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|Transcriber's Note: Variations in hyphenation are preserved. |
|Specifically, "homecoming" vs. "home-coming" and "timberline"|
|vs. "timber-line".                                           |
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THE YELLOW HORDE


[Illustration: When dawn lifted the shadows from the low country, Breed
was prowling along the first rim of the hills.

FRONTISPIECE. _See page 6._]




  THE YELLOW HORDE
  BY HAL G. EVARTS


  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
  CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL


  TORONTO
  McCLELLAND AND STEWART
  1921




  _Copyright, 1921,_
  BY HAL G. EVARTS.


  _All rights reserved_
  Published April, 1921


  Norwood Press
  Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.
  Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  When dawn lifted the shadows from the low
  country, Breed was prowling along the first rim
  of the hills                                     _Frontispiece_

  The elk migration had begun                           PAGE   63

  As the summer advanced the pups learned to
  pack-hunt with Breed                                        167

  Breed was compelled to hunt farther from home
  as the deer quit the valleys                                191




THE YELLOW HORDE

CHAPTER I


The wolfer lay in his cabin and listened to the first few night sounds
of the foothills. The clear piping notes of migrating plover floated
softly down to him, punctuated by the rasping cry of a nighthawk. A
coyote raised his voice, a perfect tenor note that swept up to a wild
soprano, then fell again in a whirl of howls which carried amazing
shifts of inflection, tearing up and down the coyote scale. One after
another added his voice to the chorus until it seemed that the swelling
volume could be produced by no less than a full thousand musical prairie
wolves scattered through the foothills for a score of miles.

Wild music to the ears of most men, the song of flat wastes and deserts
and limitless horizons, freighted with a loneliness which is
communicated to man in a positive ache for companionship,--and which
carries a wealth of companionship in itself for those who have lived so
long under the open skies that the song of the desert choir comes to
them as a lullaby.

It moved Collins, the wolfer, to quiet mirth. Always it affected him
that way, this first clamorous outburst of the night. He read in it a
note of deep-seated humor, the jeering laughter of the whole coyote
tribe mocking the world of men who had sworn to exterminate their kind.

"The little devils!" Collins chuckled. "The little yellow devils! Men
can't wipe 'em out. There'll be a million coyotes left to howl when the
last man dies."

From this oft-repeated prophecy Collins was known to every stockman in
three States as the Coyote Prophet, the title a jeering one at first,
then bestowed with increasing respect as men saw many of his prophecies
fulfilled. The coyote's larger cousin, the wolf, ranged the continent
over while the coyote himself was strictly a prairie dweller. For twenty
years Collins had predicted that wolves would disappear in settled
districts while the coyote would survive; not only survive but increase
his range to include the hills and spread over the continent from the
Arctic to the Gulf. There were rumors of coyotes turning up in Indiana.
Then came the tale that a strange breed of small yellow wolves had
appeared in Michigan. Those sheepmen who summered their sheep in the
high valleys of the western mountains complained that stray coyotes quit
the flats and followed them into the hills to prey upon the flocks. The
buffalo wolves that had once infested the range country were gone and it
was seldom that any of the big gray killers turned up on the open range
except when the pinch of cold and famine drove a few timber wolves down
from the north. Men saw these things and wondered if all of Collins'
sweeping prophecies would come to pass. In the face of conditions that
had placed a value on the coyote's pelt and a bounty on his scalp, there
was no apparent decrease in the numbers of the yellow horde from year to
year.

Collins listened to the coyote clamor and knew that they had come to
stay. The concert was suddenly hushed as a long-drawn wolf howl, faint
from distance, drifted far out across the range. Collins turned in his
blankets and peered through the window at the black bulk of the
mountains to the north of him, towering clear and distinct in the
brilliant moonlight.

"If you come down out of those hills I'll stretch your pelt," the wolfer
stated. "I'll pinch your toes in a number four."

The wolf whose howl had occasioned this assertion was even then
considering the possibilities of which Collins spoke. Men called those
of his kind breed-wolves, half coyote and half wolf. He stood on the
high divide which was the roughly separating line between the haunts of
the two tribes whose blood flowed in his veins,--all wolf except for the
yellow fur that marked him for a breed. The coyote voices lifted to him
and Breed read them as the call of kind; for although he had spent the
past ten months with the wolf tribe of his father his first friendships
had been formed among his mother's people on the open range. The acrid
spice of the sage drifted to his nostrils and combined with the coyote
voices to fill him with a homesick urge to revisit the land of his
birth.

But he would not go down. Breed knew well the dangers of the open range;
the devilish riders who made life one long gamble for every wolf that
appeared; he had gruesome recollections of the many coyotes he had seen
in traps. But those things gave him small concern. It was still another
menace--the poison baits put out by wolfers--which held him back. Not
that he feared poison for himself, but coyotes writhing in convulsions
and frothing at the mouth had always filled him with a terrible dread.
It was an epidemic of this sort which had driven him to leave the
sagebrush land of the coyotes for the heavily timbered country of the
wolves. The memory of it lingered with him now. Would he find these
stricken, demented creatures there?

Breed moved down the south slope of the hills at last, the sage scent
luring the coyote in him, but moved slowly and with many halts
occasioned by the wolf suspicion which urged him to turn back. When dawn
lifted the shadows from the low country, Breed was prowling along the
first rim of the hills.

Two dirt-roofed log cabins showed as toy houses, small from distance,
and he could see the slender threads of smoke ascending from others, the
houses themselves beyond the scope of his vision. The range was taking
on fall shades, the gray of the sage relieved by brown patches of open
grasslands and splotches of color where early frosts had touched the
birch and willow thickets that marked each side-hill spring. Tiny dark
specks moved through it all. Meat! It had been long since Breed had
tasted beef, and his red tongue lolled out and dripped in anticipation
of the coming feast.

But he would not go down until night. Twice during the early evening
Breed howled, and Collins, down in the choppy country below, turned his
glasses toward the spot to see what manner of wolf this was who howled
in the broad light of day. The second time he located Breed. The yellow
wolf stood on the rims half a mile above, looming almost life-size in
the twelve-power lens. Collins noted the yellow fur.

"A breed-wolf," he said. "The most cunning devil that ever made a track.
He'll never take on a feed of poison bait or plant his foot on a trap
pan. He'll come down--and I'll ride him out on the first tracking snow."

Just at dusk Breed howled again and dropped down to the broken country
at the base of the hills, skirting the flats and holding to the roughest
brakes, then swung out across the rolling foothills.

The wind soon brought him the message that coyotes were just ahead and
he traced the scent upwind, anxious for the first sight of his former
running mates. Two coyotes scattered swiftly before his approach, each
carrying his own piece of a jack rabbit which the pair had caught and
torn apart. Breed did not follow but held steadily on in search of more.
The urge for companionship was even stronger than hunger, and he sought
to satisfy the stronger craving first. Twice more he veered into the
wind, and both times the coyotes slipped away as he advanced. He
followed the line of one's retreat and the coyote whirled and fled like
a yellow streak in the moonlight. Breed was puzzled by all this, but the
craving for food had grown so strong as to crowd out all else, and he
abandoned the hunt for friends to hunt for meat instead.

Out in the center of a broad flat bench a mile across Breed made out a
group of slowly moving specks which he knew for cows, and he headed
toward them, taking advantage of the cover afforded by every clump of
sage as he crept up to a yearling steer that lagged behind the rest. He
had hunted heavy game animals with the wolves, animals with every sense
alert to detect the approach of the big gray killers, and he fully
expected the steer to break into full flight at the first warning of his
presence. He had almost forgotten the stupidity of the cows on the open
range and the ease with which he had torn them down when hunting them
with his wolf father long before. He made his final rush and drove his
teeth deep into one hind leg before his prey had even quickened his
gait. The steer lurched into an awkward gallop and bawled with fright as
the savage teeth cut through muscles and hide. Breed lunged for the same
spot again; once more and the leg was useless, the hamstrings cut, and
it sagged loosely with every step. He slashed at the other leg. Within a
hundred yards of the start the steer pitched down, bracing his foreparts
off the ground with his two front feet, and even as he fell the yellow
wolf drove for his throat.

Then Breed circled his kill, looking off in all directions to make sure
that there was no route by which men might approach unseen. He stretched
forth his head and cupped his lips as he sent his tribal call rolling
across the range, the message that here was meat for all of his kind who
would come and feed. A score of coyote voices answered from far and
near.

Collins heard the dread cry and knew that the wolf had made a kill. He
knew too that whenever the wolf note was heard, all other sounds were
stilled as if every living creature expected to hear an answering cry
and waited for it to come before resuming their own communications. The
fact that the coyotes answered the cry assured Collins that it was the
breed-wolf that had howled; that coyote ears had read a note of their
own kind in the sound, a note which even his experienced ears could not
detect.

The yellow wolf tore at the warm meat and waited,--waited for his coyote
kinsmen to join him at the feast. He howled again and they answered,
reading invitation to coyote as well as to wolf in the sound, but they
would not come in. An old dog coyote trotted up and down the crest of a
slight rise of ground two hundred yards downwind. Another joined him,
then a third, and in less than an hour there was a half score of coyotes
circling the spot. Breed could see dim shapes moving across the open
places and padding on silent feet over the cow trails that threaded the
sage. Surely they would come in. The shadowy forms were restless, never
still, and prowled round and round him, but they would not join him at
the kill.

Breed was mystified by this strange thing. Here was meat yet the
meat-eaters would not come in and feed. Coyotes had fed with him long
ago but shunned him now. Breed could not know that then he had been
accepted as one of them, having grown to maturity among them and so
become known to every coyote on his range; that they had forgotten him
as an individual, as he had also forgotten them. If there were any old
friends among those who circled round him now he did not know them as
such, only as a companionable whole; and they knew him for a wolf,--a
wolf at least in size and strength. There was a coyote note in his call
but not one of them would venture in to feed with the great yellow beast
that was tearing the steer.

At last a grizzled old dog coyote drew up to within ten yards. He had
lived to the limit of all experiences which a coyote can pass through
and still survive. He had even known the crushing grip of a
double-spring trap, a Newhouse four. This misadventure had occurred in
midwinter when the range was gripped by bitter frost. The cold had
numbed the pain and congealed the flesh to solid ice. He had cut through
the meat with his keen-pointed teeth, and one desperate wrench had
snapped the frozen bone and freed him. There were many of his kind so
maimed, and the wolfers, abbreviating the term peg-legs, called these
three-footed ones "pegs."

A second coyote joined Peg near the steer. He too had lived long and
hard. He had been shot at many times and wounded twice. A shattered
foreleg had healed with an ugly twist, the foot pointing inside and
leaving only the prints of two warped toe pads when it touched the
ground.

Peg and Cripp circled twice round the steer at a distance of thirty
feet. They had known other breeds and had found that some would share
their kills. Breed went out to greet them and they sidled away as he
advanced, stopping when he stopped and turning to face him. Cripp
allowed him to draw close, his teeth bared in warning against a too
effusive greeting, while Peg drew swiftly in behind the wolf. The
peg-leg coyote stretched forth his nose for one deep sniff, then sprang
ten feet away as Breed whirled. Cripp drew up for a similar sniff as
Breed faced Peg, then leaped away as Peg had done. Nature has endowed
the members of each animal tribe with a different scent, and most
animals identify enemies and friends with nose instead of eyes. That one
deep inhalation had assured the two coyotes that there was a strain of
their own scent mingled with that of the wolf. They grew bolder and
stalked stiffly about him, appraising his qualities with eye and nose.
When Breed returned to the feed they followed a few steps behind. At
first they kept the body of the steer between them, then lost all
restraint and accepted Breed as a brother coyote from whom they had
nothing to fear.

An hour before dawn Breed left the spot and traveled back to the edge of
the hills where he bedded for the day. He was full fed and satisfied
with life. It was not until night closed down about him that he was
conscious of the single flaw in his content, the one thing lacking to
complete it all. Breed loosed the hunting cry but there was no answering
call. He tried again without success. When with the wolves he had longed
for the smell of the sage, the scent that spoke of home to him, and the
mocking voices of the coyotes. Now that he had all these he missed the
muster cry of the pack, hungered to hear the aching wails coming from
far across the timbered hills, penetrating to the farthest retreats of
the antlered tribes and sounding a warning to all living things that the
hunt-pack was about to take the meat trail. But he knew that coyotes did
not hunt in packs; that they hunted singly or in pairs, killing more by
stealth than strength; clever stalkers and the most intelligent
team-workers and relayers in the world, but lacking the weight and
driving force to tear down a steer,--calves their largest prey.

Breed howled again and started on the hunt alone. Even then, though he
did not know it, his pack was gathering to him. The two wise old coyotes
who had fed with him the night before knew that wherever they found the
big breed-wolf, there they would also find meat. They had started up at
his first call and Peg was coming swiftly from the south, Cripp from the
west. Breed had not traveled far before he was aware that other hunters
were abroad and running with him, swinging wide on either flank. Here
was his pack! At first he was not sure, but whenever he wheeled or
veered from his course the two coyotes altered their routes to accord
with his. He ran on for miles, thrilled with the knowledge that his
queer pack followed loyally where he led, and when at last he singled
out a steer the two veteran coyotes angled swiftly in and ran but a few
yards on either side of him.

Then Breed sounded the meat call,--and two jeering coyote voices
launched into full cry and howled with him. And Collins, the Coyote
Prophet, for the first time in all his experience heard wolf and coyote
howl in unison over the same kill.

Every night thereafter Breed's pack of two ran with him on the hunt and
always there were the dim shapes circling the kill, padding restlessly
through the sage as they waited for the yellow wolf to leave so they
could swarm in and pick the bones.

At first Breed had retired to the edge of the hills to spend his days,
but his habits were changed through long immunity until his days as well
as nights were spent in the open country; but his caution was never
relaxed and he bedded on the crest of some rise of ground which afforded
a clear field of view for miles in all directions. He frequently saw
some of the devilish riders and occasionally one drew uncomfortably near
his retreat, but always veered away before discovering his presence. His
days were untroubled except by the memories of poisoned coyotes which
persisted in his mind. When he slept his dreams often reverted to these
poisoned horrors, and their death rattles sounded in his ears and his
feet twitched in imaginary flight as he sought to put distance between
himself and these haunting demons. Breed knew that poison was some evil
exercised by man, but its workings were shrouded in mystery. Traps he
could understand,--and rifle shots; for although this latter force was
peculiar, yet there was sound. He understood only those things which to
him were real and actual, things communicated through his physical
senses. Poison seemed some sort of intangible magic, an evil spell
wrought by man, and which transformed sound coyotes into diseased fiends
in the space of seconds.

Always he waked snarling from these dreams, and always he was vastly
puzzled by the abrupt change from night death scenes to the daylight
calm of the open range. For dreams too were beyond his comprehension.
They were actual scenes and scents and sounds to him,--then vanished. It
was only natural that his greatest waking terror should stalk through
his dreams, two mysteries combined to haunt him. Also it was inevitable
that these dreams should eventually link up with the personal equation.

Breed slept one day on the crest of a knoll and suddenly it was night
instead of noon, and Cripp and Peg were leaping about him in a frenzy,
their frothing jaws snapping on the empty air in their madness. He faced
them with bared fangs,--and it was noon once more, but the two old
coyotes stood before him in reality, their own noses wrinkled in snarls
which answered his menacing actions and warned him off. The same old
baffling wave which flooded Breed after each of these recurring dreams
engulfed him now. Peg and Cripp were as sane as himself, yet a moment
past they had been stricken before his very eyes. It had been very real,
and Breed started suddenly from the knoll and headed for the base of the
hills five miles away, nor did he stop until he was far back among their
sheltering ridges.

