among the various owners of the hounds as to which could do best, and a slight inclination among the cowboys to be jealous of Abernethy. No better riders could be imagined than these same cowboys, and their greyhounds were stanch and fast; but Abernethy, on his tough white horse, not only rode with great judgment, but showed a perfect knowledge of the coyote, and by his own exertions greatly assisted his hounds. He had found out in his long experience that while the greyhounds could outpace a coyote in a two or three mile run, they would then fall behind; but that after going eight or ten miles, a coyote in turn became exhausted, and if he had been able to keep his hounds going until that time, they could, with his assistance, then stop the quarry.

THE BIG D. COW-PONY
From a photograph by W. Sloan Simpson

We had been shogging along for an hour or more when we put up a coyote and started after it. I was riding the Big D pony I had ridden the afternoon before. It was a good and stout horse, but one which my weight was certain to distress if I tried to go too fast for too long a time. Moreover, the coyote had a long start, and I made up my mind that he would either get away or give us a hard run. Accordingly, as the cowboys started off at their usual headlong pace, I rode behind at a gallop, husbanding my horse. For a mile or so the going was very rough, up over and down stony hills and among washouts. Then we went over gently rolling country for another mile or two, and then came to a long broken incline which swept up to a divide some four miles ahead of us. Lambert had been riding alongside of Abernethy, at the front, but his horse began to play out, and needed to be nursed along, so that he dropped back level with me. By the time I had reached the foot of this incline the punchers, riding at full speed, had shot their bolts, and one by one I passed them, as well as most of the greyhounds. But Abernethy was far ahead, his white horse loping along without showing any signs of distress. Up the long slope I did not dare press my animal, and Abernethy must have been a mile ahead of me when he struck the divide, while where the others were I had no idea, except that they were behind me. When I reached the divide I was afraid I might have missed Abernethy, but to my delight he was still in sight, far ahead. As we began to go down hill I let the horse fairly race; for by Abernethy’s motions I could tell that he was close to the wolf and that it was no longer running in a straight line, so that there was a chance of my overtaking them. In a couple of miles I was close enough to see what was going on. But one greyhound was left with Abernethy. The coyote was obviously tired, and Abernethy, with the aid of his perfectly trained horse, was helping the greyhound catch it. Twice he headed it, and this enabled me to gain rapidly. They had reached a small unwooded creek by the time I was within fifty yards; the little wolf tried to break back to the left; Abernethy headed it and rode almost over it, and it gave a wicked snap at his foot, cutting the boot. Then he wheeled and came toward it; again it galloped back, and just as it crossed the creek the greyhound made a rush, pinned it by the hind leg and threw it. There was a scuffle, then a yell from the greyhound as the wolf bit it. At the bite the hound let go and jumped back a few feet, and at the same moment Abernethy, who had ridden his horse right on them as they struggled, leaped off and sprang on top of the wolf. He held the reins of the horse with one hand and thrust the other, with a rapidity and precision even greater than the rapidity of the wolf’s snap, into the wolf’s mouth, jamming his hand down crosswise between the jaws, seizing the lower jaw and bending it down so that the wolf could not bite him. He had a stout glove on his hand, but this would have been of no avail whatever had he not seized the animal just as he did; that is, behind the canines, while his hand pressed the lips against the teeth; with his knees he kept the wolf from using its forepaws to break the hold, until it gave up struggling. When he thus leaped on and captured this coyote it was entirely free, the dog having let go of it; and he was obliged to keep hold of the reins of his horse with one hand. I was not twenty yards distant at the time, and as I leaped off the horse he was sitting placidly on the live wolf, his hand between its jaws, the greyhound standing beside him, and his horse standing by as placid as he was. In a couple of minutes Fortescue and Lambert came up. It was as remarkable a feat of the kind as I have ever seen.

Through some oversight we had no straps with us, and Abernethy had lost the wire which he usually carried in order to tie up the wolves’ muzzles—for he habitually captured his wolves in this fashion. However, Abernethy regarded the lack of straps as nothing more than a slight bother. Asking one of us to hold his horse, he threw the wolf across in front of the saddle, still keeping his grip on the lower jaw, then mounted and rode off with us on the back track. The wolf was not tied in any way. It was unhurt, and the only hold he had was on its lower jaw. I was surprised that it did not strive to fight with its legs, but after becoming satisfied that it could not bite, it seemed to resign itself to its fate, was fairly quiet, and looked about with its ears pricked forward. The wolves which I subsequently saw him capture, and, having tied up their muzzles, hold before him on the saddle, acted in precisely the same manner.

The run had been about ten miles in an almost straight line. At the finish no other riders were in sight, but soon after we crossed the divide on our return, and began to come down the long slope toward the creek, we were joined by Tom Burnett and Bony Moore; while some three or four miles ahead on a rise of the prairie we could see the wagon in which Burke Burnett was driving General Young. Other punchers and straggling greyhounds joined us, and as the wolf, after travelling some five miles, began to recover his wind and show a tendency to fight for his freedom, Abernethy tied up his jaws with his handkerchief and handed him over to Bony Moore, who packed him on the saddle with entire indifference, the wolf himself showing a curious philosophy. Our horses had recovered their wind and we struck into a gallop down the slope; then as we neared the wagon we broke into a run, Bony Moore brandishing aloft with one hand the live wolf, its jaws tied up with a handkerchief, but otherwise unbound. We stopped for a few minutes with Burnett and the general to tell particulars of the hunt. Then we loped off again toward camp, which was some half dozen miles off. I shall always remember this run and the really remarkable feat Abernethy performed. Colonel Lyon had seen him catch a big wolf in the same way that he caught this coyote. It was his usual method of catching both coyotes and wolves. Almost equally noteworthy were the way in which he handled and helped his greyhounds, and the judgment, resolution, and fine horsemanship he displayed. His horse showed extraordinary endurance.

The third day we started out as usual, the chuck wagon driving straight to a pool far out on the prairie, where we were to meet it for lunch. Chief Quanah’s three wives had joined him, together with a small boy and a baby, and they drove in a wagon of their own. Meanwhile the riders and hounds went south nearly to Red River. In the morning we caught four coyotes and had a three miles run after one which started too far ahead of the dogs, and finally got clean away. All the four that we got were started fairly close up, and the run was a breakneck scurry, horses and hounds going as hard as they could put feet to the ground. Twice the cowboys distanced me; and twice the accidents of the chase, the sudden twists and turns of the coyote in his efforts to take advantage of the ground, favored me and enabled me to be close up at the end, when Abernethy jumped off his horse and ran in to where the dogs had the coyote. He was even quicker with his hands than the wolf’s snap, and in a moment he always had the coyote by the lower jaw.

Between the runs we shogged forward across the great reaches of rolling prairie in the bright sunlight. The air was wonderfully clear, and any object on the sky-line, no matter how small, stood out with startling distinctness. There were few flowers on these dry plains; in sharp contrast to the flower prairies of southern Texas, which we had left the week before, where many acres for a stretch would be covered by masses of red or white or blue or yellow blossoms—the most striking of all, perhaps, being the fields of the handsome buffalo clover. As we plodded over the prairie the sharp eyes of the punchers were scanning the ground far and near, and sooner or later one of them would spy the motionless form of a coyote, or all would have their attention attracted as it ran like a fleeting gray or brown shadow among the grays and browns of the desolate landscape. Immediately dogs and horses would stretch at full speed after it, and everything would be forgotten but the wild exhilaration of the run.

ABERNETHY AND COYOTE
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

It was nearly noon when we struck the chuck wagon. Immediately the handy round-up cook began to prepare a delicious dinner, and we ate as men have a right to eat, who have ridden all the morning and are going to ride fresh horses all the afternoon. Soon afterward the horse-wranglers drove up the saddle band, while some of the cow-punchers made a rope corral from the side of the wagon. Into this the horses were driven, one or two breaking back and being brought into the bunch again only after a gallop more exciting than most coyote chases. Fresh ponies were roped out and the saddle band again turned loose. The dogs that had been used during the morning then started campward with the chuck wagon. One of the punchers was riding a young and partially broken horse; he had no bridle, simply a rope around the horse’s neck. This man started to accompany the wagon to the camp.