With the coming of the night he felt the loss of the two old coyotes who
had traveled with him for the past three weeks. They had been normal
when he saw them last and as this latter impression was the stronger he
knew that he would find them untouched by madness; yet the vividness of
the dream lingered with him and held him back from the low country. He
howled once and started on a solitary hunt through the hills. The cry
drifted faintly to the flats below and reached the ears of Cripp and
Peg. They started instantly in the direction from which it came.

The chain of hills in which Breed hunted was but an outcropping spur,
extending thirty miles eastward at right angles from the main bulk of
the hills, and he found no meat. The elk and deer were high up in the
parent range and would stay there until heavy snows drove them down to
winter in the valleys of the lower hills. Breed worked up the slope
until he reached the crest of the divide. He prowled along the bald
ridge, undecided which course to take, then whirled and faced back in
the direction from which he had come. Five miles below him a coyote had
raised his voice; another answered. By traveling steadily Cripp and Peg
had covered much ground since Breed's first cry of the night had reached
their ears and the two coyotes were ten miles within the first folds of
the hills and still seeking the yellow wolf, the leader of the pack.

Breed cupped his lips, his head stretched forth and his muzzle depressed
to a line slightly below the peak of his shoulders as he sent forth the
hunting cry to summon his loyal band. An hour later Cripp and Peg were
with him, the three of them swinging west along the divide toward the
rough mass of the main range of hills. Morning found them climbing
through a matted jungle of close-growing spruce and down-timber.

Breed chose a ridge that lifted above the trees and there curled up for
the day in a clump of stunted sage. Coyotes hunt in the full glare of
the noonday sun as readily as at night and Cripp and Peg slept a bare
two hours before starting once more on the hunt. They found small game
less abundant in the high hills than in the flats and they scoured the
surrounding timber without success, returning at last to bed down near
Breed on the open ridge. Hunger drove Breed from his bed before the sun
had set and he headed deeper into the hills, the two coyotes following,
even though they had small liking for this country which seemed devoid
of meat.

The yellow wolf sampled the cross currents of air which drifted in from
each branching gulch. He crossed the cold trail scent of several deer
but was in no mood for following a long trail so passed them by. It was
the actual warm body scent he sought. He stopped suddenly with uplifted
nose. The shifting breezes had carried the deer scent to his
nostrils,--one brief flash and it was gone. Breed tacked back and forth
across the wind, caught it again and held it, following the ribbon of
scent upwind as easily as a man would follow a blazed trail through the
timber. Two hundred yards from the start he sighted his prey, a
fork-horn buck grazing slowly along under the trees. Breed turned his
eyes to either side to determine the location of Cripp and Peg but they
had suddenly vanished from sight.

He crept toward the fork-horn, standing without the moving of a muscle
whenever the young buck lifted his head, advancing swiftly when he
dropped it again to feed. The wind held steadily from the deer to him
and Breed drew up to within fifty feet. The buck lifted his head and
looked off in all directions, not from present uneasiness but from his
never-failing caution, then reached for another bite of grass, and even
as the downward motion was started Breed launched forward in a silent
rush.

The fork-horn caught one backward slanting glimpse of him and fled just
as the wolf's teeth clashed a bare inch short of his hamstring, and
Breed was off in pursuit of an animal whose speed matched his own. This
prey was no awkwardly galloping steer but a nimble beast that swept
ahead in twenty-foot bounds, and after fifty yards Breed was still ten
feet behind. Then a yellow streak darted over a windfall jam and Peg
flashed at the buck. The deer turned almost at right angles in his
fright, and as he turned Breed's teeth slashed his leg, but not deep
enough to cripple, and the chase was on again. Another fifty yards and
Cripp leaped from behind a spruce trunk and struck gamely for a leg
hold. The flying speed of the buck jerked him clear of the ground, broke
the hold of his teeth and threw him end over end. But he had retarded
the deer for one half-second and the yellow wolf closed his jaws on a
leg with all the force he could throw into the drive. Breed too was
thrown, but the deer was turned again and running with less than half
his former speed, one hind leg powerless. Peg was angling across to turn
him still another time but Breed overhauled him first and slashed at the
other leg, and as the deer rolled downhill the three-legged coyote
dodged the churning hoofs and fastened on his throat.

Collins had journeyed far into the hills to replenish his supply of
meat. It was scarcely dark under the trees when he heard the breed-wolf
and two coyotes howl together,--thirty miles back in the heart of the
hills!

"There now!" he exclaimed. "I've been telling 'em right along that the
coyotes would take to the hills some day. Those breed-wolves--they'll
teach 'em to live in the hills."

When Breed had eaten his fill from the deer he headed back for the low
country. The effect of the mad dream was waning before the fact that Peg
and Cripp were with him in reality, sane and normal in every way. The
three of them were sluggish and heavy with meat and they traveled slowly
with frequent halts for sleep.

The following night Breed's howl sounded again in the foothills and a
score of coyotes answered him from far and near. The coyote tribe had
learned that when the yellow wolf prowled the range there would be fresh
beef for all. Each night the number of shadowy forms that padded through
the sage round his kills increased, waiting until the wolf should leave
and they could close in and finish it to the last mouthful. They grew
bolder from the fact that two of their own kind fed with Breed, and on
the first night after his return from the hills three others found
courage to come in and feed upon his kill before he left it. Within a
week he was accepted unreservedly as a member of the coyote clan.

Each succeeding evening Breed found more and more coyotes gathering
swiftly toward him at the first hunting cry of the night, spreading out
over a quarter-mile front and running with him on the chase, knowing
there would be meat in plenty at the end of the run.

Collins noted a curious change in the coyote signs in his immediate
neighborhood. He still found their tracks singly or in pairs, where they
wandered in all directions through the sage in their hunts for jacks, or
padded thick round some spot where they had killed a calf, but he soon
discovered that whenever he found a track which the breed-wolf had left
the night before he had only to swing out to the right or left to find
the trails of many coyotes pointing in the same direction,--a general
movement of coyotes over a wide front. Collins had heard many tales of
late which accorded with a prophecy he had made long ago; for three
hundred miles north and south men who rode back into the mountains
reported seeing coyotes far back in the very heart of them and of
hearing their howls from among the highest peaks. His prediction that
coyotes would take to the hills and feel as much at home high above
timberline as in the flats had come to pass.

Collins studied long over the many coyote trails which always paralleled
the tracks of the yellow wolf and made still another prophecy,--that
breed-wolves would teach the coyotes to hunt in packs.




CHAPTER II


No man who has lived long in the open and observed the ways of animals
and birds doubts that each tribe has a language of its own,--the
vocabulary of cadence and inflection. A man may watch a marsh teeming
with waterfowl, their contented chuckles filling his ears; then every
wing will lift at once, every bird roused to sudden flight by the change
of a single note so faint that it makes no impression on the ear of the
watching man, yet sufficient to warn the birds as surely as a gunshot. A
widely scattered bunch of range cows will graze placidly for hours, and
suddenly every head will be raised and every cow gaze off in the same
direction.

Coyotes catch all finely shaded inflections and interpret them as
unerringly as a man notes the difference between a bawling cow and a
blatting sheep. Mate communicates with mate through all the coyote
refrains of the night; half-grown coyotes answer their mother's voice
but are silent when another calls. All that wild outburst in which men
read only an uproar of meaningless savagery is in reality the
intelligent conversation of the coyote nation.

Breed's range covered fifty miles each way and there were some two
hundred coyotes who used the same strip or whose range overlapped his
own, and of these there were but few who had not at one time or another
profited by some of his kills. Breed knew the voice of every coyote in
the little band that made up his pack. Even when their notes reached him
faintly through a maze of other howls his ears identified their voices
as certainly as the eyes of man pick out the faces of his friends among
a crowd. Those coyotes in whom dog ancestry was less than four
generations removed betrayed that fact to him when they howled.

There are those who believe that the shepherds and police dogs sprang
originally from the jackal. In any event, there are more dogs that
revert to the wild bunch from these wolfish types than from all other
kinds combined. The gulf between shepherd and coyote is not wide, and
except when raiding coyotes and stock-guarding dogs meet in a clash of
interests they are more apt to mate than to fight.

Throughout the whole of Breed's range there was but one note which
puzzled him,--and it was not the ancestry but the present habits of the
one who made the sound that baffled him. The parental mixture was
plainly evidenced in the voice. It was the cry of a she-wolf, a
half-blood coyote and dog, and Breed heard her howl night after night
yet could not locate her. He would answer her cry and announce that he
was coming, but always she evaded him. When he picked up her trail and
followed it persistently, it invariably led him toward an isolated
cabin. The wolf in him held him back from too close an approach to the
homes of men. When he stopped she called again from up near the
twinkling windows of the house. There was a lonesome note in her cry,
and it was furtive, carrying both fear and invitation in its tones as if
the she-wolf felt herself an outcast and both longed and dreaded to
break down the bars between her wild relatives and herself.

And she was an outcast, without doubt. Collins had trailed her mother, a
renegade shepherd, to the den. He had turned in the rest of the pups for
bounty, keeping her for a pet. She was slightly heavier than a coyote
and the fur of her back was dark, the badge of shepherd parentage. The
yellow underfur showed through the black guard hairs of her back-strip
when the wind ruffled it, the black shading to yellow on flanks and
sides, and from this Collins called her Shady.

Shady's relations with men and beasts were unsatisfactory in the
extreme. Stockmen hate the coyote with an intensity that they show
toward no other animal, and with good reason, for the coyote meets them
on a more equal footing than other beasts, his strategy outrivaling that
of men. He repays their cruelties against his kind by killing their
sheep and calves in broad daylight and executing a well-covered retreat
before the owners can exact the penalty, then returning at night to
raise his jeering laughter almost under the windows of his enemies.

Collins had no stock, his business being that of killing coyotes, and he
found far more to admire than to despise in the qualities of his prey
and so did not accord coyotes the undying hatred shown them by other
men. In his gruff way he was kind to Shady. Those who came to his cabin
were mainly stockmen and they hated Shady cordially. That she sprang
from a renegade sheep dog, a traitor to her kind, was even more
condemnatory in their eyes than the coyote part of her.

The coyotes, less averse to the proximity of man, had investigated
Shady's case by drawing nearer to the cabin than Breed would go and so
were no longer curious about her. Breed was almost two years old yet he
knew nothing of dogs. His mother had ranged a limited strip of country
in which only two men made their homes and neither had owned dogs. When
north with the wolves he had met none of his domestic cousins except
those renegades or breeds that were of the wild. He had crossed the
trails of others at rare intervals. Therefore he did not know dogs as
allies of men and so enemies to himself; rather Shady seemed some
extra-shy wolf creature yet with sufficient courage to range in close to
men. She seemed a daring adventurer to Breed.

It was partly this curiosity which piqued his interest in her. Then too
he recognized in her a freak type,--as he himself was a freak. Each
stood for the first generation of a new breed, the equally divided
parental strains not yet dulled and blended by further crosses, and so
each of them recognized something outstanding and unusual in the other.

At first their knowledge was confined to what each learned of the other
by ear alone, unaided by the testimony of other senses. Breed never once
caught sight of her, and the trail scent which she left behind told him
little except that she was half coyote and half dog, as he already knew.

For a month he answered her howls, his curiosity unassuaged. And as
Breed puzzled over Shady's voice, so Collins puzzled over Breed's.
Collins had heard him howl more than a hundred times and knew that there
was some slight difference between his voice and the pure wolf note. He
had made a close study of animal sounds and knew them well. He knew
Shady's voice from that of other coyotes. Her variations were less
sharply defined; more sustained than the bewildering staccato of the
coyote and with a slightly coarser tone. Collins knew that he should be
able to detect that peculiarity in Breed's howl,--a difference which he
felt was there but could not place. There were times when the solution
rose to the very surface of his mind and struggled for interpretation
into readable thought, but always it eluded him in the end.

Shady came to listen for Breed's voice among the multitude of other
sounds, and in some small measure she felt acquainted with the yellow
wolf. She missed his voice on those nights when he hunted in some far
corner of his range and the familiar cry failed to reach her.

This sense of familiarity led her at last to wait for a sight of him.
Breed traveled one night toward the howl which always had the power to
draw him, and he suddenly saw Shady fifty yards ahead. She would permit
of no nearer approach, fleeing before him as he came on, stopping when
Breed stopped, but always keeping that fifty-yard gap between. Every
night for a week Breed strove to narrow the breach, but without success;
but Shady's doubts were wearing down before his constant advances and
she found no menace in his actions. She eventually allowed Breed to draw
near and they viewed one another at a distance of ten yards. Their
course through the sage was a series of eccentric loops as each circled
repeatedly downwind to catch the other's scent.

Then their relations were reversed, Breed the retiring one, Shady the
aggressive. There was the scent of the stables, a horsy smell that clung
to Shady and which Breed could not understand. There seemed too some
vague taint of man about her which held him back. Shady grew bolder in
the face of his timidity, and Breed's new-found suspicion eventually
waned before her friendly insistence. Their friendship once established
they romped together night after night.

Shady was puzzled over the fact that this new playmate invariably left
her early in the night. These meetings took place before Breed raised
his voice to summon the coyote pack for the nightly hunt. He would break
off in the middle of a race and send out the call, then leave the
wondering Shady to her own devices for the rest of the night.

His curiosity satisfied, Breed answered her invitations less often and
she saw him only at infrequent intervals; and there was a reason for
this flagging interest. Wolves and coyotes mate for life, or till one or
the other of a pair falls victim to the wiles of man. When once a pair
is broken the survivor will not take unto himself another mate till the
next running time of wolves. There were pairs of coyotes running
together in Breed's pack; there were also single she-coyotes and single
dogs, but while the mated ones were as devoted as ever before, these
single ones had only a general interest in the others, their attitude
uninfluenced by the lure of sex. And Shady, hampered by her relations
with man and so unable to follow Breed's leadership at will, exercised
less influence over him than either Peg or Cripp.

Breed killed abundantly, the coyotes picking the last morsel of each
victim before dawn. Often he killed twice in one night. Word had spread
that a breed-wolf had turned up on the range and was running with the
coyotes. Private rewards were added to the State bounty till a total of
two hundred dollars was posted as the price on his scalp. Every rider
kept a sharp lookout for the breed; yet so great was his caution that
except for that first day of his return, when Collins had seen him on
the rims, no man had set eyes on the yellow wolf.

Breed's watchfulness for traps and poison baits had waned from the fact
that he found none of either on the range, and he now gave them scarce a
thought. On the other hand his caution to avoid horsemen was quickened
from seeing many of them and his vigilance in that particular was never
relaxed. He chose his beds with care and he slept so lightly that the
least sound penetrated his consciousness and carried its message to his
brain. The shrill cachinnations of a prairie dog, the shriek of a
burrowing owl or the bawling of a range cow; any of these usual sounds
of the open failed to rouse him; but invariably he knew when a man was
dangerously near. If the menace was upwind and within reasonable
distance, his nose detected it. At times the creak of saddle leather
reached his ears or the sound of the horse's hoofs warned him.

This hoof reading was a curious thing. Breed could not tell why he knew
when a horse was ridden, but invariably he did. If walking, the feet of
an iron-shod horse struck pebbles and rocks with a metallic sound and
Breed was suspicious of all horses that wore shoes; but usually a rider
traveled at a steady trail trot. It was not the way of loose horses to
strike a steady, regular gait and hold it, and the even vibrations of a
shuffling trail trot beat through all other sounds and warned him that a
horseman was near.

Men grossly underestimate the keen physical senses of the animal world,
being loath to credit them with finer sense perceptions than those
possessed by man, dulled by countless centuries of disuse. A coyote can
scent the tracks left by a bird long hours past; the smell of fresh
blood is hot in his nostril a full half-mile downwind while the nose of
man could scarce detect it at a distance of two feet. His ears, attuned
to receive the delicately shaded tone inflections of coyote converse,
catch vibrations of sound far too fine to make the least impression on
the ears of man. And it is through these sense impressions that animals
are warned at distances which men believe impossible without the aid of
some subtle intuition or sixth sense. They speak of these things as
animal instinct and let it go at that.

In addition to this Breed had many other ways of protection at his
command; he usually knew of the approach of man long before the direct
message reached him over the paths of his own physical senses,--this
from his vast knowledge of the ways of animals and birds and his ready
understanding of their widespread systems of communications. Their
actions frequently put him on guard before his own senses apprised him
of the actuality of the danger.

These things, coupled with his own habits and backed by coyote
intelligence, made Breed an animal most difficult to stalk.

Collins knew the wolf habit of bedding on a rise of ground. He knew too
that the dog who turns round and round before lying down is not merely
chasing his tail but instead is exhibiting a relic of his wild
ancestors' way of rising frequently from his bed and turning to look off
in all directions before resuming it. Day after day Collins swept the
range with powerful glasses and through his knowledge and persistence he
located Breed at last.

Breed lay on the crest of a knoll. Peg and Cripp were hunting in the
shallow basin below him and he watched with keen interest the diabolical
cunning of his two chief followers. Peg ranged in the open while Cripp
paralleled his course, moving along just behind the wave of a low ridge.
A long-eared jack rabbit bounced from his bed in front of Peg and fled
swiftly for a hundred yards, then halted to look back as he discovered
that he was not pursued. He reared on his haunches, forefeet clear of
the ground, as he watched the coyote who had veered away from him and
was now questing aimlessly through the stunted sage. Peg turned toward
him again and the jack bounced away toward the ridge, stopping again as
Peg swung away. From his point of vantage Breed could see the cunning
Cripp keeping even with the jack, following closely its every move and
peering at it through the scattered sage that topped the ridge. Peg,
apparently unconscious that there was meat in sight, rambled in erratic
tacks that crowded the rabbit toward the ridge. Breed saw a crouching
shape slip behind a sage within ten feet of the jack, whose eyes were
occupied with Peg. There was a flash of yellow as Cripp struck him and
the dying squall of the big hare floated to Breed's ears. He rose from
his bed in excitement, then paused to sweep the country with his gaze
before resuming his nap.

Collins had seen! From the point of a commanding ridge five miles away
he had centered his binoculars on the yellow wolf. The wolfer's horse
grazed in the bottom of a gulch, his reins trailing loose, and Collins
moved swiftly down to him and swung to the saddle. He had covered less
than two hundred yards before Breed, five miles away, knew that a man
rode toward him!

The pronghorn antelope has a most peculiar signal system of his own. He
is furnished with a white patch on his rump, the hair long and stiff,
and when alarmed, instead of bristling his neck roach as do other
animals, the antelope bristles this white rump patch. The sun strikes
light from the glistening hair and every antelope within view follows
suit; the warning is flashed from band to band till every antelope
throughout an area of many miles knows that some man is abroad on the
plains.

Whenever a band of antelopes sported within view of Breed his eyes
flickered open for frequent glimpses of them. Ten minutes after the two
coyotes had killed the jack Breed opened his eyes for a view of a
pronghorn buck that had taken his stand on a low ridge half a mile away.
Breed caught the danger signal and was instantly alert. For as far as
his eye could reach he could see the glistening points of light which he
knew for antelope flashes. The whole antelope tribe was facing toward
the danger and so pointed out its direction for Breed. It is this sort
of signaling which men will not understand, preferring instead to credit
an animal, warned at a distance of many miles, with some mysterious
occult knowledge.

A band of antelope joined the buck on the ridge and fled with him toward
Breed, stopped to look back, stamping their feet excitedly, then swept
on past as a rider topped the ridge they had just left.

Breed flattened in his nest, resting his head between his paws. It was
not his way to rush off in panicky flight across the open at the first
glimpse of man, but rather the coyote way of remaining motionless till
the enemy had passed, or slipping away unseen if he came too close. The
horseman came on at an angle that would take him three hundred yards to
one side, then altered his course and angled the other way. He stopped
to look over a bunch of cows, shifted again to view another bunch and
circled round it; came on again but turned to head a stray steer back
toward the rest. Collins was using the same tactics in approaching Breed
that the two coyotes had so recently used to stalk the jack. He seemed
about to pass two hundred yards away but lifted his horse into a keen
run and whirled him straight for the point of the knoll, then shifted
his course again to round the shoulder of the little hill instead of
over its crest, knowing that Breed was running at top speed down the
opposite slope. He pulled the horse back on his haunches and flung from
the saddle with the first glimpse of the fleeing wolf.

Breed did not stop to look back as most other animals would have done
but ran with every ounce of his speed. He flinched away from the sharp
crack near his head as a rifle ball passed him and the crash of the
report reached his ears. The next shot struck close behind and the
biting gravel stung him as the ricochet hissed past within an inch of
him. He held straight ahead but resorted to the coyote ruse of flipping
from side to side in sharp tacks, his tail snapping jerkily outward to
balance him on the turns. Bullets ripped through the sage about him as
Collins emptied his gun. Then he was safe on the far side of a swell and
Collins was grinning ruefully at a wolfless landscape.

"Coyote stuff!" he said. "A man might as well gun up the corkscrew
flight of a jacksnipe as to pour lead through the gaps in a
side-steppin' freak like that. But you, Breed,--you better keep your eye
on me. The Coyote Prophet is out for your scalp--so walk soft, old
boy,--walk soft."

Breed struck a swift, gliding trot and held it clear to the base of the
hills, stopping only when far up the first slope of them to sweep the
low country for sight of his enemy. That night when he raised his howl
it reached the ears of perhaps a hundred coyotes far out across the
flats and immediately thereafter there was a strange movement in the
coyote tribe. The majority of them rambled in all directions on personal
business or pleasures of their own but through it all, strung out over a
five-mile front, more than a dozen coyotes were running swiftly toward
the hills. They were not to be turned aside but held their course,
gathering to the wolf who had led them to many a kill,--willing to
follow wherever he should lead. An hour later, when Breed raised his
voice from the divide, a wave of coyote answers rose in unison and when
he headed toward the parent range there were fourteen coyotes traveling
with him through the hills. They moved together, but not as man
understands that term, for they did not travel closely grouped. Some
were half a mile to either side and some far behind, and there were gaps
of several hundred yards in the line. Their trails sometimes shifted and
crossed, but noses and ears kept them well informed as to the locality
and actions of the rest.

They entered the rough mass of the main range and pushed on, traveling
in this loose formation. Toward morning Breed stopped and listened to a
far-off sound which reached him. Every coyote in the pack had also
stopped to listen, their red tongues circling hungrily along their lips
as they caught the significance of the sound.

There were no sheep on Breed's immediate range. Trouble between the
cowmen and those who grazed sheep had been temporarily adjusted by
apportioning the range. Sheep now grazed far to the south but the cowmen
allowed the privilege of pastoral transportation across the cattle strip
twice a year for those who summered their sheep in the hills. The snows
were late in falling and the flocks had been held correspondingly late
high in the hills.

Breed had known sheep in the past,--and this was the sound of sheep. Two
herders had combined their bands to work them down to the low country
and the camp tender stayed to help them with the crossing. Breed
listened long to the droning undertone, the maddening blat of five
thousand woollies on the bed ground, its querulous volume persisting
through the sound of water and wind and drifting to him across a
distance of five miles. Then he stretched forth his head and issued his
hunting cry.

The savage peal ripped through the plaintive chant of the sheep as the
prow of a canoe cuts sluggish water, and traveling against the current
of sound it reached the ears of the camp tender who rolled over in his
blankets and cursed. There was a half-minute cessation of the baa and
blat, and before it was resumed the tender had prodded the two herders
into wakefulness.

"Better sleep with one eye open," he advised. "There's a wolf in the
hills. Just crossing through, mebbe--but anyhow you better stay awake to
hold the sheep while I fire a shot to scare him off if he comes too
close. He'll put 'em off the bed ground and scatter 'em if he slips past
the dogs."

The cry sounded again, this time less than a mile away, and a clamor of
coyote howls rose with it.

"Coyotes!" the tender exclaimed. "Night shooting won't scare those
cunning devils off,--they know a man can't see at night. It sounds like
they was running in a pack, and enough of 'em to make a noise like as if
the whole damn coyote nation had took to the hills. Wonder how come
they're pranking round with a wolf? They'll likely only hang along to
cut out some strays--but if they do come in close in a mob like that,
it's good night, sheep! Them shaller-brained woollies will take to the
peaks."

The sheep had risen from their beds and were huddled close. The tender
and herders stood with drawn guns and the three dogs bristled savagely
and turned their gaze toward the timbered slope that rose on one side of
the open side-hill bench that served as a bed ground. There was a
movement among the sheep; the fleecy mass buckled and surged as those on
the outer edge turned and sought safety by plowing toward the
close-packed center. The three men stationed themselves in a triangle
three hundred yards apart, hoping to steady the sheep and hold them. The
dogs circled swiftly round the milling horde, driving merciless teeth
into every panic-stricken sheep who sought to quit the flock. The whole
mass suddenly crowded off to one side and all three dogs sped round to
hold them.

One herder saw a flitting streak leave the timber edge and glide toward
the sheep; another; there was no moon and he could not be sure. His gun
barked twice as a dozen shadowy forms crossed the open, strung out for
two hundred yards. Then hell broke loose on the bed ground.

The fear-crazed horde streamed past the other herder and the tender.
They shouted and struck out with heavy staffs, trying to stem the tide
and turn it back. The resistless sea of fleece surged on and was
swallowed in the gloom of the heavy timber down the slope. And in the
center of it all Breed and the coyote pack were working.

They ripped through the mob and split it; drove through again. The sheep
split into a hundred small detachments and blundered on under the trees.
The men stumbled through the down-timber windfalls and their shouts and
the frantic barking of the dogs rose above the clamor of the sheep,--but
there was not a sound from the yellow killers who had started the
stampede. Every coyote knew the location of the men and each one singled
out a stray band for his own and swept ahead with it. The dogs worked
like fiends but the marauders were in too great force for them. Whenever
a dog bore down upon a coyote the raider fled straight away from the
sheep and their blats recalled the dog to duty. The mad wave rolled down
the slope and up the next.

The first light of dawn revealed each of the three dogs holding a large
band of sheep. The two herders and the camp tender had each rounded up a
smaller bunch. They worked their separate ways back toward the bed
ground, gathering strays along the way. The camp tender held them in the
open while the two herders and the dogs combed the surrounding hills for
stragglers; and as they worked they cursed the coyote and his ways. It
was no unusual thing in their experience for a few coyotes to fly at a
bunch of sheep and scatter them, cutting out a few that straggled away
from the protection of men and dogs, but this savage attack in pack
formation and the harrying of five thousand head of sheep far through
the hills was new to them.

All through the morning they rounded stragglers toward the flock and
shortly after noon they headed the tired sheep down toward the
foothills, fearing a repetition of the stampede. Just at dusk they
milled the sheep and bedded them on a ridge in the low country, a mile
from the base of the timbered hills.

The camp tender looked them over with practiced eye and shook his head.

"There's no chance to make a count now," he said. "But when we do make
one it's dollars to dimes that we'll tally out two hundred short."




CHAPTER III


Collins had waited till the fur was prime and the flesh side of the
coyote pelt showed flint white before throwing out his trap line. He
made the first set three hundred yards from the cabin, choosing the spot
with care, for he knew that the last place a coyote would enter was the
one where guiding clumps of sage formed an inviting lane across the
traps. He selected an open spot instead and dismounted on a sheep pelt
spread flat upon the ground; with a hand-axe he hewed out a triangular
trap bed a foot across by three inches deep, placing every shred of
fresh earth removed from it in a canvas sack; then he fitted a heavy
Newhouse four in place with both springs bent far to the rear and drove
a slender steel pin out of sight through the swivel ring of the chain.
He smoothed a piece of canvas under the jaws and over the pan and poured
the soft earth over it all, filling it level with the surface and
tamping it firmly with his fingers except that within the six-inch
circle of the jaws. From a second sack he sifted dust over the spot till
it matched the surrounding flat, remounted and leaned from the saddle to
recover the sheep pelt on which he had knelt and used it as a fan to
whip the dust of the flat into curling eddies which settled back so
uniformly as to defy the eyes of any man to detect the location of the
trap. The surplus earth removed from the hole he carried away to be
emptied far from the spot. For Collins knew the qualities of his prey
and a good wolfer leaves no sign. He had used no foolish scent to
disguise his own, knowing that the heat of day and the frost of night
would diffuse his scent and obliterate all trace of it, the same as an
animal's trail grows cold in time, while any foreign odor lingering
longer than his own would only serve as a guide for the cunning prey he
sought.

The wisdom of the fox has furnished theme for song and legend, and only
those who have followed the trap line for both fox and coyote know that
Reynard's vaunted brain is but a dry sponge when compared to the
knowledge-soaked brain of the prairie wolf. It is the way of the coyote
to live near man, confident that his own cunning will offset that of his
arch enemy and lead him unscathed through all the contrivances men may
employ for his destruction. Collins knew that the fox was only trap-shy
while the coyote was--vast difference between the two--trap-wise; that
he would go to a bait, knowing the traps were there, and risk his life
in an effort to uncover them and so leave evidence behind that he was
keener than his foe.

At the end of a week Collins had thrown out three pear-shaped loops of
traps, each line with a length of twenty miles, the whole a clover-leaf
effect with his cabin as the base. He had used no bait until his scent
should have been blotted out round his traps, not from fear that coyotes
would not approach the bait while his scent was fresh but from certain
knowledge that they would approach too soon, locate his traps and
uncover them. When the third trap circle was complete he started back
over the first and baited the sets, then commenced the steady routine of
riding one string each day and thus covering his entire line in three
days.

Shady frequently accompanied Collins on these trips and when he made a
trap set she sat down some distance away and watched him with full
understanding of what he was about; for Shady's past experience with
traps had been large. She had seen Collins take many a coyote from his
traps. Twice she had slipped away to steal the bait from some set near
the cabin and both times had felt the sudden deadly clutch of steel jaws
on her foot, remaining in their grip till Collins had released her. She
had seen coyotes dead and bloated from eating poison baits,--and meat
was now a danger signal to Shady, not a lure. She would touch no food
except that which she obtained at the cabin.

The trap line had yielded many coyote pelts while Breed was still in the
hills and he knew nothing of the widespread mortality among the coyotes
in his absence or the dangers which lurked in wait for him on his
return.

There were two hundred sheep scattered for miles through the hills and
Breed and the coyote pack found easy killing. Winter had claimed the
lofty peaks, while but little snow had fallen below timber line.

Breed sensed the coming storm. The movements of the elk herds told him
it would be a heavy one. It was nearing the end of the elk rutting moon
but the bulls were still bugling. Breed heard the clear bugle note of an
old herd bull, the piercing sound reaching him from many miles back
among the snowy peaks. It was closely followed by others. The elk
migration had begun; the herds were evacuating the lofty basins of their
summer range and boiling out through the high passes of the peaks before
the snowfall of the coming storm should block them in,--coming down to
winter in the lower valleys of the hills.

[Illustration: The elk migration had begun. _Page 63._]

The certainty with which animals gauge a coming storm is cited as proof
of that mysterious instinct with which men credit them; yet this
information may reach them through known laws. Breed knew of it from the
elk movements, and it is probable that the elk in turn were warned from
some similarly natural source,--perhaps from atmospheric changes, more
likely from the flight of migratory birds.