The rest of us went off at the usual cow-pony trot or running walk. It was an hour or two before we saw anything; then a coyote appeared a long way ahead and the dogs raced after him. The first mile was up a gentle slope; then we turned, and after riding a couple of miles on the level the dogs had shot their bolt and the coyote drew away. When he got too far in front the dogs and foremost riders stopped and waited for the rest of us to overtake them, and shortly afterward Burke Burnett and the general appeared in their buggy. One of the greyhounds was completely done out and we took some time attending to it. Suddenly one of the men, either Tom Burnett or Bony Moore, called out that he saw the coyote coming back pursued by a horseman. Sure enough, the unfortunate little wolf had run in sight of the wagons, and the puncher on the young unbridled horse immediately took after him, and, in spite of a fall, succeeded in heading him back and bringing him along in our direction, although some three-quarters of a mile away. Immediately everyone jumped into his saddle and away we all streamed down a long slope diagonally to the course the coyote was taking. He had a long start, but the dogs were rested, while he had been running steadily, and this fact proved fatal to him. Down the slope to the creek bottom at its end we rode at a run. Then there came a long slope upward, and the heavier among us fell gradually to the rear. When we topped the divide, however, we could see ahead of us the foremost men streaming after the hounds, and the latter running in a way which showed that they were well up on their game. Even a tired horse can go pretty well down hill, and by dint of hard running we who were behind got up in time to see the worry when the greyhounds caught the coyote, by some low ponds in a treeless creek bed. We had gone about seven miles, the unlucky coyote at least ten. Our journey to camp was enlivened by catching another coyote after a short run.

Next day was the last of our hunt. We started off in the morning as usual, but the buggy men on this occasion took with them some trail hounds, which were managed by a sergeant of the regular army, a game sportsman. They caught two coons in the timber of a creek two or three miles to the south of the camp. Meanwhile the rest of us, riding over the prairie, saw the greyhounds catch two coyotes, one after a rather long run and one after a short one. Then we turned our faces toward camp. I saw Abernethy, with three or four of his own hounds, riding off to one side, but unfortunately I did not pay any heed to him, as I supposed the hunting was at an end. But when we reached camp Abernethy was not there, nor did he turn up until we were finishing lunch. Then he suddenly appeared, his tired greyhounds trotting behind him, while he carried before him on the saddle a live coyote, with its muzzle tied up, and a dead coyote strapped behind his saddle. Soon after leaving us he had found a coyote, and after a good run the dogs had stopped it and he had jumped off and captured it in his usual fashion. Then while riding along, holding the coyote before him on the saddle, he put up another one. His dogs were tired, and he himself was of course greatly hampered in such a full-speed run by having the live wolf on the saddle in front of him. One by one the dogs gave out, but his encouragement and assistance kept two of them to their work, and after a run of some seven miles the coyote was overtaken. It was completely done out and would probably have died by itself, even if the hounds had not taken part in the killing. Hampered as he was, Abernethy could not take it alive in his usual fashion. So when it was dead he packed it behind his horse and rode back in triumph. The live wolf, as in every other case where one was brought into camp, made curiously little effort to fight with its paws, seeming to acquiesce in its captivity, and looking around, with its ears thrust forward, as if more influenced by curiosity than by any other feeling.

After lunch we rode toward town, stopping at nightfall to take supper by the bank of a creek. We entered the town after dark, some twenty of us on horseback. Wagner was riding with us, and he had set his heart upon coming into and through the town in true cowboy style; and it was he who set the pace. We broke into a lope a mile outside the limits, and by the time we struck the main street the horses were on a run and we tore down like a whirlwind until we reached the train. Thus ended as pleasant a hunting trip as any one could imagine. The party got seventeen coyotes all told, for there were some runs which I did not see at all, as now and then both men and dogs would get split into groups.

On this hunt we did not see any of the big wolves, the so-called buffalo or timber wolves, which I hunted in the old days on the Northern cattle plains. Big wolves are found in both Texas and Oklahoma, but they are rare compared to the coyotes; and they are great wanderers. Alone or in parties of three or four or half a dozen they travel to and fro across the country, often leaving a district at once if they are molested. Coyotes are more or less plentiful everywhere throughout the West in thinly settled districts, and they often hang about in the immediate neighborhood of towns. They do enough damage to make farmers and ranchers kill them whenever the chance offers. But this damage is not appreciable when compared with the ravages of their grim big brother, the gray wolf, which, wherever it exists in numbers, is a veritable scourge to the stockmen.

Colonel Lyon’s hounds were, as I have said, used chiefly after jack-rabbits. He had frequently killed coyotes with them, however, and on two or three occasions one of the big gray wolves. At the time when he did most of his wolf-hunting he had with the greyhounds a huge fighting dog, a Great Dane, weighing one hundred and forty-five pounds. In spite of its weight this dog could keep up well in a short chase, and its ferocious temper and enormous weight and strength made it invaluable at the bay. Whether the quarry were a gray wolf or coyote mattered not in the least to it, and it made its assaults with such headlong fury that it generally escaped damage. On the two or three occasions when the animal bayed was a big wolf the greyhounds did not dare tackle it, jumping about in an irregular circle and threatening the wolf until the fighting dog came up. The latter at once rushed in, seizing its antagonist by the throat or neck and throwing it. Doubtless it would have killed the wolf unassisted, but the greyhounds always joined in the killing; and once thrown, the wolf could never get on his legs. In these encounters the dog was never seriously hurt. Rather curiously, the only bad wound it ever received was from a coyote; the little wolf, not one-third of its weight, managing to inflict a terrific gash down its huge antagonist’s chest, nearly tearing it open. But of course a coyote against such a foe could not last much longer than a rat pitted against a terrier.

Big wolves and coyotes are found side by side throughout the Western United States, both varying so in size that if a sufficient number of specimens, from different localities, are examined it will be found that there is a complete intergradation in both stature and weight. To the northward the coyotes disappear, and the big wolves grow larger and larger until in the arctic regions they become veritable giants. At Point Barrow Mr. E. A. McIlhenny had six of the eight “huskies” of his dog team killed and eaten by a huge white dog wolf. At last he shot it, and found that it weighed one hundred and sixty-one pounds.

Good trail hounds can run down a wolf. A year ago Jake Borah’s pack in northwestern Colorado ran a big wolf weighing one hundred and fifteen pounds to bay in but little over an hour. He then stood with his back to a rock, and though the dogs formed a semicircle around him, they dared not tackle him. Jake got up and shot him. Unless well trained and with the natural fighting edge neither trail hounds (fox-hounds) nor greyhounds can or will kill a big wolf, and under ordinary circumstances, no matter how numerous, they make but a poor showing against one. But big ninety-pound or one hundred-pound greyhounds, specially bred and trained for the purpose, stand on an entirely different footing. Three or four of these dogs, rushing in together and seizing the wolf by the throat, will kill him, or worry him until he is helpless. On several occasions the Colorado Springs greyhounds have performed this feat. Johnny Goff owned a large, fierce dog, a cross between what he called a Siberian bloodhound (I suppose some animal like a Great Dane) and an ordinary hound, which, on one occasion when he had shot at and broken the hind leg of a big wolf, ran it down and killed it. On the other hand, wolves will often attack dogs. In March of the present year—nineteen hundred and five—Goff’s dogs were scattered over a hillside hunting a bobcat, when he heard one of them yell, and looking up saw that two wolves were chasing it. The other dogs were so busy puzzling out the cat’s trail that they never noticed what was happening. Goff called aloud, whereupon the wolves stopped. He shot one and the other escaped. He thinks that they would have overtaken and killed the hound in a minute or two if he had not interfered.

The big wolves shrink back before the growth of the thickly settled districts, and in the Eastern States they often tend to disappear even from districts that are uninhabited save by a few wilderness hunters. They have thus disappeared almost entirely from Maine, the Adirondacks, and the Alleghanies, although here and there they are said to be returning to their old haunts. Their disappearance is rather mysterious in some instances, for they are certainly not all killed off. The black bear is much easier killed, yet the black bear holds its own in many parts of the land from which the wolf has vanished. No animal is quite so difficult to kill as is the wolf, whether by poison or rifle or hound. Yet, after a comparatively few have been slain, the entire species will perhaps vanish from certain localities. In some localities even the cougar, the easiest of all game to kill with hounds, holds its own better. This, however, is not generally true.