A marshland may be empty of certain species of ducks in the fall; then
suddenly a flock will pitch down out of the blue, followed by another
and another till the whole sky is streaked with the oncoming horde. They
will feed and start on, the belated arrivals not even alighting but
holding straight ahead. The flight ceases as suddenly as it commenced
and inevitably a storm drives down out of the north in the wake of the
flocks. But this is not instinct. The storm strikes those birds that
have remained farthest north and as they scurry ahead of it the more
southerly ones take wing. Many ducks fly at rates of speed that are well
over a hundred miles an hour and so can distance the swiftest storms.
Even the ears of man may detect the difference between the
wing-whistlers of a flock of mallards or other slow-flying ducks and the
humming screech of redhead or canvasback hurtling through the night with
tremendous speed; and animals note such things more readily than man.

In any event Breed knew of the coming storm many hours before the first
soft flakes fell and melted on his yellow coat. He took shelter under
the low-hanging branches of a stunted spruce and slept. It snowed for
two days and throughout that time there was little sound in the hills.
Each coyote in the pack had sought out a similar shelter, the mated
pairs bedding together, the others singly. No one of them howled during
the storm. The elk and deer held to their beds without a sound. The few
stragglers who had not yet crossed out through the passes were the only
ones that moved, pushing on through the storm, and the herd bulls
traveling with them bugled to hold their cows together; but the
snow-filled air deadened these distant sounds. And for two days Breed
heard nothing but the soft hissing of the snow through the branches or
the groaning of overburdened trees. The third night a big gray owl
hooted gruffly an hour before dawn, and as if dispersed by the sound of
his voice the last gray clouds scudded past and the stars flamed from
the steel-blue sky of night.

A savage wind sprang up with the sun, shrieking along the exposed ridges
and rippling the valleys of lodgepole pine, hurling its force against
the spruce slopes. For another day Breed heard only the howl of the
gale, the snow sliding from the swaying branches and the sudden crash of
falling trees,--not a sound of life. The fury of the wind abated toward
night and an hour after dark there was a sudden lull followed by one
last rush of wind, leaving the white hills wrapped in a vast silence.

Breed heard a single bugle note of a young bull, the last he was to hear
for another ten months, for the mating time of the antlered tribes had
been ushered out with the storm. The gray owls hooted the warning that
they would soon set forth on silent wings to strike down any small
creature that moved across the white carpet under the trees. The elk
were working back up to the bald ridges that had been blown free of
snow. All the night-feeders of the wild prowled in search of food after
the fast.

Breed raised the hunting cry and the coyote pack answered roll call.
They were gaunt and their flanks were pinched up and hollowed from the
three-day famine. They ran silently and with but a single purpose,
spurred on by hunger. A coyote far out on one flank of the pack winded a
bunch of elk and headed for them. The elk accorded him scarcely a glance
as he drew near. In an earlier day, before the white man had invaded the
foothills, the elk herds had wintered there, but the coyotes had not
molested them; of late a few coyotes had invaded the high country, the
summer range, but the elk did not fear them.

The coyote howled, one short eager blast, and angled in between the herd
and a straggler on the edge of it, a yearling elk, a spike bull, his
first antler growth consisting of two pointed spikes eighteen inches
long. He was not alarmed,--but it was a new kind of coyote that faced
him now, one that had learned pack hunting under the leadership of the
yellow wolf.

The coyote made a swift lunge and drove his teeth in one hind leg. The
young bull whirled and aimed a sweeping slash of his polished spears,
intent upon impaling his foe; and as he turned a second coyote flashed
from behind a tree and slashed him. The bull whirled again and struck
wickedly with a smashing forefoot. The rest of the elk had stopped to
gaze in amazement at this strange scene,--at coyotes attacking an elk.

Every coyote in the pack had altered his course at that short howl,
wheeling as at a command. Yellow shapes had appeared as if by magic and
were sliding under the trees on silent feet and circling the bull. There
was something sinister and purposeful in this concerted action and the
rest of the elk milled about uneasily and at last turned and trotted
off. The spike bull fought with hoof and horn, but at every turn a
coyote slashed him from behind, striking always at the hamstring. His
rage turned to fear and he fled. He struck the heavy four-foot drifts
where the wind had scoured the snow from the ridge above and sifted it
deep in the timber. His sharp hoofs and heavier weight let him deep into
the snow while the coyotes padded easily along, their feet sinking in
but a few inches. He tired himself with desperate charges at some coyote
that always eluded him while others drove fangs in him from behind. More
coyotes joined the running fight and he was far gone before Breed drove
through the pack and struck him with all the force of a killing wolf. He
spent the last of his ebbing strength in a whirlwind of furious
fighting, then went down and the yellow horde swarmed over him. They fed
long and when they left the feast they were no longer gaunt. Flanks had
filled out and paunches sagged heavily, nearly touching the snow. The
following night they returned to the kill and finished it. Then Breed
headed back for the open sagebrush foothills. The immediate fear of
being shot had departed, leaving only the lesson as a reminder of his
narrow escape.

The pack reached the edge of the hills in the first morning light and
many of them kept on, but Breed, more averse to daylight traveling than
they, would not venture down till night. The low country lay spread out
below him, ragged patches of brown alternating with those of dirty
white, the wind having scoured the snow from open grass-country and
piled it to the tops of the sage in the heavier clumps and in long
drifts trailing away downwind behind them, or packed it in the depths of
badland washes and cracks. The powdery snow had been swept from the open
before it had time to melt and the dry air of the hill country had
sucked up what little moisture remained, leaving the flats almost as
dusty as before.

With nightfall Breed descended to the tongue of the foothills that
reached up into the notch formed by the outcropping spur where it joined
the main range at right angles. Thirty miles east along this Hardpan
Spur was his home territory and he followed along the base of it. Not
till within ten miles of Collins' cabin did he howl. The wolfer heard
it, and again he had the feeling that he could almost name that
peculiarity in Breed's note, but before he could give it expression the
solution was slipping away from him as always before. He could feel the
odd quality but it defied analysis in words.

Shady too had heard the call and answered it. Breed started toward her
but stopped abruptly and tested the wind. The scent of stale meat played
on his nostrils and he veered aside to investigate. He moved along a cow
trail and peered from the edge of the sage at a ten-pound chunk of meat
that lay in the center of an open flat. He knew what that meant.
Suspicion flooded him and every hair tingled as he realized that this
was the work of man. Traps! No coyote on the range would have found need
to look twice at the tempting morsel to know that it had not come there
by accident but had been placed by some man as a coyote lure.

Breed, springing as he did from two wise tribes, had been educated in
two schools. His coyote mother had led him to meat, knowing men had put
it there to bait her, and she had taught him to detect the most
cunningly buried trap. Later he had practiced this art himself. The old
dog wolf who was his father had followed one simple rule which served
him well. He killed each meal as he felt the need of it and would touch
no other food, not even returning to previous kills of his own. Breed
was possessed of both traits in moderation, inclining to either for long
periods as his moods varied. Breed moved to within ten feet of the meat
and extended one forepaw, feeling cautiously through the carpet of dust,
then pushed it two inches ahead. For a solid hour that paw was not once
lifted from the ground except when the other was pushed forward to
replace it. He moved ahead an inch at a time, the edging forepaws
feeling through the dust for the least sign of loosened earth beneath.
He knew that the crushing jaws of a trap yawned beneath the surface
somewhere near the meat. His eyes swept every inch of ground for a sign
that differed from the rest and his nose quested for a spot which held
the taint of man. A faint trace of it pervaded the place, coming mainly
from the bait itself and almost blotted by the meat scent.

Cripp and Peg watched every move from a distance of ten feet. Two young
coyotes had come to the spot and one of them worked in toward the bait
from the opposite side, using the same tactics as those employed by
Breed. At the end of an hour Breed stood within three feet of his goal
and the out-stretched paw suddenly touched yielding earth. He scratched
gently along the edge of this softened spot; a claw scraped some solid
substance and the moonlight glinted on a point of naked steel. Breed
pushed his paw beneath it and gently lifted till half of a deadly
four-pound trap showed above the dust. He looked long at it, then veered
past it to the bait; and the young coyote edged in from the other side.
Breed's feet did not shift an inch as he tore a mouthful from the meat,
but the young coyote across from him strained to drag the whole of it
from the spot. It was wired solidly to a stake and he shifted far to
either side in his vain efforts to dislodge it. There was a hissing
grate of loosened springs and the young coyote felt the bone-shattering
snap of a trap as it closed on his foot. Breed whirled and leaped ten
feet away, from which point he watched the struggles of his ill-fated
friend. In his desperate struggles to free himself the young coyote
leaped clear across the meat and the trap that Breed had unearthed
closed on another foot. Breed circled uneasily round the spot, powerless
to help the coyote that was stretched full length between two traps, yet
he lingered till an hour before dawn.

This experience quickened old fears in Breed. Memories of past horrors,
long dormant but not forgotten, welled up out of his mind to increase
his caution, and fresh pangs were added by similar discoveries on each
succeeding night. The whole range seemed studded with fearsome traps and
the odor of stale meat was borne on every breeze. There were few nights
when he did not find some animal fast in one of these man-made snares.
Each new victim acted differently, according to the characteristics of
its kind. Breed found a badger in a trap and the animal ceased his
struggle long enough to wrinkle his nose and hiss at Breed with a thick
snakelike sound. The badger's forepaws were more than twice the size of
his hind feet, and were fitted with heavy two-inch claws, while those of
the hind feet measured but half an inch. He was caught by one hind foot,
leaving the powerful spading forks of the forepaws free to work. He had
always found safety by burrowing in the ground and so now, in his last
extremity, he turned to digging and plowed every inch of the surface
within reach. He settled on one spot at last and burrowed from sight.
Breed watched the heaving dirt till it ceased to move as the badger
settled comfortably in fancied security, buried to the full limit of the
trap chain.

Some nights later Breed passed a cross fox that had strayed down from
the high country and had stepped into one of Collins' traps. The fox was
never still, weaving in and out, looping and turning round the pin that
held the trap; lashed into constant movement by his native nervousness
but making no strenuous efforts to break loose. Later the same night he
found a bobcat. The big cat made no move save a slight creasing of his
facial muscles preparatory to a snarl if the wolf drew near. The first
pain had dulled and he rested quietly, lacking the hardihood to stretch
his own flesh and bones in a struggle against the trap.

But Breed always found a trapped coyote fighting,--fighting silently and
gamely to the last heartbeat. Coyotes are high in the scale of
intelligence and so each one has an individuality of his own. One would
surge time after time against the chain, driving savagely to the end of
it. Another would grind his teeth against the cold steel till his jaws
dripped blood, while a third would amputate the mangled foot. But
whatever the method, the basic fact was the same,--no coyote waited
submissively for his fate but waged a ceaseless, desperate fight for
freedom.

All these things heightened Breed's suspicions. He felt the reassertion
of wolfish caution within him, driving out the coyote desire to outwit
man. Three times he unearthed the traps and stole the bait. Then he
refused to go near stale meat. He was nauseated by the smell of it and
merely avoided instead of investigating the spots from which the scent
came to him. And this was not through fear of traps--he retained full
confidence in his ability to detect them--but from the fact that
wherever he had found traps in the past he had also found poison and so
these two were associated together in his mind.

Throughout a whole month of accustoming himself to these new conditions,
Breed had visited Shady but twice. He had the companionship of coyotes
to fill his time and the lonesome howls of the she-wolf were unanswered.
It is the stock dog without steady occupation that reverts to the wild.
Mere inactivity, even if coupled with kindness, is insufficient to still
his natural restlessness and fill his life; he must have careful
training and active employment to be content,--and Shady was half wild.

The mating time of wolves was drawing near and Breed caught the new note
in Shady's voice. He dropped all other business to hurry to her. Though
the season was yet some time ahead they knew its nearness and each
recognized in the other a possible future mate.

Collins thought of Shady more as a pet than as a dog and so had not
troubled to train her. The wild traits in her were as apparent in
maturity as they had been in infancy--even more pronounced--and chief
among these was her natural aptitude for stealing. She pillaged Collins'
stores and even sneaked food from the table when his back was turned, as
her wild ancestors for many generations had stolen his bait. Collins
curbed this propensity, not by judicious training which would eliminate
it, but by the simple process of chaining her to the cabin wall when he
left for a trip and did not wish her to accompany him. So it was not
strange that Shady viewed thieving from the standpoint of expediency.
Those who came to Collins' cabin predicted a bad end for Shady.

That insistent note in her voice was more pronounced as the season
neared and Breed tingled to the sound of it. The frequency of his visits
increased till they were of nightly occurrence instead of semi-monthly.
He used every wolfish inducement to lure her away from the vicinity of
the twinkling lights that marked the abode of man. She longed to follow
him into the wild but could not bring herself to face its terrors. Breed
longed to follow her when she left him but could not bring himself to
face the horrors which must lurk near the haunts of men. These clashing
outlooks upon life held them apart. The wild represented safety for
Breed, its dangers known to him and accepted as a part of it and not to
be greatly feared. Those dangers were the work of man, and by natural
consequence Breed assumed that their numbers and deadliness increased in
proportion as he drew nearer the homes of men, the house itself the most
dangerous of all. Shady's mode of life had taught her the reverse of
this; that complete safety lay in the cabin and its immediate vicinity,
the known and unknown terrors of the wild increasing in ever-widening
circles dependent upon the distance from the refuge of the cabin that
was home to her.

The season had started and some few coyotes had paired, yet Breed could
not induce Shady to follow him. The preceding winter her desire for
motherhood had been thwarted. Collins had chained her to the cabin for a
month. Coyotes are without the wolf suspicion which fills their larger
cousins with fear of human habitations, and they are prone to
investigate them at night while a wolf will not approach. Several dog
coyotes had braved the dangers of Collins' cabin in answer to Shady's
howls. Her soft whimpering had roused the wolfer each time this occurred
and every new admirer had been greeted with a charge of buckshot as he
slipped toward the house, three dog coyotes having paid for their
temerity with their lives.

The Coyote Prophet intended the same imprisonment for Shady the present
season but he neglected it one day too long. He came from the cabin, a
collar and chain in his hand, only to see Shady slip away into the dusk.
A minute later she howled.

Breed heard it. Every fiber of him quivered to the sound. It was the
mating call!

Collins whistled in vain. There was no answering whimper from Shady. But
the habit of obedience was strong in her and she lingered within sound
of it. Breed came nearer than ever before, his fears dulled by the
message she had sent him. Collins came from the house again and whistled
shrilly. Breed shrank from the sound and drew back as Shady trotted a
short distance toward the house; she answered the whistle with an uneasy
whine and Collins moved in the direction from which it came, coaxing as
he advanced.

Fear flooded Breed. It spurred him to sudden rushes of flight which were
halted in a few stiff bounds as the longing for Shady cried out against
his leaving her. Then came the clanking of the chain in Collins' hand.
It was the clank of a trap chain to Breed,--and he was off. That same
sound, its meaning so different for each of them, resulted in flight for
both. Shady ran with him through the night, and once started it was not
so hard to keep on. And as she ran she transferred her trust from
Collins to Breed, giving herself entirely into his keeping to lead her
through the unknown perils which lay ahead,--and she ran close to him,
her nose almost touching his flank.




CHAPTER IV


The exhilarating element of danger in trap robbing, which appeals so
strongly to the coyote, held no fascination for Shady. She was vastly
trap-wise but used her knowledge solely for self-preservation. Every
scrap of meat on the range represented possible pain or death to her and
she found no sport in close investigation with its attendant risks. She
was entirely dependent upon Breed, feeling a sense of security in his
nearness, but weighed down by the vast unknown which seemed to close in
upon her whenever the gap between them exceeded the span of one leap.
She would not touch any food other than that which he provided.

The coyotes clustered round the steer that Breed pulled down a few hours
after luring Shady from the cabin and she viewed them suspiciously,
warning them off by repeated growls. Peg and Cripp edged in to feed.
Shady's protest rose frenziedly and she raged at them but did not
attack, and the two old coyotes eyed her warily as they ate. She noted
that Breed accepted their presence and she quieted and patterned her
actions according to her mate's.

The rest of the pack came in. Her uneasiness persisted and for an hour
she ate but little, edging away from physical contact with those who
crowded about her. She pressed close to Breed's side and whirled to snap
at any coyote who attempted to wedge between them, but her suspicions
subsided as she found that these nips were never returned. Whenever a
dog coyote was inclined to make friendly advances to Shady a low growl
from Breed warned him from her side. The sense of strangeness, of having
been catapulted from a sheltered life into the midst of a growling mob,
wore off and Shady rapidly accustomed herself to these new conditions.

The feast was but half finished when the head of every coyote in the
pack was raised at once and the shuffling feet and grinding jaws were
stilled as a timber wolf howled from the slope of the Hardpan Spur. All
animal sounds were suspended till the last ripples of Breed's answering
cry died away; then lesser beasts, having preserved strict silence while
two mighty hunters spoke, resumed their own interrupted communications.

The Coyote Prophet heard the two cries, and that baffling quality in
Breed's voice was instantly clear to him, as was the reason why he had
never before been able to give it name. He had quested for the
difference with his ear,--and the difference lay in the feel of the
sound. Collins had felt the crawling of his flesh and the roughening of
his skin at the gray wolf's cry; for a man may hear that note every
night of his life and the wolf shiver will shake his frame the last time
it sounds as surely as it does the first. It is not fear; no man can
name it; but the wolf shiver is as inseparably linked with the wolf howl
as the involuntary gasp is linked with a dash of ice water on the spine.
And Collins knew that that quality was lacking in Breed's cry. The
personality of the gray wolf was marked by absolute savagery, his bleak
outlook on life undiluted by a single ray of that humor which is so
evident in every act of the dog and the prairie wolf; and this
difference of temperament was reflected in his voice, apparent to the
ears of the animal world, apparent to Collins only in the different way
in which his subconscious mind reacted to his howl. Collins, having once
defined Breed's note, its sound so identical with that of the wolf howl
yet so dissimilar in the elusive feeling which accompanied it, had no
further doubt that he could thereafter identify Breed by his howl.

"You, Breed! I've got your number now," he said. "I could pick you out
from amongst a hundred wolves." This was merely a casual assertion, a
self-congratulation over having solved the puzzle, and the Coyote
Prophet made it without a thought that the day would ever come when he
might have opportunity to file it among prophecies fulfilled.

The wolf howl affected Shady in a similar way, its stark savagery
clashing discordantly with the dog strain in her. She felt the grating
along her spine, and the hair rose with it. There was an air of
expectancy among the coyotes. Heads were raised between mouthfuls and
all eyes were repeatedly turned toward the hills. It was the first time
that Shady had heard the cry of one of the big gray hunters. She noted
the tension among her new friends without reading its portent. Of them
all, Breed seemed the only one unaffected. One by one the coyotes left
the feast, then the remaining few sidled hurriedly away as a huge dog
wolf moved swiftly across the flat. His pace slowed as he neared the
kill and he halted ten feet away, his quivering nose taking stock of the
two who fed there.

Shady's long run through the sage had whipped her soft fur full of sage
dust, its sharp scent nearly obliterating the conglomerate smell of the
cabin which usually clung to her. The reek of coyote scent and fresh
blood that permeated the spot still further concealed it, and though the
wolf caught the peculiar odor he could not trace its source to her
without closer inspection. He was hungry and advanced to the meat,
tearing off huge bites and gulping them down till the wire edge of his
hunger was appeased, then sidled cautiously round the steer to nose the
mating she-wolf. As he neared her his eyes peered over her at Breed.
That foreign odor which he had noted he now traced to Shady, but having
once accepted her it did not trouble him. Shady flinched away from him
and Breed's lips writhed up and cupped away from his ivory fangs. There
was no mistaking the snarl that accompanied this baring of his teeth and
the gray wolf moved back to the opposite side of the steer.

Thereafter both wolves ate sparingly and each watched for the least
hostile move in the other. The coyote pack ringed in close, awaiting the
departure of the timber wolf. He frequently turned his head and favored
the closer ones with a baleful stare, the move always accompanied by a
flattening of his ears, and the ones so fixed by his appraising eye
shrank deeper into the sage. Each time this occurred his head swung
abruptly back toward Breed.

Shady feared and hated the wolf. If she thought of him in human words
she would have given him the name of Flatear, and with good reason. In
coyote, fox and wolf the ears are even more expressive than the eyes. A
wolf's ears work when he sleeps, one of them inclining toward the least
sound that reaches him. When awake his ears seem to work automatically
in conjunction with nose and eyes, tipping sharply forward and turning
in the direction of any strange object or questionable scent that
excites his curiosity. And the flattening of the ears is indicative of
his mood, preceding even the snarl, their backward angle an accurate
gauge of his intent. It seemed to Shady that the big wolf's ears were
chronically laid as he regarded Breed. She was unversed in the ways of
her wild kinsfolk and could not know that the yellow wolf and the gray
were sparring for the advantage of the first blow in the savage fight
that would soon be waged for the right of proprietorship,--herself as
the prize.

Both wolves centered their attention on the main issue and waited only
for an opening. Shady and the restless coyotes out in the sage were
forgotten, each wolf conscious only of his foe. Those others mattered
not at all, for there were certain known laws which all past experience
had proved unalterable. She-wolves showed small concern over the clashes
of rival males; coyotes never fought with their big gray cousins, and
there were no other wolves about. The issue was squarely up to them.

Each time that Breed appeared off guard for a split second the gray wolf
laid his ears, the involuntary betrayal of muscles tensing for the fatal
spring; and Breed's own flattening ears each time evidenced his
readiness to counter. Shady sensed the enmity between them without
knowing the inevitable result. Her mode of fighting was the impulsive
way of the dog, the act almost simultaneous with the desire, and this
protracted, cold-blooded calculation was new to her.

Breed gave an opening at last, turning and reaching for a bite of meat,
and exposing the unprotected side of his neck. Flatear struck for it
without a sound, driving straight across the steer with all his weight
behind the gleaming rows of teeth. Breed dropped flat and as his enemy
swept over him he swung his head up and sidewise in a terrible slash
that tore an ugly rent in the gray wolf's paunch. They whirled face to
face,--and both were treated to a series of tremendous surprises which
shattered all previous convictions.

Shady harked back to the ways of her domestic ancestors, to the custom
of dashing into a neighborhood dog fight and mauling the one strange dog
in the lot, regardless of sex,--and Breed had been her friend long
before he had become her mate. Flatear was the one strange dog to Shady,
and he found himself assailed by a screeching fury who fought without
care or caution, her sole aim being to sink her teeth in any available
part of him. As he leaped away from this unnatural she-wolf he was met
by a second surprise. The coyote pack had learned to strike when the
leader struck. Peg flashed round a sage and laid open his flank, and as
he whirled to face this new enemy Cripp slashed him from behind. Three
coyotes darted past Breed and before he had recovered from the shock of
the surprise his enemy had fled.

Flatear did not flee from fear but from an overwhelming sense of the
whole world gone mad, the shattering of tradition and the overthrow of
natural laws. The chaos in his mind sent him flying from this insane
place within six seconds after his first attack. A mating she-wolf had
been transformed into a she-fiend and in the same second he had been
mobbed by coyotes. No doubt he believed with Collins that strange things
had come to pass of late in the ranks of the coyote tribe. Flatear
headed back for the hills out of which he had come, and as he ran his
bewilderment crystallized into a consuming hatred for the strange yellow
wolf, the hybrid beast who had upset the established order of things. He
did not know that Breed himself had been so nearly paralyzed with sheer
astonishment that he had not joined the attack.

The coyotes settled once more to the enjoyment of their interrupted
banquet. Breed little realized that he had made a mortal enemy, one who
would not merely attempt to deprive him of his mate during the running
moon as would any other unattached dog wolf, but one whose enmity was
for the individual and who had marked him for the slaughter when next
they met, regardless of time or season.




CHAPTER V


The number of coyotes in Collins' territory had been cut down by half
and only the wisest were left. As they grew more trap-wise the wolfer
increased the cunning of his sets. Clearly marked cow trails crossed
through every low saddle in the foothills and Collins studded these with
traps. After once his scent was cold the coyotes had nothing to warn
them of these sets, but trail trapping is largely chance and not
productive of great results.

Breed saw one coyote in a trail trap and he forswore the following of
cow trails. The coyotes soon learned to avoid them. Collins noted the
absence of coyote tracks on trails that had once been padded thick with
them and the wolfer chuckled over this evidence of their
resourcefulness.

Some of Breed's pack had fallen victims to the trap line but their
places had been filled by new recruits, every one trap-wise to the last
degree. But even these found it increasingly difficult to retain their
lives.

A new menace hovered over every coyote that ranged near the foot of the
Hardpan Spur, a menace that filled the hardiest prairie wolf with dread.
Many a lone coyote was suddenly startled by a huge shape that leaped for
him and bore him down. None thus attacked lived to spread the warning
and the only knowledge the others had of the lurking fiend was the
finding of old friends, stiff and dead, their throats gashed open by
savage teeth. The tracks and scent round these murder spots identified
the slayer.

Flatear spent his days high in the hills and at night he dropped to the
low country to perpetrate his unnatural crimes. Coyotes had violated the
customs of centuries and turned their teeth against him. He now wreaked
vengeance for this affront. There were no wolves to answer his call, so
Flatear no longer howled, but prowled the range without a sound to warn
prospective victims, a silent assassin that struck without notice.

At the end of a week he had left a long trail of victims behind but not
one of Breed's pack was among them. Those that had pack-hunted with the
yellow wolf and learned the advantages of combined attack in killing
heavy game now put that same knowledge to good use for their own
protection, sufficient evidence of the quick adaptability with which
coyotes rise to meet any new emergency.

Mated pairs now ran close when hunting, sometimes traveling in fours.
Flatear soon discovered that the teamwork of a pair of fighting coyotes
was more than a match for even his great prowess and his kills grew
fewer.

Cold fear clutched every coyote that caught a fugitive scent of the gray
killer, but Breed did not share this dread. He was Flatear's match in
size and strength and so was not concerned. Breed could not know that
Flatear's hatred had become almost an obsession; that night after night
the slayer was craftily trailing him and that killing coyotes was but a
side line to lighten the hours of a protracted stalk for Breed himself.
Flatear was a veteran warrior and he waited only for an opportunity to
attack when he should find Breed alone. Nose and ears kept him apprised
of the yellow wolf's whereabouts, but usually there were coyotes running
with him and invariably the tracks of the she-fury were mingled with
those of her mate. Breed was untroubled by any thought that sudden death
lurked in wait for him the first time he should run alone through the
sage.

While Flatear plied his bloody trade and made the nights fearsome for
the coyotes, men found one more method of harrying them by day.

The first Breed knew of this danger was one day when he lay with Shady
on a high point of ground. There were many things about Shady which he
could not fathom. From the first he had found much of mystery in her.
She insisted on traveling in broad daylight whenever the notion seized
her and she seemed not to share his fear of horsemen, often rising
incautiously from her bed for a better view of them, careless of the
risk of their seeing her.

Shady cocked her ears alertly at a distant sound, and the same note,
faint as it was, roused Breed from his nap. Somewhere off across the
foothills several men had raised their voices in a wild outburst of
cheers. This sounded again and again, each time from a point nearer to
where Breed lay. A band of antelope sped past without following their
usual custom of stopping to look back. Breed caught the vibrations of
pounding hoofs, the sound of many hard-running horses blended in one.
Through it all he heard an occasional note that was strange to him, a
shrill, sharp note that had something of the wolf in it, yet which he
knew was not made by any beast he had met before. And at this note Shady
laid her ears and growled.

The cheers and the hammering hoofs came closer and Breed fixed his eyes
on the edge of the flat bench spread out for half a mile before him. A
coyote spurted from the mouth of a draw off to the left of Breed's
position and raced across the flat. He was stretched out and running his
best, but before he had covered two hundred yards five great wolfhounds
poured out of the draw. They were slender and long-coupled, capable of
tremendous speed, and before the coyote passed below Breed the lead dog
was but a few lengths behind.

For the most part the dogs ran silently and wasted no breath in
senseless clamor, but occasionally one of them loosed an eager yelp, the
sound as thin and keen as his body. A dozen riders streamed across the
flat on furiously running horses, cheering as they came. The coyote
doubled to evade the snapping jaws of the foremost dog, and as he turned
another struck him. He rolled over twice, and when he gained his feet he
faced his enemies. He knew the game was up but he went down
fighting,--fighting against odds without a whine; and Breed watched five
savage dogs mauling a limp dead thing that ten seconds past had been his
valued friend. These strange beasts did not move off as the men rode up,
and Breed realized with a shock that the men did not ride with the
purpose of killing them; that they were leagued together and that the
dogs were the creatures of men the same as sheep and cows were their
property.

He stole down the far slope, keeping the high ground between himself and
the horsemen. Shady followed him closely, moving furtively and with many
backward glances, her tail tucked almost between her legs, and Breed,
accustomed to Shady's indifference to the approach of riders, wondered
at this sudden reversal of her usual ways.

But it was not the men that roused Shady's fear; above all other things
she feared and hated dogs. The few that had followed their masters to
Collins' house had always sensed the wild blood in her, and at the first
opportunity they had pounced on her with intent to kill. Shady had found
friends among the coyotes and had found only hostility among dogs.
Savagery is only relative, according to the views of the one who
pronounces upon it, and from Shady's experience she was right in her
judgment that the ultimate limit of savagery was reached only in the
dog.

The owner of the dog pack lived some ten miles from Collins and the
whole countryside had assembled to witness the first race. There were
fewer riders in each chase as the novelty wore off but the days were few
when the owner failed to take the dogs out for a run. Wolfhounds run
only by sight and coyotes are slippery prey, doubling and twisting on
their trails to throw their pursuers off, so the result was always in
doubt and every chase did not yield a coyote pelt.

After that first day Breed did not wait for the dogs to draw near but
started off the instant he found that they were coming his way. It was
Shady's habit of daylight traveling that led Breed into grave danger
within a week after the dog pack had made their first run. He followed
Shady down the bed of a gulch which screened their movements from prying
eyes but at the same time served to shut out all the various signs by
which Breed received long-range warnings. As they loitered along the
bottom of the draw the antelope bands were flashing the danger sign;
range cows on the ridges all stood facing the same way; everywhere
coyotes were scurrying for cover, but all these things passed over
Breed's head. A coyote flipped into the gulch and he did not tarry but
passed Breed with merely a sidelong look and vanished round a bend.

Breed was instantly alert. He darted to the rim of the draw and looked
warily about him. There was not an antelope in sight and no cows grazed
in the little basin that flanked the gulch at the point where he left
it; not a sign to warn him of the source of the danger. He ran for the
crest of a ridge for a better view,--and the next instant he was in full
flight back the way he had come, for as he sky-lined himself on the
ridge five sharp-eyed wolfhounds a quarter of a mile away had darted
toward him. He knew that they had seen him and were coming, that death
was sweeping down on him.