But with all wild animals, it is a noticeable fact that a course of contact with man continuing over many generations of animal life causes a species so to adapt itself to its new surroundings that it can hold its own far better than formerly. When white men take up a new country, the game, and especially the big game, being entirely unused to contend with the new foe, succumb easily, and are almost completely killed out. If any individuals survive at all, however, the succeeding generations are far more difficult to exterminate than were their ancestors, and they cling much more tenaciously to their old homes. The game to be found in old and long-settled countries is of course much more wary and able to take care of itself than the game of an untrodden wilderness; it is the wilderness life, far more than the actual killing of the wilderness game, which tests the ability of the wilderness hunter.

ABERNETHY RETURNS FROM THE HUNT
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

After a time, game may even, for the time being, increase in certain districts where settlements are thin. This was true of the wolves throughout the northern cattle country, in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and the western ends of the Dakotas. In the old days wolves were very plentiful throughout this region, closely following the huge herds of buffaloes. The white men who followed these herds as professional buffalo-hunters were often accompanied by other men, known as wolfers, who poisoned these wolves for the sake of their fur. With the disappearance of the buffalo the wolves diminished in numbers so that they also seemed to disappear. Then in the late eighties or early nineties the wolves began again to increase in numbers until they became once more as numerous as ever and infinitely more wary and difficult to kill; though as they were nocturnal in their habits they were not often seen. Along the Little Missouri and in many parts of Montana and Wyoming this increase was very noticeable during the last decade of the nineteenth century. They were at that time the only big animals of the region which had increased in numbers. Such an increase following a previous decrease in the same region was both curious and interesting. I never knew the wolves to be so numerous or so daring in their assaults upon stock in the Little Missouri country as in the years 1894 to 1896 inclusive. I am unable wholly to account for these changes. The first great diminution in the numbers of the wolves is only partially to be explained by the poisoning; yet they seemed to disappear almost everywhere and for a number of years continued scarce. Then they again became plentiful, reappearing in districts from whence they had entirely vanished, and appearing in new districts where they had been hitherto unknown. Then they once more began to diminish in number. In northwestern Colorado, in the White River country, cougars fairly swarmed in the early nineties, while up to that time the big gray wolves were almost or entirely unknown. Then they began to come in, and increased steadily in numbers, while the cougars diminished, so that by the winter of 1902–3 they much outnumbered the big cats, and committed great ravages among the stock. The settlers were at their wits’ ends how to deal with the pests. At last a trapper came in, a shiftless fellow, but extraordinarily proficient in his work. He had some kind of scent, the secret of which he would not reveal, which seemed to drive the wolves nearly crazy with desire. In one winter in the neighborhood of the Keystone Ranch he trapped forty-two big gray wolves; they still outnumber the cougars, which in that neighborhood have been nearly killed out, but they are no longer abundant.

At present wolves are decreasing in numbers all over Colorado, as they are in Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. In some localities traps have been found most effective; in others, poison; and in yet others, hounds. I am inclined to think that where they have been pursued in one manner for a long time any new method will at first prove more efficacious. After a very few wolves have been poisoned or trapped, the survivors become so wary that only a master in the art can do anything with them, while there are always a few wolves which cannot be persuaded to touch a bait save under wholly exceptional circumstances. From association with the old she-wolves the cubs learn as soon as they are able to walk to avoid man’s traces in every way, and to look out for traps and poison. They are so shy and show such extraordinary cunning in hiding and slinking out of the way of the hunter that they are rarely killed with the rifle. Personally I never shot but one. A bold and good rider on a first-rate horse can, however, run down even a big gray wolf in fair chase, and either rope or shoot it. I have known a number of cow-punchers thus to rope wolves when they happened to run across them after they had gorged themselves on their quarry. A former Colorado ranchman, Mr. Henry N. Pancoast, who had done a good deal of wolf-hunting, and had killed one which, judging by its skin, was a veritable monster, wrote me as follows about his experiences:

“I captured nearly all my wolves by running them down and then either roped or shot them. I had one mount that had great endurance, and when riding him never failed to give chase to a wolf if I had the time to spare; and never failed to get my quarry but two or three times. I roped four full-grown and two cubs and shot five full-grown and three cubs—the large wolf in question being killed that way. And he was by far the hardest proposition I ever tried, and I candidly think I run him twenty miles before overhauling and shooting him (he showed too much fight to use a rope). As it was almost dark, concluded to put him on horse and skin at ranch, but had my hands full to get him on the saddle, was so very heavy. My plan in running wolves down was to get about three hundred yards from them, and then to keep that distance until the wolf showed signs of fatigue, when a little spurt would generally succeed in landing him. In the case of the large one, however, I reckoned without my host, as the wolf had as much go left as the horse, so I tried slowing down to a walk and let the wolf go; he ... came down to a little trot and soon placed a half mile between us, and finally went out of sight over a high hill. I took my time and on reaching top of hill saw wolf about four hundred yards off, and as I now had a down grade managed to get my tired horse on a lope and was soon up to the wolf, which seemed all stiffened up, and one shot from my Winchester finished him. We always had poison out, as wolves and coyotes killed a great many calves. Never poisoned but two wolves, and those were caught with fresh antelope liver and entrails (coyotes were easily poisoned).”

BONY MOORE AND THE COYOTE
From a photograph, copyright, 1905, by Alexander Lambert, M.D.

In the early nineties the ravages of the wolves along the Little Missouri became so serious as thoroughly to arouse the stockmen. Not only colts and calves, and young trail stock, but in midwinter full-grown horses and steers were continually slain. The county authorities put a bounty of three dollars each on wolf scalps, to which the ranchmen of the neighborhood added a further bounty of five dollars. This made eight dollars for every wolf, and as the skin was also worth something, the business of killing wolves became profitable. Quite a number of men tried poisoning or trapping, but the most successful wolf hunter on the Little Missouri at that time was a man who did not rely on poison at all, but on dogs. He was named Massingale, and he always had a pack of at least twenty hounds. The number varied, for a wolf at bay is a terrible fighter, with jaws like those of a steel trap, and teeth that cut like knives, so that the dogs were continually disabled and sometimes killed, and the hunter had always to be on the watch to add animals to his pack. It was not a good-looking pack, but it was thoroughly fit for its own work. Most of the dogs were greyhounds, whether rough or smooth haired, but many of them were big mongrels, part greyhound and part some other breed, such as bulldog, mastiff, Newfoundland, bloodhound, or collie. The only two requisites were that the dogs should run fast and fight gamely; and in consequence they formed as wicked, hard-biting a crew as ever ran down and throttled a wolf. They were usually taken out ten at a time, and by their aid Massingale killed over two hundred wolves, including cubs. Of course there was no pretence of giving the game fair play. The wolves were killed as vermin, not for sport. The greatest havoc was in the spring-time, when the she-wolves were followed to their dens. Some of the hounds were very fast, and they could usually overtake a young or weak wolf; but an old dog wolf, with a good start, unless run into at once, would ordinarily get away if he were in running trim. Frequently, however, he was caught when not in running trim, for the hunter was apt to find him when he had killed a calf or taken part in dragging down a horse or steer, and was gorged with meat. Under these circumstances he could not run long before the pack. If possible, as with all such packs, the hunter himself got up in time to end the worry by a stab of his hunting-knife; but unless he was quick he had nothing to do, for the pack was thoroughly competent to do its own killing. Grim fighter though a great dog wolf is, he stands no show before the onslaught of ten such hounds, agile and powerful, who rush on their antagonist in a body. Massingale’s dogs possessed great power in their jaws, and unless he was up within two or three minutes after the wolf was overtaken, they tore him to death, though one or more of their number might be killed or crippled in the fight. The wolf might be throttled without having the hide on its neck torn; but when it was stretched out the dogs ripped open its belly. Dogs do not get their teeth through the skin of an old cougar; but they will tear up either a bobcat or coyote.

In 1894 and 1896 I saw a number of wolves on the Little Missouri, although I was not looking for them. I frequently came upon the remains of sheep and young stock which they had killed; and once, upon the top of a small plateau, I found the body of a large steer, while the torn and trodden ground showed that he had fought hard for his life before succumbing. There had been two wolves engaged in the work, and the cunning beasts had evidently acted in concert. Apparently, while one attracted the steer’s attention in front, the other, according to the invariable wolf habit, attacked him from behind, hamstringing him and tearing out his flanks. His body was still warm when I came up, but the marauders had slunk off, either seeing or smelling me. There was no mistaking the criminals, however, for, unlike bears, which usually attack an animal at the withers, or cougars, which attack the throat or head, wolves almost invariably attack their victim at the hind quarters and begin first on the hams or flanks, if the animal is of any size. Owing to their often acting in couples or in packs, the big wolves do more damage to horned stock than cougars, but they are not as dangerous to colts, and they are not nearly as expert as the big cats in catching deer and mountain sheep. When food is plentiful, good observers say that they will not try to molest foxes; but, if hungry, they certainly snap them up as quickly as they would fawns. Ordinarily they show complete tolerance of the coyotes; yet one bitter winter I knew of a coyote being killed and eaten by a wolf.

Not only do the habits of wild beasts change under changing conditions as time goes on, but there seems to be some change even in their appearance. Thus the early observers of the game of the Little Missouri, those who wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century, spoke much of the white wolves which were then so common in the region. These white wolves represented in all probability only a color variety of the ordinary gray wolf; and it is difficult to say exactly why they disappeared. Yet when about the year 1890 wolves again grew common these white wolves were very, very rare; indeed I never personally heard of but one being seen. This was on the Upper Cannonball in 1892. A nearly black wolf was killed not far from this spot in the year 1893. At the present day black wolves are more common than white wolves, which are rare indeed. But all these big wolves are now decreasing in numbers, and in most places are decreasing rapidly.

It will be noticed that on some points my observations about wolves are in seeming conflict with those of other observers as competent as I am; but I think the conflict is more seeming than real, and I have concluded to let my words stand. The great book of nature contains many pages which are hard to read, and at times conscientious students may well draw different interpretations of the obscure and least-known texts. It may not be that either observer is at fault, but what is true of an animal in one locality may not be true of the same animal in another, and even in the same locality two individuals of the same species may differ widely in their traits and habits.

CHAPTER IV
HUNTING IN THE CATTLE COUNTRY; THE PRONGBUCK

The prongbuck is the most characteristic and distinctive of American game animals. Zoologically speaking, its position is unique. It is the only hollow-horned ruminant which sheds its horns, or rather the horn sheaths. We speak of it as an antelope, and it does of course represent on our prairies the antelopes of the Old World; but it stands apart from all other horned animals. Its place in the natural world is almost as lonely as that of the giraffe. In all its ways and habits it differs as much from deer and elk as from goat and sheep. Now that the buffalo has gone, it is the only game really at home on the wide plains. It is a striking-looking little creature, with its prominent eyes, single-pronged horns, and the sharply contrasted white, brown and reddish of its coat. The brittle hair is stiff, coarse and springy; on the rump it is brilliantly white, and is erected when the animal is alarmed or excited, so as to be very conspicuous. In marked contrast to deer, antelope never seek to elude observation; all they care for is to be able themselves to see. As they have good noses and wonderful eyes, and as they live by preference where there is little or no cover, shots at them are usually obtained at far longer range than is the case with other game; and yet, as they are easily seen, and often stand looking at the hunter just barely within very long rifle-range, they are always tempting their pursuer to the expenditure of cartridges. More shots are wasted at antelope than at any other game. They would be even harder to secure were it not that they are subject to fits of panic folly, or excessive curiosity, which occasionally put them fairly at the mercy of the rifle-bearing hunter.

In the old days the prongbuck was found as soon as the westward-moving traveller left the green bottom-lands of the Mississippi, and from thence across to the dry, open valleys of California, and northward to Canada and southward into Mexico. It has everywhere been gradually thinned out, and has vanished altogether from what were formerly the extreme easterly and westerly limits of its range. The rates of extermination of the different kinds of big game have been very unequal in different localities. Each kind of big game has had its own peculiar habitat in which it throve best, and each has also been found more or less plentifully in other regions where the circumstances were less favorable; and in these comparatively unfavorable regions it early tends to disappear before the advance of man. In consequence, where the ranges of the different game animals overlap and are intertwined, one will disappear first in one locality, and another will disappear first where the conditions are different. Thus the whitetail deer had thrust forward along the very narrow river bottoms into the domain of the mule-deer and the prongbuck among the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and in these places it was exterminated from the narrow strips which it inhabited long before the mule-deer vanished from the high hills, or the prongbuck from the great open plains. But along great portions of the Missouri there are plenty of whitetails yet left in the river bottoms, while the mule-deer that once dwelt in the broken hills behind them, and the prongbuck which lived on the prairie just back of these bluffs, have both disappeared. In the same way the mule-deer and the prongbuck are often found almost intermingled through large regions in which plains, hills, and mountains alternate. If such a region is mainly mountainous, but contains a few valleys and table-lands, the prongbuck is sure to vanish from the latter before the mule-deer vanishes from the broken country. But if the region is one primarily of plains, with here and there rows of rocky hills in which the mule-deer is found, the latter is killed off long before the prongbuck can be hunted out of the great open stretches. The same is true of the pronghorn and the wapiti. The size and value of the wapiti make it an object of eager persecution on the part of hunters. But as it can live in the forest-clad fastnesses of the Rockies, into which settlement does not go, it outlasts over great regions the pronghorn, whose abode is easily penetrated by sheep and cattle men. Under anything like even conditions, however, the prongbuck, of course, outlasts the wapiti. This was the case on the Little Missouri. On that stream the bighorn also outlasted the wapiti. In 1881 wapiti were still much more plentiful than bighorns. Within the next decade they had almost totally disappeared, while the bighorn was still to be found; I shot one and saw others in 1893, at which time I had not authentic information of a single wapiti remaining anywhere on the river in my neighborhood, although it is possible that one or two still lurked in some out-of-the-way recess. In Colorado at one time the bighorn was nearly exterminated, while the wapiti still withstood the havoc made among its huge herds; then followed a period in which the rapidity of destruction of the wapiti increased far beyond that of the bighorn.

I mention these facts partly because they are of interest in themselves, but chiefly because they tend to explain the widely different opinions expressed by competent observers about what superficially seem to be similar facts. It cannot be too often repeated that allowance must be made for the individual variability in the traits and characters of animals of the same species, and especially of the same species under different circumstances and in different localities; and allowance must also be made for the variability of the individual factor in the observers themselves. Many seemingly contradictory observations of the habits of deer, wapiti, and prongbuck will be found in books by the best hunters. Take such questions as the keenness of sight of the deer as compared with the prongbuck, and of the pugnacity of the wapiti, both actual and relative, and a wide difference of opinion will be found in three such standard works as Dodge’s “The Hunting-grounds of the Great West,” Caton’s “Deer and Antelope of America,” and the contributions of Mr. Grinnell to the “Century Book of Sports.” Sometimes the difference will be in mere matters of opinion, as, for instance, in the belief as to the relative worth of the sport furnished by the chase of the different creatures; but sometimes there is a direct conflict of fact. Colonel Dodge, for instance, has put it upon record that the wapiti is an exceedingly gentle animal, less dangerous than a whitetail or blacktail buck in a close encounter, and that the bulls hardly ever fight among themselves. My own experience leads me to traverse in the most emphatic manner every one of these conclusions, and all hunters whom I have met feel exactly as I do; yet no one would question for a moment Colonel Dodge’s general competency as an observer. In the same way Mr. Grinnell has a high opinion of the deer’s keenness of sight. Judge Caton absolutely disagrees with him, and my own experience tends to agree with that of the Judge—at least to the extent of placing the deer’s vision far below that of the prongbuck and even that of the bighorn, and only on a par with that of the wapiti. Yet Mr. Grinnell is an unusually competent observer, whose opinion on any such subject is entitled to unqualified respect.

Difference in habits may be due simply to difference of locality, or to the need of adaptation to new conditions. The prongbuck’s habits about migration offer examples of the former kind of difference. Over portions of its range the prongbuck is not migratory at all. In other parts the migrations are purely local. In yet other regions the migrations are continued for great distances, immense multitudes of the animals going to and fro in the spring and fall along well-beaten tracks. I know of one place in New Mexico where the pronghorn herds are tenants of certain great plains throughout the entire year. I know another region in northwestern Colorado where the very few prongbucks still left, though they shift from valley to valley, yet spend the whole year in the same stretch of rolling, barren country. On the Little Missouri, however, during the eighties and early nineties, there was a very distinct though usually local migration. Before the Black Hills had been settled they were famous wintering places for the antelope, which swarmed from great distances to them when cold weather approached; those which had summered east of the Big Missouri actually swam the river in great herds, on their journey to the Hills. The old hunters around my ranch insisted that formerly the prongbuck had for the most part travelled from the Little Missouri Bad Lands into the Black Hills for the winter.