He turned up the gulch and followed it toward the hills, Shady running
her best to keep up with him. The dogs fanned out to look for him as
they topped the ridge. The upper end of the draw widened to blend into a
broad mesa and the hounds caught sight of the two wolves as they headed
out across the flat. Breed had held his lead but a clean race of over a
mile confronted him, the flat affording not one shred of cover. He swung
his head slightly to one side as he ran, one backward-rolling eye taking
in every detail of what transpired behind him.

He saw the five specks increase their speed and knew that they had
sighted him again; they angled slightly and he watched them draw
gradually together, their courses converging on the center of his line
of flight till they were once more running well bunched,--and gaining.

His lead was being steadily cut down, the gap perceptibly lessened; the
specks showed larger with every backward glance till every dog was
clearly visible. Shady was fleet but her speed was no match for Breed's
and he would not leave her. The high-pitched sinister yelps sounded from
behind him as the eager dogs closed up, putting forth every effort to
end the race before the wolves reached the choppy badland breaks at the
far edge of the flat. Shady's pace was lagging, and they gained the
first gulch of the broken country a bare fifty yards ahead of the
leading hound.

The gulch feathered out into a maze of branching draws and Shady lost
Breed on the first sharp turn and ran on alone while the dogs streamed
past after the yellow wolf.

Breed slowed his pace, fear for Shady's life surmounting even the fear
for his own, but as the lead dog flashed into view without any sound of
a fight behind him, Breed knew that his mate was safe and he turned on
the reserve speed he had not been free to use while she ran with him.

The country ahead was a tangle of small flat-tops, crisscrossed by a
network of badland washes and cut-bank draws, and for two miles he
eluded the dog pack by sheer brainwork and cunning. But the hounds
pressed him hard. Their speed was greater than his own and each time
they lost sight of him they spread out both ways. Whenever he crossed a
flat-top bench some one of them always sighted him and bored straight
for the spot, and his team-mates, noting this sudden burst of speed,
wheeled as one and fell in behind him.

Breed's one aim was to reach the hills, knowing that once among the
trees he could shake them off. His course led him ever nearer to the
base of the spur but he knew at last that he could not make his goal.
His muscles had lost their spring and his breath came in leaky gasps;
the dogs would pull him down on the first sagebrush slopes of the hills
before he could gain the shelter of the trees.

He broke cover and started up the last long sloping bench that led to
the base of the spur. The mouth of every gulch behind him seemed to
belch forth a dog and they raced across the bench, spread out for two
hundred yards.

Then Breed sprung one last desperate trick,--a coyote trick. A badland
wash intersected the flat squarely across his route and Breed leaped to
the bed of it and fled fifty yards along its course, then flashed into a
narrow coulee that led straight back toward the dogs. The draw was
shallow, with scarcely sufficient depth to cover him, but the dogs did
not suspect and as they darted on ahead Breed doubled back through the
very center of the pack. He ran with the last of his strength, crept
from the sheltering coulee and leaped into the center of a heavy clump
of sage where he crouched flat and peered out at the puzzled dogs. Of
all the beasts there are but few with the brains to plan such a coup and
the nerve to carry it through when winded and played out,--and with
certain death the penalty for a single slip. The ruse would not have
fooled a trail hound for an instant, but with sight-hunting coursers it
worked.

Breed watched the dogs swing wide and scour the country off to the right
of him till they appeared as swift-skimming dots in the distance. Then
one of them lined out with increased speed as he topped a ridge. One
after another Breed saw them flash over the skyline and disappear.




CHAPTER VI


Shady's first impression after taking the wrong turn in the coulee was
one of vast relief at having evaded the dogs. The recovery of her breath
was accompanied by a vague sense of loss which rapidly deepened into an
ache of loneliness so oppressive that her whole spirit was weighed down
by it. She started up through the long crescent-shaped neck of badlands
that partially encircled Collins' cabin and extended clear to the foot
of the spur, knowing that this was Breed's favorite route when making
for the hills. She moved slowly and with many halts, cocking her head
sidewise and tilting her ears for some sound of her mate. She came out
into a funnel-shaped basin that sloped down from the first sharp rise of
the spur. The small end of it formed a saddle between two knobs, leading
to Collins' shack as through a natural gateway.

Shady trotted to the saddle and gazed down at the wolfer's cabin five
hundred yards away, the spot which had meant home to her over the
greatest part of her life. The door stood invitingly open. She turned
and saw the five dogs pouring down the funnel of the basin. The sudden
purposeful increase of speed which Breed had noticed as the dogs left
his field of view had been occasioned by the sight of Shady standing in
the notch.

Without an instant's hesitation Shady headed straight for that open
door, a haven of refuge which had served her well in the past when
assailed by the dogs of visiting ranchers. The dogs were jaded and Shady
was fresh, and she reached her goal without their gaining an inch.

Collins sat smoking his pipe when he was startled by the frenzied
entrance of his former pet. Shady failed to pause for greetings but made
one mad leap from the door and slid to the farthest corner under the
wolfer's bunk.

Collins grunted with surprise and for a space of five seconds his brain
refused to function with its usual snap. Then he rose and crossed to the
door to discover the reason for Shady's headlong home-coming,--and
slammed it shut with but a single second to spare.

One dog rose on his hind feet, standing higher than a man, and savagely
raked the door from top to bottom with his claws while another opened
his jaws wide and closed them, his teeth splintering across the smooth
surface as he sought to gnaw his way inside. The remaining three circled
the cabin, sniffing explosively at the cracks between the logs. Shady
was seized with a fit of excessive shivering induced by these dread
sounds, and Collins heard her hind leg-joints beating a spasmodic tattoo
on the cabin floor. Then he turned on his ready grin.

"Just one split second more," he said, "and they'd have surged in here
and wrecked this plant for fair,--and that's a fact!"

That night when Breed sent out his call for Shady there was no answering
cry. He called again and again, an agony of longing and entreaty in his
tones. A sickening dread entered his soul,--the fear that his mate had
been caught in a trap, shot by some rider or killed in some other way by
man. He little suspected that Shady was at that instant resting her head
on a man's knee and enjoying the feel of his fingers scratching behind
her ears.

"Good old Shady," Collins said, roughing her head between his hands.
"You're a renegade now, old girl,--a she-outlaw, that's what you are.
You've gone over to the wild bunch, and men will be out after your
scalp; and they'll get it too. You'll go ambling up to some man and
he'll blow you up. You won't stick with me now unless I keep you
chained. You'll go back to 'em,--and if you're lucky you may go right on
living for mebbe a month. You don't know the ropes out there and they'll
pick you up."

Shady suddenly stiffened at Breed's first cry.

"Don't need to be afraid of that," Collins assured her. "That's old
Breed. He won't bother you. It must be hell, Shady, to be born astraddle
of a fence like you, afraid of tame dogs and the wild bunch too."

Breed howled again and Shady moved to the door and whined, scratching
and sniffing along the crack. Her uneasiness increased with every howl.
She clawed so vigorously at the door that it rattled on the hinges; then
her pent-up emotions sought partial relief in action and she ran in
crazy circles about the cabin, weaving in and out among the furniture at
top speed, running over and under the bunk and leaping over chairs, then
brought up in front of Collins and gazed pleadingly up into his face.
The Coyote Prophet regarded her speculatively.

"I read you wrong, Shady," he said. "You're not afraid of Breed--you
want to go to him, that's what; he's a friend of yours. Surely now, an
old savage like him didn't go and take up with a little misfit like
you."

Breed's voice sounded again and Shady raised her own, the whole cabin
ringing with her long-drawn howl. Up in the funnel basin Breed had
picked up her trail and was trying to work it out from among the trails
left by the dogs. He stopped abruptly and listened. A strange muffled
sound had reached him, hollow and drumlike, but there was a familiar
chord in it, and Breed swept ahead on Shady's trail, his hope of finding
her alive renewed.

"You're mated up with that yellow wolf," Collins stated. "Two freaks
paired up! If you track round with Breed you may live longer than I
thought. He'll show you how to beat the game." The Coyote Prophet
crossed to the door and opened it. "Go to it, Pet," he said. "He's
a-calling you." But the last remark was addressed to a streak that
vanished into the night.

Shady met Breed in the notch and frisked wildly around him. Breed's
delight in this reunion was as deep as hers but he was more dignified
and staid, his emotions less openly apparent. All through the night
Shady held so close to him as to brush against him frequently as they
ran.

Shady rapidly absorbed much of Breed's caution. Two days after their
race with the dogs Shady had occasion to revise her estimates of
horsemen. Twice in the same day, after imprudently showing herself in
the open, she heard the vicious reports of their guns and the balls
tossed up spurts of earth about her. Thereafter she followed Breed's
lead in all such cases. Breed's way was the wolf way, recognizing no
individuals among men but classing them as a dangerous whole. Shady,
having lived among them, knew them as individuals, but this knowledge
was soon blurred and she too acquired the views of the wild things
toward men and lumped them as a whole. There was but one reservation.
She placed Collins, the one man who had been kind to her, in a class by
himself.

This eccentricity was the source of much worry to Breed. Shady could see
no good reason why she should not revisit Collins when the mood so moved
her. One night she turned abruptly from her course and headed for the
twinkling lights of the wolfer's cabin. Breed turned with her. Cripp and
Peg, each with his mate, ran on either flank. The coyotes stopped two
hundred yards from the house but Shady held straight ahead. Breed tried
to dissuade her but to no avail. He nipped her sharply, and its only
effect was to cause her to tuck her tail and spurt for the house.

Breed stopped twenty yards away, every nerve quivering from excitement
over this suicidal move. He heard Shady scratch at the door. It swung
back and a flood of light streamed out into the night. Breed heard a
man's voice booming out a welcome; saw his mate jump up and put her paws
against him, their outlines framed in the lighted doorway. Then the door
closed and his mate was inside with a man, the arch enemy of all wolves.
Breed whirled and fled. He ran blindly and at high-pressure speed as if
he fled before an actual enemy. All his sense of balance was thrown out
of gear, the fitness of things upset, and he felt his reason tottering.
For his ear, attuned to receive the meaning of all animal sounds, could
detect the least tremor of menace in any animal note; when a range bull
bellowed Breed knew whether the tones held invitation to his cows or
husked a warning to some intruder that had strayed over into his chosen
range. In any animal voice the quiver of anger or fear was easily
apparent to him; and there had been no vibrations of anger in the man's
tones, only those of friendliness.

The coyotes were hard pressed to keep abreast of him, and after a wild
race of some four miles he wheeled abruptly and retraced his course, the
longing for his mate combining with curiosity to draw him irresistibly
back to the spot where this impossible thing had transpired.

His pace slackened as he neared the house, then increased as he heard
Shady's voice. Shady had met Breed in the notch after her first visit to
the cabin and she naturally assumed that she would find him there again.
She repaired to the spot at once after leaving the cabin and waited for
him to come.

For three nights in succession Shady made her pilgrimage to meet her one
friend among the world of men. Breed could not unravel the mystery of
these visits. He could only know the actual that reached him over the
trails of his physical senses. Sights, scents and sounds were facts to
him. Those senses combined to show him that the unnatural visits were
real,--that Shady actually entered the lair of a man and came back
smelling strong of him. Yet when she was with him Breed felt a sense of
unreality in his memories of those visits, partaking of the same vague
qualities that dreams possessed for him after waking.

But he fathomed it at last, evidence that his brain came from his coyote
mother, a brain that is capable of constructive reasoning, of taking two
facts which the physical senses have verified and evolving a third from
them,--the association of ideas.

His nose told him that there was something in Shady's scent that was
similar to that left by the dog pack. His eyes had proved that those
dogs were the companions of men. Eyes, ears and nose testified that
Shady visited the haunts of men and was accepted as a friend. His nose
further told him that Shady was half coyote, and her voice added proof
of this. From out this fragmentary assortment of facts Breed found a
satisfactory answer. He knew that Shady was of the wild, yet that she
was also linked with the world of men, thus combining two things which
in the past had seemed widely separate, a chasm too wide to span,
dividing the animals of the wild from those belonging to man.

Each recurring visit confirmed this fact. Shady missed two nights, but
on the third she headed for the cabin with the coming of night. The
comparative warmth of early winter had given way to the gripping,
penetrating cold of January. Breed's appetite increased with a
corresponding drop in temperature and he was hungry. But from Shady's
actions he knew that she was seized with one of those queer lapses which
called her back to former ways and he delayed the hunt until she should
return from this trip. The coyotes had all mated and the season for
pack-hunting was past, yet many of them still rallied to his call; but
on this night he lingered in the notch and waited for Shady to come back
to him before summoning the pack.

He prowled uneasily about the narrow saddle, and in his nervousness over
Shady's protracted absence he forgot the danger of following cow trails
and padded restlessly up and down those which threaded through the gap.
And as he waited for her a mortal enemy found the chance he had sought
so long and began stalking him from behind.

Flatear dropped from the hills to follow his ruthless trade and as he
swung down the funnel basin Breed's scent was wafted to his nose. The
breeze held up the slope,--he had the wind on the yellow wolf. He
shifted across the wind but it carried no coyote scent. His victim was
alone. Flatear followed up the drifting current of scent and sighted
Breed at a hundred yards. His feet made no sound and the wind held
right; the breed-wolf was unaware of his approach.

Breed saw a sudden flow of light from the cabin and knew that Shady was
leaving it to come back to him. He sent forth the rally call to the pack
and turned to trot along a cow trail. He gave a sudden mighty leap into
the air and crashed down four feet away as he struck the end of the
chain swiveled to the trap that had crushed his foot.




CHAPTER VII


Breed's great paw had not squarely centered the trap and the jaws
clamped on but two toes. He fought the trap with all his strength,
backing up to gain slack in the chain, then throwing all his weight and
force into his spring as he launched himself into the air, only to be
jerked violently to the ground at the end of the chain.

Four times he sprang, and four times the breath was almost jarred from
his body as he smashed down on his side. As he rose from the last spring
he suddenly stiffened, standing rigidly in one spot while every hair
rose along his spine. Twenty feet away a great gray shape loomed in the
sage. Breed knew it was the midnight killer who had left such sinister
evidence of his handiwork scattered along the foot of the hills,--and
there was no doubt of his purpose. The yellow wolf was handicapped and
knew that he had no chance, but he did not storm and rage aloud as a dog
would have done; his was the coyote way. He backed up inch by inch till
he stood above the trap stake, and this move gave him a four-foot
striking range each way.

Flatear did not fear traps with the full knowledge of their powers and
limitations as the coyotes did, but with the superstitious dread of the
wolf. In common with all his kind he had merely avoided instead of
investigating this danger, and now his understanding could not
distinguish between a trap that was set and one that was sprung and
harmless.

The clank of the trap chain delayed his attack. He feared that the thing
which clamped his enemy's foot might leap out and seize his own. The
killer circled his victim, and the yellow wolf turned round and round in
the same spot, keeping his bared fangs toward his foe. The trap chain
kinked and twisted till it gave him less than a foot of play. Only his
insane hatred of Breed led Flatear to brave his horror of that sound of
grating steel,--but he came in close at last, crouched and sprang. Breed
leaned sharply to one side and met him with a side slash of teeth but
the weight of his enemy threw him and he felt the killer's teeth cut
cleanly into his shoulder and slide along the bone. Flatear reversed his
snap so swiftly that it seemed but a double swing of his head, yet the
second swing drove his teeth along Breed's neck and laid open a six-inch
gash. As Breed struggled to his feet the wolf's fangs sliced at his
throat and ripped it open but not deep enough to kill. A loop of the
kinked trap chain was tightened on Flatear's toes by Breed's convulsive
backward dodge, and a ghastly fear that he himself was trapped swept
through him, transcending even the lust to kill the yellow wolf. He made
one wild leap for safety,--and the tightening kink cracked his toes and
threw him, the same lurch dragging Breed down with him, and they rolled
into a furious tangle of clashing teeth and rattling steel.