ON THE LITTLE MISSOURI

When I was ranching on that river, however, this custom no longer obtained, for the Black Hills were too well settled, and the herds of prongbuck that wintered there were steadily diminishing in numbers. At that time, from 1883 to 1896, the seasonal change in habits, and shift of position, of the prongbucks were well marked. As soon as the new grass sprang they appeared in great numbers upon the plains. They were especially fond of the green, tender blades that came up where the country had been burned over. If the region had been devastated by prairie fires in the fall, the next spring it was certain to contain hundreds and thousands of prongbucks. All through the summer they remained out on these great open plains, coming to drink at the little pools in the creek beds, and living where there was no shelter of any kind. As winter approached they began to gather in bands. Some of these bands apparently had regular wintering places to the south of us, in Pretty Buttes and beyond; and close to my ranch, at the crossing of the creek called Beaver, there were certain trails which these antelope regularly travelled, northward in the spring and southward in the fall. But other bands would seek out places in the Bad Lands near by, gathering together on some succession of plateaus which were protected by neighboring hills from the deep drifts of snow. Here they passed the winter, on short commons, it is true (they graze, not browsing like deer), but without danger of perishing in the snowdrifts. On the other hand, if the skin-hunters discovered such a wintering place, they were able to butcher practically the entire band, if they so desired, as the prongbucks were always most reluctant to leave such a chosen ground.

Normally the prongbuck avoids both broken ground and timber. It is a queer animal, with keen senses, but with streaks of utter folly in its character. Time and again I have known bands rush right by me, when I happened to surprise them feeding near timber or hills, and got between them and the open plains. The animals could have escaped without the least difficulty if they had been willing to go into the broken country, or through even a few rods of trees and brush; and yet they preferred to rush madly by me at close range, in order to get out to their favorite haunts. But nowadays there are certain localities where the prongbucks spend a large part of their time in the timber or in rough, hilly country, feeding and bringing up their young in such localities.

Typically, however, the prongbuck is preeminently a beast of the great open plains, eating their harsh, dry pasturage, and trusting to its own keen senses and speed for its safety. All the deer are fond of skulking; the whitetail preeminently so. The prongbuck, on the contrary, never endeavors to elude observation. Its sole aim is to be able to see its enemies, and it cares nothing whatever about its enemies seeing it. Its coloring is very conspicuous, and is rendered still more so by its habit of erecting the white hair on its rump. It has a very erect carriage, and when it thinks itself in danger it always endeavors to get on some crest or low hill from which it can look all about. The big bulging eyes, situated at the base of the horns, scan the horizon far and near like twin telescopes. They pick out an object at such a distance that it would entirely escape the notice of a deer. When suspicious, they have a habit of barking, uttering a sound something like “kau,” and repeating it again and again, as they walk up and down, endeavoring to find out if danger lurks in the unusual object. They are extremely curious, and in the old days it was often possible to lure them toward the hunter by waving a red handkerchief to and fro on a stick, or even by lying on one’s back and kicking the legs. Nowadays, however, there are very few localities indeed in which they are sufficiently unsophisticated to make it worth while trying these time-honored tricks of the long-vanished trappers and hunters.

Along the Little Missouri the fawns, sometimes one and sometimes two in number, were dropped in May or early in June. At that time the antelope were usually found in herds which the mother did not leave until she was about to give birth to the fawn. During the first few days the fawn’s safety is to be found only in its not attracting attention. During this time it normally lies perfectly flat on the ground, with its head outstretched, and makes no effort to escape. While out on the spring round-up I have come across many of these fawns. Once, in company with several cowboys, I was riding behind a bunch of cattle which, as we hurried them, spread out in open order ahead of us. Happening to cast down my eyes I saw an antelope fawn directly ahead of me. The bunch of cattle had passed all around it, but it made not the slightest sign, not even when I halted, got off my pony, and took it up in my arms. It was useless to take it to camp and try to rear it, and so I speedily put it down again. Scanning the neighborhood, I saw the doe hanging about some half a mile off, and when I looked back from the next divide I could see her gradually drawing near to the fawn.

If taken when very young, antelope make cunning and amusing pets, and I have often seen them around the ranches. There was one in the ranch of a Mrs. Blank who had a station on the Deadwood stage line some eighteen years ago. She was a great worker in buckskin, and I got her to make me the buckskin shirt I still use. There was an antelope fawn that lived at the house, wandering wherever it wished; but it would not permit me to touch it. As I sat inside the house it would come in and hop up on a chair, looking at me sharply all the while. No matter how cautiously I approached, I could never put my hand upon it, as at the last moment it would spring off literally as quick as a bird would fly. One of my neighbors on the Little Missouri, Mr. Howard Eaton, had at one time upon his ranch three little antelope whose foster-mother was a sheep, and who were really absurdly tame. I was fond of patting them and of giving them crusts, and the result was that they followed me about so closely that I had to be always on the lookout to see that I did not injure them. They were on excellent terms with the dogs, and were very playful. It was a comic sight to see them skipping and hopping about the old ewe when anything happened to alarm her and she started off at a clumsy waddle. Nothing could surpass the tameness of the antelope that are now under Mr. Hornaday’s care at the Bronx Zoological Garden in New York. The last time that I visited the garden some repairs were being made inside the antelope enclosure, and a dozen workmen had gone in to make them. The antelope regarded the workmen with a friendliness and curiosity untempered by the slightest touch of apprehension. When the men took off their coats the little creatures would nose them over to see if they contained anything edible, and they would come close up and watch the men plying the pick with the utmost interest. Mr. Hornaday took us inside, and they all came up in the most friendly manner. One or two of the bucks would put their heads against our legs and try to push us around, but not roughly. Mr. Hornaday told me that he was having great difficulty, exactly as with the mule-deer, in acclimatizing the antelope, especially as the food was so different from what they were accustomed to in their native haunts.

The wild fawns are able to run well a few days after they are born. They then accompany the mother everywhere. Sometimes she joins a band of others; more often she stays alone with her fawn, and perhaps one of the young of the previous year, until the rut begins. Of all game the prongbuck seems to me the most excitable during the rut. The males run the does much as do the bucks of the mule and whitetail deer. If there are no does present, I have sometimes watched a buck run to and fro by himself. The first time I saw this I was greatly interested, and could form no idea of what the buck was doing. He was by a creek bed in a slight depression or shallow valley, and was grazing uneasily. After a little while he suddenly started and ran just as hard as he could, off in a straight direction, nearly away from me. I thought that somehow or other he had discovered my presence; but he suddenly wheeled and came back to the original place, still running at his utmost speed. Then he halted, moved about with the white hairs on his rump outspread, and again dashed off at full speed, halted, wheeled, and came back. Two or three times he did this, and let me get very close to him before he discovered me. I was too much interested in what he was doing to desire to shoot him.

In September, sometimes not earlier than October, the big bucks begin to gather the does into harems. Each buck is then constantly on the watch to protect his harem from outsiders, and steal another doe if he can get a chance. I have seen a comparatively young buck who had appropriated a doe, hustle her hastily out of the country as soon as he saw another antelope in the neighborhood; while, on the other hand, a big buck, already with a good herd of does, will do his best to appropriate any other that comes in sight. The bucks fight fearlessly but harmlessly among themselves, locking their horns and then pushing as hard as they can.

Although their horns are not very formidable weapons, they are bold little creatures, and if given a chance will stand at bay before either hound or coyote. A doe will fight most gallantly for her fawn, and is an overmatch for a single coyote, but of course she can do but little against a large wolf. The wolves are occasionally very destructive to the herds. The cougar, however, which is a much worse foe than the wolf to deer and mountain sheep, can but rarely molest the prongbuck, owing to the nature of the latter’s haunts. Eagles, on occasion, take the fawns, as they do those of deer.

I have always been fond of the chase of the prongbuck. While I lived on my ranch on the Little Missouri it was, next to the mule-deer, the game which I most often followed, and on the long wagon strips which I occasionally took from my ranch to the Black Hills, to the Big Horn Mountains, or into eastern Montana, prongbuck venison was our usual fresh meat, save when we could kill prairie-chickens and ducks with our rifles, which was not always feasible. In my mind the prongbuck is always associated with the open prairies during the spring, summer, or early fall. It has happened that I have generally pursued the bighorn in bitter weather; and when we laid in our stock of winter meat, mule-deer was our usual game. Though I have shot prongbuck in winter, I never liked to do so, as I felt the animals were then having a sufficiently hard struggle for existence anyhow. But in the spring the meat of the prongbuck was better than that of any other game, and, moreover, there was not the least danger of mistaking the sexes, and killing a doe accidentally, and accordingly I rarely killed anything but pronghorns at that season. In those days we never got any fresh meat, whether on the ranch or while on the round-up or on a wagon trip, unless we shot it, and salt pork became a most monotonous diet after a time.

Occasionally I killed the prongbuck in a day’s hunt from my ranch. If I started with the intention of prongbuck hunting, I always went on horseback; but twice I killed them on foot when I happened to run across them by accident while looking for mule-deer. I shall always remember one of these occasions. I was alone in the Elkhorn ranch-house at the time, my foreman and the only cow-puncher who was not on the round-up having driven to Medora, some forty miles away, in order to bring down the foreman’s wife and sister, who were going to spend the summer with him. It was the fourth day of his absence. I expected him in the evening and wanted to have fresh meat, and so after dinner I shouldered my rifle and strolled off through the hills. It was too early in the day to expect to see anything, and my intention was simply to walk out until I was five or six miles from the ranch, and then work carefully home through a likely country toward sunset, as by this arrangement I would be in a good game region at the very time that the animals were likely to stir abroad. It was a glaring, late-spring day, and in the hot sun of mid-afternoon I had no idea that anything would be moving, and was not keeping a very sharp lookout. After an hour or two’s steady tramping I came into a long, narrow valley, bare of trees and brushwood, and strolled along it, following a cattle trail that led up the middle. The hills rose steeply into a ridge crest on each side, sheer clay shoulders breaking the mat of buffalo-grass which elsewhere covered the sides of the valley as well as the bottom. It was very hot and still, and I was paying but little attention to my surroundings, when my eye caught a sudden movement on the ridge crest to my right, and, dropping on one knee as I wheeled around, I saw the head and neck of a prongbuck rising above the crest. The animal was not above a hundred yards off, and stood motionless as it stared at me. At the crack of the rifle the head disappeared; but as I sprang clear of the smoke I saw a cloud of dust rise on the other side of the ridge crest, and felt convinced that the quarry had fallen. I was right. On climbing the ridge crest I found that on the other side it sank abruptly in a low cliff of clay, and at the foot of this, thirty feet under me, the prongbuck lay with its neck broken. After dressing it I shouldered the body entire, thinking that I should like to impress the new-comers by the sight of so tangible a proof of my hunting prowess as whole prongbuck hanging up in the cottonwoods by the house. As it was a well-grown buck the walk home under the hot sun was one of genuine toil.

The spot where I ran across this prongbuck was miles away from the nearest plains, and it was very unusual to see one in such rough country. In fact, the occurrence was wholly exceptional; just as I once saw three bighorn rams, which usually keep to the roughest country, deliberately crossing the river bottom below my ranch, and going for half a mile through the thick cottonwood timber. Occasionally, however, parties of prongbuck came down the creek bottoms to the river. Once I struck a couple of young bucks in the bottom of a creek which led to the Chimney Butte ranch-house, and stalked them without difficulty; for as prongbuck make no effort to hide, if there is good cover even their sharp eyes do not avail them. On another occasion several does and fawns, which we did not molest, spent some time on what we called “the corral bottom,” which was two or three miles above the ranch-house. In the middle of this bottom we had built a corral for better convenience in branding the calves when the round-up came near our ranch—as the bottom on which the ranch-house stood was so thickly wooded as to make it difficult to work cattle thereon. The does and fawns hung around the corral bottom for some little time, and showed themselves very curious and by no means shy.

When I went from the ranch for a day’s prongbuck hunting of set purpose, I always rode a stout horse and started by dawn. The prongbucks are almost the only game that can be hunted as well during the heat of the day as at any other time. They occasionally lie down for two or three hours about noon in some hollow where they cannot be seen, but usually there is no place where they are sure they can escape observation even when resting; and when this is the case they choose a somewhat conspicuous station and trust to their own powers of observation, exactly as they do when feeding. There is therefore no necessity, as with deer, of trying to strike them at dawn or dusk. The reason why I left the ranch before sunrise and often came back long after dark was because I had to ride at least a dozen miles to get out to the ground and a dozen to get back, and if after industrious walking I failed at first to find my game, I would often take the horse again and ride for an hour or two to get into new country. Prongbuck water once a day, often travelling great distances to or from some little pool or spring. Of course, if possible, I liked to leave the horse by such a pool or spring. On the great plains to which I used to make these excursions there was plenty of water in early spring, and it would often run, here and there, in the upper courses of some of the creeks—which, however, usually contained running water only when there had been a cloudburst or freshet. As the season wore on the country became drier and drier. Water would remain only in an occasional deep hole, and few springs were left in which there was so much as a trickle. In a strange country I could not tell where these water-holes were, but in the neighborhood of the ranch I of course knew where I was likely to find them. Often, however, I was disappointed; and more than once after travelling many miles to where I hoped to find water, there would be nothing but sun-cracked mud, and the horse and I would have eighteen hours of thirst in consequence. A ranch horse, however, is accustomed to such incidents, and of course when a man spends half the time riding, it is merely a matter of slight inconvenience to go so long without a drink.

Nevertheless, if I did reach a spring, it turned the expedition into pleasure instead of toil. Even in the hot weather the ride toward the plains over the hills was very lovely. It was beautiful to see the red dawn quicken from the first glimmering gray in the east, and then to watch the crimson bars glint on the tops of the fantastically shaped barren hills when the sun flamed, burning and splendid, above the horizon. In the early morning the level beams threw into sharp relief the strangely carved and channelled cliff walls of the buttes. There was rarely a cloud to dim the serene blue of the sky. By the time the heat had grown heavy I had usually reached the spring or pool, where I unsaddled the horse, watered him, and picketed him out to graze. Then, under the hot sun, I would stride off for the hunting proper. On such occasions I never went to where the prairie was absolutely flat. There were always gently rolling stretches broken by shallow watercourses, slight divides, and even low mounds, sometimes topped with strangely shaped masses of red scoria or with petrified trees. My object, of course, was, either with my unaided eyes or with the help of my glasses, to catch sight of the prongbucks before they saw me. I speedily found, by the way, that if they were too plentiful this was almost impossible. The more abundant deer are in a given locality the more apt one is to run across them, and of course if the country is sufficiently broken, the same is true of prongbucks; but where it is very flat and there are many different bands in sight at the same time, it is practically impossible to keep out of sight of all of them, and as they are also all in sight of one another, if one flees the others are certain to take the alarm. Under such circumstances I have usually found that the only pronghorns I got were obtained by accident, so to speak; that is, by some of them unexpectedly running my way, or by my happening to come across them in some nook where I could not see them, or they me.

Prongbucks are very fast runners indeed, even faster than deer. They vary greatly in speed, however, precisely as is the case with deer; in fact, I think that the average hunter makes altogether too little account of this individual variation among different animals of the same kind. Under the same conditions different deer and antelope vary in speed and wariness, exactly as bears and cougars vary in cunning and ferocity. When in perfect condition a full-grown buck antelope, from its strength and size, is faster and more enduring than an old doe; but a fat buck, before the rut has begun, will often be pulled down by a couple of good greyhounds much more speedily than a flying yearling or two-year-old doe. Under favorable circumstances, when the antelope was jumped near by, I have seen one overhauled and seized by a first-class greyhound; and, on the other hand, I have more than once seen a pronghorn run away from a whole pack of just as good dogs. With a fair start, and on good ground, a thoroughbred horse, even though handicapped by the weight of a rider, will run down an antelope; but this is a feat which should rarely be attempted, because such a race, even when carried to a successful issue, is productive of the utmost distress to the steed.