Out in the night the coyotes were moving in from all directions in
answer to the call Breed had sent out ten seconds before the steel jaws
gripped him. Shady was trotting leisurely up to the saddle to meet her
lord and mate,--the mate whose life was flowing out through a score of
ugly rents. Breed's strength was ebbing fast, and he no longer had the
power to put killing force behind his teeth. Flatear snapped aimlessly,
his mind half crazed by that fearsome pinching of the chain on his toes.
He felt it loosen and slip off, and he leaped clear of the spot.

A shape moved over the edge of the saddle and the next instant Shady
drove straight at the gray assassin, raging as she came, the dog in her
boiling to the surface. Before she reached him a yellow streak split the
night and Peg's teeth crunched on the wolf's hind leg, the little
coyote's deadly silence contrasting queerly with Shady's fighting
shrieks.

The big wolf fled from this combined attack, one hind leg sagging as he
ran, the muscle torn raggedly across by Peg's one snap. Once more Breed
was indebted to Shady and his coyote followers.

But Breed was far gone. He struggled to rise but fell back again and lay
still, the blood oozing from the rents in his tattered pelt. He raised
his head and looked at Shady, and for a single instant his mouth opened
and his red tongue lolled out in friendly greeting, showing his spirit
still intact even though his body was slit in ribbons; then he lowered
it flat between his paws and moved nothing but his eyes.

Shady crept close to him and licked his wounds. The coyote pack came up
in pairs and circled about their stricken leader, some of them squatting
on their haunches as they regarded his plight, others moving restlessly
about; all of them silent as the grave, the only sound in the notch
being Shady's continuous low wails as she implored her mate to rise and
follow her.

The bitter frost claimed Breed's swollen foot and stiffened it, numbing
all sense of pain. He felt comfortable and content. Then Peg moved up
and sniffed critically at the trapped foot. He set his teeth in it but
Breed did not flinch. The three-legged coyote crouched beside him and
turned his head sidewise, the right side of his jaws flat on the trap,
his teeth sliding along the cold steel and shearing away the frozen
flesh. The leg was dulled to all sensations and Breed felt no pain.
Shady viewed this amputation closely and whined with anxiety as it
proceeded. Peg sliced the meat from the two toes, set his teeth firmly
across the bones and crunched just once. Then he hooked one forepaw over
the trap and scratched it away from Breed's sprawling hind leg, two
severed toes remaining in the trap.

Peg's lips and gums along the right side of his face were seared and
burned from contact with the chilled steel of the trap, raw patches of
flesh showing where the skin had adhered to the frosted springs and had
been wrenched loose. He nursed these wounds with his hot tongue, and
fiery twinges of pain racked him but he did not whine. He curled up and
slept for an hour, then rose and nipped Breed's flank. The cold had
stopped the flow of blood from Breed's cuts and the pain of the nip
roused him from the stupor. He struggled to his feet and stood swaying
while Shady bounced around him with joyous yelps. Then he set off for
the hills, moving at a walk, with his head drooping weakly.

The next morning Collins stood and looked down at the two great toes in
the trap.

"Pegged him," he said. "Pegged old Breed. He'll be minus two hind toes
from now on out--but he could lose two toes off each foot and still beat
the game. The whole coyote tribe must have been up here to look him over
from the number of tracks."

When Collins returned to his shack he found six stockmen awaiting him.
The stampede of the sheep and the big kill made by Breed's pack up in
the hills had enraged the sheepmen. They had confidently expected that
some man would collect Breed's scalp on a fresh tracking snow, but while
every rider had scoured the foothills for Breed's tracks after every
storm, no man had cut his trail. After gorging on warm meat at night a
wolf runs sluggishly the following day; his muscles lack snap and his
wind is leaky, and a good horse can wear him down. Twice in his first
year Breed had been harried far across the foothills by hard-running
horses, and now the first spitting flakes of a coming storm brought
recollections of those desperate races and roused his uneasiness to such
a pitch that he set off for the hills and remained there till the wind
had piled the snow and cleared long stretches which made tracking from a
running horse impossible.

The sheepmen at the cabin informed Collins of the big killing and their
tale was punctuated by every possible epithet applicable to the coyote
tribe. Collins, owning no sheep, was in a position to view the killing
in a more philosophical light than they.

"You can't rightly blame 'em," he said. "Men raise up sheep to kill 'em
in cold blood; coyotes kill 'em when they're hungry. Two sides to it,
'cording to whether you're a coyote or a man."

The stockmen stated the purpose of their visit. Their association had
raised the bounties, making it profitable for wolfers to hunt even in
the summer months when pelts were unprime and valueless; the price for
spring pups had been raised to equal the reward posted for adults; and
now the association would furnish free poison for all wolfers and
advocated its use all through the year. They stated their belief that
this system, if followed ruthlessly, would result in the practical
extermination of prairie wolves. They rested their case and anxiously
awaited the Coyote Prophet's verdict on their plan. Collins shook his
head.

"Part of it's good," he told them, "and part of it's dead wrong. Anyhow
you can't kill 'em all. I've told you so for twenty year and I stand on
what I've said. There'll be a million coyotes left to howl when the last
man dies. The raise on summer bounties is a good move--a man can afford
to kill shedders at that price; and the pup bounty will set men to
digging out their dens. But your main plan was laid out by men that
don't savvy the coyote mind." Collins leaned forward and tapped one
forefinger in the open palm of his other hand to emphasize his point.

"You let this all-year poison idea slide! You mark me--if you try that
on you'll lose; more ways than one. I know 'em! A coyote will take a
chance on guns and traps, but he's superstitious about these strychnine
baits. After a few turn up on the range with a dose of it the rest will
quit your line. Your traps won't show one catch. There's only one time
to use it and that's after you've bait trapped and trail trapped till
only the wisest are left. Then shoot the whole range full of poison; get
it all out at once and knock off all you can. Then take your poison up
and quit! You hear me,--quit! Then they'll sort of halfway forget before
another year and you can spring it again. But I'm a-telling you the
facts,--if you leave poison scattered round loose for six months you'll
see coyotes increasing fast and there'll be hell to pay amongst your
sheep; you'll break behind two ways at once. There'll be just enough
that forget themselves and take on a poison feed to keep the rest in the
notion of passing up all dead meat. They won't even touch bloats or
winter-killed stock. When they're hungry they'll make a kill,--and
they'll work on your sheep."

"I've stripped off three times more pelts than any wolfer that's mixed
poison with his traps. Now my trap line is played out and I'm going to
throw poison into 'em for a month,--and quit."

As Breed lay convalescing from his wounds he reviewed the dangers of his
chosen range, not knowing that the one horror which he feared more than
all else combined was about to sweep through the foothills. His former
attitude toward Flatear had been one of aversion for his gruesome
practices, but with no touch of personal enmity. But the gray wolf had
not only pounced on him at a season when mating was past and dog wolves
at peace, but had almost torn him to shreds while he was helpless in the
grip of a trap. Breed now felt a terrible hatred growing in him, a
desire to kill the slinking gray beast as soon as he gained sufficient
strength to take his trail.

Breed was too weak to hunt but there was enough of the coyote in Shady
to lead her to rustle food for her mate. For five days Breed lived
wholly upon the chunks of meat which Shady purloined from the frozen
bait piled against Collins' shack,--the meat which he intended to poison
and strew all across the range as soon as he had finished taking up his
traps. On the sixth night Shady found that the whole of the great stack
of meat had entirely vanished and near morning she returned without
food.

Breed's strength had flowed steadily back to him and he craved meat. By
noon his hunger was a hollow ache. Then suddenly he knew that there was
meat two miles west of him. The wind was square at his back so he could
not possibly have scented it, and any man who had seen him rise from his
bed and head for meat that lay two miles downwind would have charged the
act to that mysterious intuitive knowledge that animals are supposed to
have.

There is one sure way by which men of the open locate animal carcasses:
the location of winter-killed stock or range cows mired down in an
alkali bog is pointed out to them at a distance of several miles. Game
wardens make use of it to locate the illegal kills of poachers, and
rangers to locate the kills of cougars and wolves. In all countries
there are meat-eating birds and their flights reveal much to practiced
eyes.

Breed's mysterious information came from seeing an eagle pitch down far
to the west of him. Two minutes later another swooped from another
angle. Ravens and magpies winged toward the spot,--and Breed set off at
once toward the converging lines of their flight. His hunger overcame
his dislike for daylight traveling, but he held to high ground instead
of the valleys.

He came to the edge of a shallow basin devoid of all vegetation except
an occasional spear of grass, chalk-white patches on the surface of the
earth showing it to be an alkali sink. A hundred yards beyond the last
tongue of sage that reached out into it Breed could see a quarter of
beef, two eagles jealously guarding it. Magpies and ravens flitted
about, waiting for their share of the feast. One of the eagles made
frequent moves to scatter them when they came too close, rushing at them
with a queer hopping run, his wings half spread and trailing back. Breed
could plainly hear the snapping of his powerful beak.

The larger eagle suddenly took flight, rising with awkwardly flapping
wings and cutting eccentric loops and curves, each dip calling forth a
raucous scream. He fought his way to a height of two hundred yards, then
lost all muscular control and fell loosely to the ground, his mate
taking wing as he smashed down on the flat.

A vague dread seized Breed. He watched the magpies close in to the feed.
A score of them took the air at half-minute intervals, fluttered wildly
and with a spasmodic jerking of their long tails and pitched down in
death. The rest of them left the meat. Breed's mind again proved capable
of associating ideas, of constructing theories from known facts. The
birds had been alive. There were no clanking traps or sound of gunshots
to account for it,--yet they had died. Their crazy flappings had been in
sharp contrast to their usual grace when in the air. Their actions had
not been normal, and Breed someway thought of the ways of poisoned
coyotes. He had never seen a poisoned horse or cow, or till now a
poisoned bird,--had always believed it an affliction of coyotes alone;
yet he felt the quickening of long dormant fears. He knew that meat was
poisoned and he would not go near. He drew farther back in the sage and
rested till night.

He started out with Shady at dusk and they were joined by Peg and his
mate, the four of them hunting together. Peg killed a jack and Breed's
share of it partially satisfied the gnawing of his hunger. As he
traveled on he sampled the wind for some sign of the gray killer. It had
narrowed down to a feud between the yellow wolf and the gray, an undying
hatred, and whenever they next met there would be one of them whose
trail the coyotes would never again cross on the range.

Then all thought of hunger, all thought of his feud with Flatear,
everything but stark horror was suddenly swept from Breed's mind. A
horrid, racheting cough sounded from straight ahead. A coyote whisked
into the open and bounced toward them with bucking leaps, strangling and
gagging as he came, then whirled and snapped at himself, the froth
dripping and foaming from his jaws and the moonlight reflecting from his
set, staring eyes. They drew away from him and he writhed on the ground
in nasty convulsions,--stiffened and stretched out with his eyes bulging
from their sockets and glaring forth in death.

Breed headed for the hills and Shady and the two coyotes clung close to
his flanks, as if numbers relieved the horror of the thing they had just
seen.

Three times before they reached the hills they were terrified by the
appearance of former friends who had suddenly been stricken into foaming
maniacs. Breed turned on the first rise of the hills and howled. The
members of the coyote pack read the message. Breed was bidding farewell
to the land of sage. Perhaps he knew that he would never see the gray
foothills again.

Six pairs of coyotes gathered toward his cry. They had seen much and
lived to pass their knowledge on. Every one of them had run the gauntlet
of rifle fire; they had been hounded by dogs. Most of them had been
maimed by traps,--and now this affliction that turned coyotes mad with a
single bite of meat.

They followed Breed back into the hills, a wise band, the pick of the
coyote tribe and well able to cope with new conditions and teach their
future pups the work of pioneering in strange countries which lay ahead
of them.




CHAPTER VIII


Breed found the hills buried deep under a blanket of snow. In the low
country the drifts lay only in the gulches and the more sheltered spots
but up in the lodgepole valleys and the heavy stands of spruce on the
slopes the white covering seemed endless and unbroken. The dogs killed
the meat for the whole pack, for at this season the she-coyotes were
unfitted for the strenuous work of pulling down heavy game. For the same
reason they were unable to travel long distances in the snow. Breed too
was disinclined to move rapidly. His foot had healed but the swollen leg
was weak and tender. The pack averaged less than twenty miles a day.

At the end of a week Breed's old home was more than a hundred miles
behind and he was well up in the backbone of the hills. He came out upon
a mighty divide and gazed off across a rolling country extending fifty
miles each way, all of it high but ringed in by still more lofty ranges,
their ragged saw-teeth standing gaunt and grim against the sky. There
were broad, open meadows spread out before him, great areas devoid of
trees, intersected by timbered ridges and rolling parks where the stand
of spruce was dotted. The whole of it lay under a four-foot layer of
snow and gleamed dead white and lusterless, but even so its aspect was
more inviting than the gloomy forest through which they had come.

The open-loving coyotes elected to remain in this land rather than
penetrate the questionable beyond. As they crossed the open spaces the
racy smell of the sage leaked through the packed drifts underfoot and
they knew that parts of these valleys were carpeted with the same brush
that clothed the foothills of their home land. This was the summer range
of the elk herds and once well down the slope of the divide they found a
country that seemed devoid of game.

After advancing in loose formation for five miles without any coyote
finding a promising trail, Breed caught a fugitive scent of meat. He
circled and looped, now catching it, then losing it again. The broad
valley stood white and silent, gripped in a dead calm, and the few
vagrant breezes were imperceptible, merely the sluggish drift of local
air pockets that shifted a few feet and settled.

The yellow specks that moved in pairs far out across the snow fields
slowed and halted, changed their routes and headed toward the leader who
was questing about with uplifted nose. Then Breed dropped his head and
ran with nose close to the snow, twisting and turning in one locality of
less than a hundred yards in extent. The eyes of every advancing coyote
were fastened on Breed. They saw him stop abruptly and shove his nose
into the snow, and the little puff of steam which rose around his head
as he breathed hard into the drift was clearly visible to them all. They
put on more speed as he began to dig, and when the first of them reached
him they saw a tawny expanse of elk hair at the bottom of the
excavation.

They tore away the snow and uncovered the whole carcass of a
winter-killed elk that had been refrigerating there for months. Breed
lingered near this spot for three days, the coyotes bedding near by in
pairs, and up here where there were no men they fed in the daytime
whenever so inclined. There was not an hour of the day or night when
Breed could not see one or more coyotes tearing at the elk. When the
last scrap of meat, hide and hair had been devoured and the bones gnawed
white and clean, Breed moved on in search of more.

There were always some few stragglers that lagged behind the elk herds
and failed to start for the winter range till after the passes were
blocked with snow. These turned back and starved when the grass was
buried deep and their feet were cut and worn from pawing through the
crust to reach it; for the elk is strictly a grazing animal and cannot
live entirely by browsing on the twigs and brush as do moose and deer.

For a month Breed prowled this high basin country, and in all that time
his feet never once touched earth except when crossing some bald ridge
from which the wind had whittled the snow. His menu consisted
exclusively of frozen elk.

A chinook swept the hills and held for a week, the hot wind melting and
packing the drifts and clearing the more exposed slopes free of snow.
The pack had split up and scattered in pairs, each she-coyote selecting
some likely spot and remaining in that vicinity.

The first day of the chinook every she-coyote started her den, and the
sites, though widely separated, were identical in many respects. Each
chose a ridge with a southeast exposure while higher ridges behind cut
off the sweep of the north and west winds; and every den was located in
a heavy clump of sage. This latter feature was not for the reason that
sagebrush reminded them of home, but because experience had proven that
the heaviest growths of sage were indicative of deep, soft soil beneath
and so pointed to easy digging, a rule used not only by home-seeking
coyotes but by homesteading men as well, and one that holds good
throughout a half-million square miles of sagebrush country.