Ordinary horses will sometimes run down an antelope which is slower than the average. I once had on my ranch an under-sized old Indian pony named White Eye, which, when it was fairly roused, showed a remarkable turn of speed, and had great endurance. One morning on the round-up, when for some reason we did not work the cattle, I actually ran down an antelope in fair chase on this old pony. It was a nursing doe, and I came over the crest of the hill, between forty and fifty yards away from it. As it wheeled to start back, the old cayuse pricked up his ears with great interest, and the moment I gave him a sign was after it like a shot. Whether, being a cow-pony, he started to run it just as if it were a calf or a yearling trying to break out of the herd, or whether he was overcome by dim reminiscences of buffalo-hunting in his Indian youth, I know not. At any rate, after the doe he went, and in a minute or two I found I was drawing up to her. I had a revolver, but of course did not wish to kill her, and so got my rope ready to try to take her alive. She ran frantically, but the old pony, bending level to the ground, kept up his racing lope and closed right in beside her. As I came up she fairly bleated. An expert with the rope would have captured her with the utmost ease; but I missed, sending the coil across her shoulders. She again gave an agonized bleat, or bark, and wheeled around like a shot. The cow-pony stopped almost, but not quite, as fast, and she got a slight start, and it was some little time before I overhauled her again. When I did I repeated the performance, and this time when she wheeled she succeeded in getting on some ground where I could not follow, and I was thrown out.

Normally, a horseman without greyhounds can hope for nothing more than to get within fair shooting range; and this only by taking advantage of the prongbucks’ peculiarity of running straight ahead in the direction in which they are pointed, when once they have settled into their pace. Usually, as soon as they see a hunter they run straight away from him; but sometimes they make their flight at an angle, and as they do not like to change their course when once started, it is thus possible, with a good horse, to cut them off from the point toward which they are headed, and get a reasonably close shot.

I have done a good deal of coursing with greyhounds at one time or another, but always with scratch packs. There are a few ranchmen who keep leashes of greyhounds of pure blood, bred and trained to antelope coursing, and who do their coursing scientifically, carrying the dogs out to the hunting-grounds in wagons and exercising every care in the sport; but these men are rare. The average man who dwells where antelope are sufficiently abundant to make coursing a success, simply follows the pursuit at odd moments, with whatever long-legged dogs he and his neighbors happen to have; and his methods of coursing are apt to be as rough as his outfit. My own coursing was precisely of this character. At different times I had on my ranch one or two high-classed greyhounds and Scotch deerhounds, with which we coursed deer and antelope, as well as jack-rabbits, foxes, and coyotes; and we usually had with them one or two ordinary hounds, and various half-bred dogs. I must add, however, that some of the latter were very good. I can recall in particular one fawn-colored beast, a cross between a greyhound and a foxhound, which ran nearly as fast as the former, though it occasionally yelped in shrill tones. It could also trail well, and was thoroughly game; on one occasion it ran down and killed a coyote single-handed.

On going out with these dogs, I rarely chose a day when I was actually in need of fresh meat. If this was the case, I usually went alone with the rifle; but if one or two other men were at the ranch, and we wanted a morning’s fun, we would often summon the dogs, mount our horses, and go trooping out to the antelope-ground. As there was good deer-country between the ranch bottom and the plains where we found the prongbuck, it not infrequently happened that we had a chase after blacktail or whitetail on the way. Moreover, when we got out to the ground, before sighting antelope, it frequently happened that the dogs would jump a jack-rabbit or a fox, and away the whole set would go after it, streaking through the short grass, sometimes catching their prey in a few hundred yards, and sometimes having to run a mile or so. In consequence, by the time we reached the regular hunting-ground the dogs were apt to have lost a good deal of their freshness. We would get them in behind the horses and creep cautiously along, trying to find some solitary prongbuck in a suitable place, where we could bring up the dogs from behind a hillock and give them a fair start. Usually we failed to get the dogs near enough for a good start; and in most cases their chases after unwounded prongbuck resulted in the quarry running clean away from them. Thus the odds were greatly against them; but, on the other hand, we helped them wherever possible with the rifle. We usually rode well scattered out, and if one of us put up an antelope, or had a chance at one when driven by the dogs, he always fired, and the pack were saved from the ill effects of total discouragement by so often getting these wounded beasts. It was astonishing to see how fast an antelope with a broken leg could run. If such a beast had a good start, and especially if the dogs were tired, it would often lead them a hard chase, and the dogs would be utterly exhausted after it had been killed; so that we would have to let them lie where they were for a long time before trying to lead them down to some stream-bed. If possible, we carried water for them in canteens.

There were red-letter days, however, on which our dogs fairly ran down and killed unwounded antelope—days when the weather was cool, and when it happened that we got our dogs out to the ground without their being tired by previous runs, and found our quarry soon, and in favorable places for slipping the hounds. I remember one such chase in particular. We had at the time a mixed pack, in which there was only one dog of my own, the others being contributed from various sources. It included two greyhounds, a rough-coated deerhound, a foxhound, and the fawn-colored cross-bred mentioned above.

We rode out in the early morning, the dogs trotting behind us; and, coming to a low tract of rolling hills, just at the edge of the great prairie, we separated and rode over the crest of the nearest ridge. Just as we topped it, a fine buck leaped up from a hollow a hundred yards off, and turned to look at us for a moment. All the dogs were instantly spinning toward him down the grassy slope. He apparently saw those at the right, and, turning, raced away from us in a diagonal line, so that the left-hand greyhound, which ran cunning and tried to cut him off, was very soon almost alongside. He saw her, however—she was a very fast bitch—just in time, and, wheeling, altered his course to the right. As he reached the edge of the prairie, this alteration nearly brought him in contact with the cross-bred, which had obtained a rather poor start, on the extreme right of the line. Around went the buck again, evidently panic-struck and puzzled to the last degree, and started straight off across the prairie, the dogs literally at his heels, and we, urging our horses with whip and spur, but a couple of hundred yards behind. For half a mile the pace was tremendous, when one of the greyhounds made a spring at his ear, but failing to make good his hold, was thrown off. However, it halted the buck for a moment, and made him turn quarter round, and in a second the deerhound had seized him by the flank and thrown him, and all the dogs piled on top, never allowing him to rise.

Later we again put up a buck not far off. At first it went slowly, and the dogs hauled up on it; but when they got pretty close, it seemed to see them, and letting itself out, went clean away from them almost without effort.

Once or twice we came upon bands of antelope, and the hounds would immediately take after them. I was always rather sorry for this, however, because the frightened animals, as is generally the case when beasts are in a herd, seemed to impede one another, and the chase usually ended by the dogs seizing a doe, for it was of course impossible to direct them to any particular beast.

It will be seen that with us coursing was a homely sport. Nevertheless we had good fun, and I shall always have enjoyable memories of the rapid gallops across the prairie, on the trail of a flying prongbuck.

Usually my pronghorn hunting has been done while I have been off with a wagon on a trip intended primarily for the chase, or else while travelling for some other purpose.

CAMPING ON THE ANTELOPE GROUNDS

All life in the wilderness is so pleasant that the temptation is to consider each particular variety, while one is enjoying it, as better than any other. A canoe trip through the great forests, a trip with a pack-train among the mountains, a trip on snowshoes through the silent, mysterious fairyland of the woods in winter—each has its peculiar charm. To some men the sunny monotony of the great plains is wearisome; personally there are few things I have enjoyed more than journeying over them where the game was at all plentiful. Sometimes I have gone off for three or four days alone on horseback, with a slicker or oilskin coat behind the saddle, and some salt and hardtack as my sole provisions. But for comfort on a trip of any length it was always desirable to have a wagon. My regular outfit consisted of a wagon and team driven by one man who cooked, together with another man and four riding ponies, two of which we rode, while the other two were driven loose or led behind the wagon. While it is eminently desirable that a hunter should be able to rough it, and should be entirely willing to put up with the bare minimum of necessities, and to undergo great fatigue and hardship, it is yet not at all necessary that he should refrain from comfort of a wholesome sort when it is obtainable. By taking the wagon we could carry a tent to put up if there was foul weather. I had a change of clothes to put on if I was wet, two or three books to read—and nothing adds more to the enjoyment of a hunting trip—as well as plenty of food; while having two men made me entirely foot-loose as regards camp, so that I could hunt whenever I pleased, and, if I came in tired, I simply rested, instead of spending two or three hours in pitching camp, cooking, tethering horses, and doing the innumerable other little things which in the aggregate amount to so much.

On such a trip, when we got into unknown country, it was of course very necessary to stay near the wagon, especially if we had to hunt for water. But if we knew the country at all, we would decide in the morning about where the camp was to be made in the afternoon, and then I would lope off on my own account, while the wagon lumbered slowly across the rough prairie sward straight toward its destination. Sometimes I took the spare man with me, and sometimes not. It was convenient to have him, for there are continually small emergencies in which it is well to be with a companion. For instance, if one jumps off for a sudden shot, there is always a slight possibility that any but a thoroughly trained horse will get frightened and gallop away. On some of my horses I could absolutely depend, but there were others, and very good ones too, which would on rare occasions fail me; and few things are more disheartening than a long stern chase after one’s steed under such circumstances, with the unpleasant possibility of seeing him leave the country entirely and strike out for the ranch fifty or sixty miles distant. If there is a companion with one, all danger of this is over. Moreover, in galloping at full speed after the game it is impossible now and then to avoid a tumble, as the horse may put his leg into a prairie-dog hole or badger burrow; and on such occasions a companion may come in very handily. On the other hand, there is so great a charm in absolute solitude, in the wild, lonely freedom of the great plains, that often I would make some excuse and go off entirely by myself.

Such rides had a fascination of their own. Hour after hour the wiry pony shuffled onward across the sea of short, matted grass. On every side the plains stretched seemingly limitless. Sometimes there would be no object to break the horizon; sometimes across a score of miles there would loom through the clear air the fantastic outlines of a chain of buttes, rising grim and barren. Occasionally there might be a slightly marked watercourse, every drop of moisture long dried; and usually there would not be as much as the smallest sage-brush anywhere in sight. As the sun rose higher and higher the shadows of horse and rider shortened, and the beams were reflected from the short, bleached blades until in the hot air all the landscape afar off seemed to dance and waver. Often on such trips days went by without our coming across another human being, and the loneliness and vastness of the country seemed as unbroken as if the old vanished days had returned—the days of the wild wilderness wanderers, and the teeming myriads of game they followed, and the scarcely wilder savages against whom they warred.

Now and then prongbuck would appear, singly or in bands; and their sharp bark of alarm or curiosity would come to me through the still, hot air over great distances, as they stood with head erect looking at me, the white patches on their rumps shining in the sun, and the bands and markings on their heads and necks showing as if they were in livery. Scan the country as carefully as I would, they were far more apt to see me than I was them, and once they had seen me, it was normally hopeless to expect to get them. But their strange freakishness of nature frequently offsets the keenness of their senses. At least half of the prongbucks which I shot were obtained, not by stalking, but by coming across them purely through their own fault. Though the prairie seemed level, there was really a constant series of undulations, shallow and of varying width. Now and then as I topped some slight rise I would catch a glimpse of a little band of pronghorns feeding, and would slip off my horse before they could see me. A hasty determination as to where the best chance of approaching them lay would be followed by a half-hour’s laborious crawl, a good part of the time flat on my face. They might discover me when I was still too far for a shot; or by taking advantage of every little inequality I might get within long range before they got a glimpse of me, and then in a reasonable proportion of cases I would bag my buck. At other times the buck would come to me. Perhaps one would suddenly appear over a divide himself, and his curiosity would cause him to stand motionless long enough to give me a shot; while on other occasions I have known one which was out of range to linger around, shifting his position as I shifted mine, until by some sudden gallop or twist I was able to get close enough to empty my magazine at him.

When the shadows had lengthened, but before any coolness had come into the air, I would head for the appointed camping-place. Sometimes this would be on the brink of some desolate little pool under a low, treeless butte, or out on the open prairie where the only wood was what we had brought with us. At other times I would find the wagon drawn up on the edge of some shrunken plains river, under a line of great cottonwoods with splintered branches and glossy leaves that rustled all day long. Such a camp was always comfortable, for there was an abundance of wood for the fire, plenty of water, and thick feed in which the horses grazed—one or two being picketed and the others feeding loose until night came on. If I had killed a prongbuck, steaks were speedily sizzling in the frying-pan over the hot coals. If I had failed to get anything, I would often walk a mile or two down or up the river to see if I could not kill a couple of prairie-chickens or ducks. If the evening was at all cool, we built a fire as darkness fell, and sat around it, while the leaping flames lit up the trunks of the cottonwoods and gleamed on the pools of water in the half-dry river bed. Then I would wrap myself in my blanket and lie looking up at the brilliant stars until I fell asleep.

In both 1893 and 1894 I made trips to a vast tract of rolling prairie land, some fifty miles from my ranch, where I had for many years enjoyed the keen pleasure of hunting the prongbuck. In 1893 the prong-horned bands were as plentiful in this district as I have ever seen them anywhere. Lambert was with me; and in a week’s trip, including the journey out and back, we easily shot all the antelope we felt we had any right to kill; for we only shot to get meat, or an unusually fine head. Lambert did most of the shooting; and I have never seen a professional hunter do better in stalking antelope on the open prairie. I myself fired at only two antelope, both of which had already been missed. In each case a hard run and much firing at long ranges, together with in one case some skilful manœuvring, got me my game; yet one buck cost ten cartridges and the other eight. In 1894 I had exactly the reverse experience. I killed five antelope for thirty-six shots, but each one that I killed was killed with the first bullet, and in not one case where I missed the first time did I hit with any subsequent shot. These five antelope were killed at an average distance of about 150 yards. Those that I missed were, of course, much farther off on an average, and I usually emptied my magazine at each. The number of cartridges spent would seem extraordinary to a tyro; and an unusually skilful shot, or else a very timid shot who fears to take risks, will of course make a better showing per head killed; but I doubt if men with experience in antelope hunting, who keep an accurate account of the cartridges they expend, will see anything much out of the way in the performance.

During the years I have hunted in the West I have always, where possible, kept a record of the number of cartridges expended for every head of game killed, and of the distances at which it was shot. I have found that with bison, bear, moose, elk, caribou, bighorn and white goat, where the animals shot at were mostly of large size and usually stationary, and where the mountainous or wooded country gave chance for a close approach, the average distance at which I have killed the game has been eighty yards, and the average number of cartridges expended per head slain, three; one of these representing the death-shot, and the others standing either for misses outright, of which there were not many, or else for wounding game which escaped, or which I afterward overtook, or for stopping cripples or charging beasts. I have killed but two peccaries, using but one cartridge for each; they were close up. My experiences with cougar have already been narrated. At wolves and coyotes I have generally had to take running shots at very long range, and I have shot but two—one of each—for fifty cartridges. Blacktail deer I have generally shot at about ninety yards, at an expenditure of about four cartridges apiece. Whitetail I have killed at shorter range; but the shots were generally running, often taken under difficult circumstances, so that my expenditure of cartridges was rather larger. Antelope, on the other hand, I have on the average shot at a little short of 150 yards, and they have cost me about nine cartridges apiece. This, of course, as I have explained above, does not mean that I have missed eight out of nine antelope, for often the entire nine cartridges would be spent at an antelope which I eventually got. It merely means that, counting all the shots of every description fired at antelope, I had one head to show for each nine cartridges expended.

Thus, the first antelope I shot in 1893 cost me ten cartridges, of which three hit him, while the seven that missed were fired at over 400 yards’ distance while he was running. We saw him while we were with the wagon. As we had many miles to go before sunset, we cared nothing about frightening other game, and, as we had no fresh meat, it was worth while to take some chances to procure it. When I first fired, the prongbuck had already been shot at and was in full flight. He was beyond all reasonable range, but some of our bullets went over him and he began to turn. By running to one side I got a shot at him at a little over 400 paces, as he slowed to a walk, bewildered by the firing, and the bullet broke his hip. I missed him two or three times as he plunged off, and then by hard running down a watercourse got a shot at 180 paces and broke his shoulder, and broke his neck with another bullet when I came up.

This one was shot while going out to the hunting-ground. While there Lambert killed four others. I did not fire again until on our return, when I killed another buck one day while we were riding with the wagon. The day was gray and overcast. There were slight flurries of snow, and the cold wind chilled us as it blew across the endless reaches of sad-colored prairie. Behind us loomed Sentinel Butte, and all around the rolling surface was broken by chains of hills, by patches of bad lands, or by isolated, saddle-shaped mounds. The ranch wagon jolted over the uneven sward, and plunged in and out of the dry beds of the occasional water courses; for we were following no road, but merely striking northward across the prairie toward the P. K. ranch. We went at a good pace, for the afternoon was bleak, the wagon was lightly loaded, and the Sheriff of the county, whose deputy I had been, and who was serving for the nonce as our teamster and cook, kept the two gaunt, wild-looking horses trotting steadily. Lambert and I rode to one side on our unkempt cow-ponies, our rifles slung across the saddle bows.