Shady too had settled on an open ridge and now spent much of her time
there, but this seemed more from a disinclination to travel and a
dislike of bedding in snow than from a definite purpose of excavating a
den. This puzzled Breed. Shady leaned more to the casual dog way of
trusting that a suitable spot would present itself on the day when her
pups should arrive; yet there was enough of the coyote in her to cause
her to scratch out a shallow nest in a sunny spot. This act was more for
present comfort, however, than from any intent to make provision for the
future.

Peg and Cripp had always clung more tenaciously to Breed than had the
others of the pack and Peg had settled on a ridge not more than two
miles away; but Cripp was no longer to be found. It had been long since
his voice had been raised in answer to Breed's call and he had not come
back into the hills with the coyote pack. Breed missed the trusty
follower who had run with him on so many hunts, and day after day he
expected to catch a trace of Cripp in the wind or to hear his friendly
voice at night, but the crippled coyote never came.

Peg was now Breed's sole companion at night, except when their mates
joined them at the two frozen elk carcasses in the bottoms between their
home ridges, and the two of them explored the surrounding country
together. Peg's lips were scarred along the right side of his face, the
price of Breed's liberty. There are close ties between animals, a myriad
proofs of friendships and enmities, the same as among men, and it may be
that the act which had brought Peg those honorable scars had helped to
cement the bond between himself and the yellow wolf. Whether or not they
had means of discussing Cripp's absence, there can be no doubt that they
missed the genial old rogue that had been their running mate for so many
months and that they wondered at his fate.

Breed visited Peg's home ridge during the height of the chinook. Peg's
mate was a silky-haired coyote, her fur fluffy and long. Fluff lay
sprawled contentedly in the sunshine while her mate worked on the den.
She growled uneasily at Breed as he peered down the hole. A shower of
dirt greeted him and he drew away as Peg backed from the den and shook
the dirt from his fur. Fluff took her turn at the work but soon tired of
it, and Peg started in as soon as she left off. A she-coyote picks her
own den site and starts the hole, but because she is easily exhausted
near denning time it falls to the dog to complete the den.

When Breed returned to Shady he found her scratching leisurely at the
nest she had scooped out. It was merely a raking of the surface to
loosen and soften the bed which was smooth and glazed from her having
bedded there when her fur was wet; but Breed read it as a tentative
start toward making a permanent home.

When Shady ceased her aimless scratching Breed edged her aside and tore
at the soft earth with his paws. He had buried himself to the hips
before he drew back. Shady entered and critically inspected the hole,
then immediately backed out. That was the extent of her interest. It may
have occurred to Breed that his mate's shifts at digging were extremely
brief, but nevertheless he persisted till he had tunneled a curving
entrance eight feet long and hollowed out a nest eighteen inches high by
three feet across. All well-ordered she-coyotes have at least two, and
the majority of them three openings leading from their homes. Shady
failed to indicate the direction which she wished these emergency
tunnels to take so Breed laid them out according to plans of his own. By
the time the den was completed the chinook wind had cooled, and winter
tightened down over the hills once more, freezing the surface dirt so
solidly as to make excavating impossible.

Breed repaired to the last frozen elk carcass in his neighborhood and
found Peg there before him. An hour later a she-coyote came to the feed.
She sprawled flat in the snow and tore ravenously at the frozen meat.
Her eyes were hollowed from hard journeying and lack of food. Breed knew
her for Cripp's mate and he momentarily expected to see his friend. When
her hunger was appeased she faced back toward the divide over which she
had come and howled; then, as if knowing her cry would go unanswered,
she turned and left them as abruptly as she had come. She had no time to
lose and she could not dig a den, yet she planned the best she knew.
There would be no mate to rustle food for her, and meat would be the
first essential while her pups were young. Five miles beyond Breed's
home ridge she found an elk drifted deep under the snow in the heavy
timber. She crawled into the heart of a windfall jam, choosing one where
the lay of the land would prevent her being drowned out when the drifts
should melt, and stayed there till her five pups were born.

When Breed returned home near morning he heard queer squeals issuing
from the yawning mouth of the den. Shady's doglike faith that a place
would somehow be provided for the great event had been justified and she
had taken possession of the den which her wild mate had so carefully
prepared.

Shady wandered no more with Breed, but stayed at home in the den, and
for the first week all that Breed saw of her was a brief glimpse of her
nose as she came to the mouth of the hole, seized the elk meat which he
brought as an offering and backed down out of sight with it. After that
he occasionally saw the whole of her but these views were hasty.
Whenever Shady emerged from the den her tail barely cleared the mouth of
it before she twisted back and dived headlong from sight, panic-stricken
lest some mishap had befallen the pups during her long eight-foot trip
from them to daylight. After two days of hourly excursions of this sort
she spent a few moments outside the den, and thereafter these periods
were lengthened until she remained on the warm slope fully as much as in
the den.

Night after night Breed heard the howls of the lone she-coyote that had
denned in the windfall. Always she faced toward the land that had been
her home. A she-coyote whose mate is killed after the running moon will
raise her pups alone and refuse to accept another mate; yet the howls
she sent out were calls for a mate, and from this Breed knew that she
did not believe that Cripp was dead. He pondered long over this mystery
of why Cripp still lived but did not join his mate.

The supply of elk meat rapidly diminished and at last was gone. The only
carcass Breed could locate within ten miles was the one near the
windfall, and the widowed mother defended that furiously against all
comers. The warm days of early March had turned it stale and putrid but
it was all she had.

Every waking second of Breed's time was spent on the meat trail. An
occasional blue grouse or snowshoe hare was the largest game he found.
That the coyotes were faring as poorly he knew from the signs he crossed
each day in the hills. He found the tracks of dog coyotes many miles
from their dens and always the signs showed that they had been working
out some cold rabbit trail. Breed found the tracks of many bobcats in
the hills and these appeared to have been wandering aimlessly. But Breed
knew that the noses of cat beasts are not keen enough to work out any
but the warmest trails; that this accounted for his seldom finding signs
that a cat had trailed a rabbit, and that their apparently crazy way of
traveling was in reality a systematic shifting across the air currents
in search of the warm body scent of their prey. Several times Breed
picked up a hot cat track and followed it at top speed but the big bobs
held mainly to the heavy timber and always took refuge in a tree.

When Breed's pups were three weeks old he had his first look at them
when Shady came from the den on a warm afternoon and a swarm of fluffy
little creatures toddled after her. There were eight of them, all with
heavy frames that gave promise of their attaining almost as great size
as their father, and there were strips of dark fur along their backs.
After that first trip they spent much time romping and quarreling on the
sunny side hill.

A pair of golden eagles had nested on the rough face of a pinnacle that
rose from the floor of the valley near its head, some five miles from
Breed's home ridge. These mighty birds soared far out over the divide
and returned with meat for their fledglings in the nest. Their pealing
screams often split the silence of the valley. Shady paid small heed to
them but Breed often cast a wary eye aloft when the screams sounded from
close at hand.

Shady was stretched comfortably before the den one day, watching the
pups scattered out along the ridge, when she became aware of a faint
rushing sound such as the first puffs of a fresh wind make when they
strike the trees some distance away. This increased to a humming roar.
She looked up to see a huge shape driving down upon a pup with
incredible velocity, swooping at a sharp angle, the great wings spread
wide and hissing through the air as the big bird tipped dizzily from
side to side. Within two seconds after the first droning sound had
reached Shady's ears she saw the eagle strike his claws through a pup
and start up the valley on lazily flapping wings. Shady raced madly
under him and raged until the valley echoed to her fury. Then she
quieted and watched till he was but a tiny speck off toward the nesting
peak, the dead pup dangling loosely from the talons that had struck
clear through his slender body, the hind claw on each foot meeting and
interlocking with one front claw in a grip which nothing short of the
actual severing of a leg tendon could break.

Thereafter Shady knew why Breed showed uneasiness when an eagle screamed
near the den.

The pups knew every note of their mother's voice and obeyed it
implicitly. They would be asleep in the den when a note would summon
them forth to play, every pup tumbling hurriedly out; she would give
another cry when they were playing carelessly in the open, the tone
being so nearly identical with that of the first that a man might hear
it a hundred times and detect no difference, yet every pup would dive
headlong for the nearest hole.

Shady learned to watch for the eagles. Nearly always it was a shadow
which warned her first. She would see a swiftly moving black speck
gliding over the snow fields or darting along the slopes of the ridges
that flanked the valley and she instantly issued a warning to the pups,
knowing that where there was a shadow there must be a bird above.
Sometimes Breed saw the birds first and called. Shady relayed the danger
signal to her young, and even if she was half a mile away the pups made
a prompt and desperate spurt for the den.




CHAPTER IX


The snow melted slowly in the high country but by mid-April a few bare
spots showed in the more open meadows, the hardy mountain grass sending
forth green shoots. The rabbits were drawn from the timbered ridges to
nibble these first spring dainties. The surface of the drifts showed
thousands of tiny mouse tracks,--the mice that had lived deep under the
snow, subsisting on food previously stored, now coming forth to swarm
into these first cleared patches.

The pups had grown large and strong and were able to follow their
parents on the meat trail, and they soon learned to catch their own
mice. The drifts in the passes had packed so firmly as to afford good
footing and the game was coming back to the summer range. After the
first few had made the crossing the rest followed their trails and the
main tide of the elk migration set in, great droves of cows boiling
through all the passes and streaming down into the green spots in the
meadows. There was now meat in plenty, and the yelping barks of the cows
sounded in the valleys that had been wrapped in white silence for so
many months; but there was not a sound from the bulls; the antlered
lords whose ringing challenges had filled the whole expanse of the hills
the previous fall seemed voiceless now. These old fellows had remained
up among the high bald ridges, their new antler growth tender in its
velvet sheath, and nothing would be heard from them till after the
porous growth had hardened and their points were polished for the next
rutting time.

The wolf family returned to the den no more, except perhaps for a casual
inspection when their wanderings chanced to lead them to the
neighborhood.

The bears had come from their long sleep and left the dens. There were
black and brown bears and monster grizzlies roaming in the meadows. At
first the diet of these huge beasts consisted almost entirely of grass
and twigs but their appetites rapidly increased and it was no unusual
thing for a bear to appropriate one of Breed's kills.

Breed did not fear bears, knowing that their speed was less than his own
and that they were harmless so long as he did not molest them and come
into too close quarters. He accepted this stealing of his meat as part
of the established order of things and always moved away when a bear
came swaying leisurely up to his kill.

Shady, on the contrary, had a wholesome fear of bears and was excited at
their approach, but at the same time she could not view their thieving
ways in such a philosophical light and her resentment rankled deeper
with each recurring theft.

The wolf family returned to a kill to find a great silvertip feeding
there. Shady's rage boiled over and she swept down upon him with a
furious burst of barking. She would have halted short of him but there
was no need. Breed was profoundly amazed to see the mighty baldface flee
down the slope with Shady in full cry behind him.

Breed knew that bears did not fear him, even though his fighting ability
far surpassed that of his mate, yet a grizzly fled at the first sound of
her voice. This deepened his respect for Shady; the mate who was so
helpless in many respects was surprisingly resourceful in others.

It was not known to Breed that bears had learned to dread the bellowing
of a pack of trail hounds in the hills through knowledge that men
followed close behind, and that the dog note in Shady's voice stirred up
visions of a man with a magazine gun on their trail. But while the
reason was not clear to Breed, the fact that the mightiest grizzly took
flight before his mate was repeatedly proved to him, and after once
learning her power Shady permitted no bear to deprive her family of its
meat.

[Illustration: As the summer advanced the pups learned to pack-hunt with
Breed. _Page 167._]

As the summer advanced the pups learned to pack-hunt with Breed. The
coyote howls at night were now confined to messages between mate and
mate or between mother and pups. The life they led was essentially a
family life and they had no interests outside of the family circle.
Breed's cry to rally a pack was never raised, for his own domestic
duties were many; and if he had sent forth the summons none would have
answered it. He sometimes met Peg and ran with him for a while, but
these visits were infrequent and brief, each having pressing business of
his own.

Breed one day caught the scent of a coyote upwind from him. This in
itself was nothing unusual but there was something vaguely familiar
about it, something that roused old memories, and suddenly he thought of
Cripp. He traced up the scent and as he topped the ridge he stopped
short and bared his teeth, the hair rising along his spine. A horrid
nightmare of a thing rose from its bed and leered at him. The hair had
slipped from its body, leaving the skin shiny and slate-blue. The ears
and head were furred, and the legs; tufts of hair sprouted from the
shoulders and along the spine, but flanks and sides were bare and the
long tail was rat-like, its joints showing through the tight-stretched
skin. The lips were drawn back and revealed the blue gums receding from
loosened teeth. This was the result of poison that had failed to kill.

Breed knew this grisly apparition for Cripp. The scent was there, and
the warped foreleg. Cripp did not recognize his friend. His mind was
clouded and the light of insanity gleamed in his sunken eyes. Breed
whirled and fled, and a weird cry sounded behind him,--the eerie howl of
a maniac.

All through the summer the coyotes shunned the specter of living death
that plodded silently up and down the valleys and the ridges. When it
came suddenly through the trees, drawn by the scent of a fresh kill,
some coyote family scattered swiftly and left the feast. Cripp was as
apt to howl in broad daylight as at night, and the sounds were
meaningless, the unintelligible jargon of an idiot. Every coyote within
hearing bristled with fear whenever Cripp's jabbering reached their
ears.

In the background of Breed's mind the purpose to slay Flatear still
persisted, but his duties prevented his spending the time to hunt for
him. Occasional wolf howls were heard back here in the hills, the calls
of strays that had drifted down from the north, following the line of
the hills and keeping well back from the dangers of the low country.
Each time he heard the wolf note the urge to kill was strengthened in
Breed. He had heard Flatear's voice but once and so was unable to
identify him by ear alone but must receive added testimony through eyes
or nose. Twice he left his family to investigate the source of these
cries. One came from a lone female; the other from a big gray dog wolf
who had mated with a coyote, and there were five pups trailing after the
oddly assorted pair. These pups were much like Breed's own and they gave
proof that the coyote strain was stronger than the wolf. Their language
was that of their mother. The only trace of wolf parentage was shown in
their greater size and the dark fur of their backs. Breed's search for
his old enemy proved fruitless. Many things of which Breed was unaware
had taken place on his old home range since he had left it, and Flatear,
terrified by the latest of these events, had slunk away to the north.

Collins' prediction had been verified. The coyotes in the low country
where poison had been strewn broadcast on the range had suddenly turned
from stale meat as from disease. Much of their food supply had come from
bloated sheep, from locoed horses, and from cows that had eaten larkspur
and died, but they would no longer touch these carcasses. Deprived of
this source of food, their kills became more frequent and they grew
bolder in their raids on calves and sheep.

Then a new and appalling menace reared its ugly head in the foothills,
striking not at coyotes alone but at every living thing. There were many
coyotes such as Cripp, with the hair slipped from their hides,--the ones
that had survived a dose of poison but were unable to shake off its
devastating after effects. Hydrophobia broke out among these and they
ran amuck, striking alike at friends and foes. Sound coyotes were turned
into frothing fiends that helped to spread the wave of madness that
swept across three States. Horses and cows died by hundreds and it was
no unusual thing for one mad coyote to bite fifty head of sheep in a
single night. The five dogs that had harried Breed were themselves
infected when they pulled down a mad coyote, and they drove poisoned
fangs into forty head of stock before the last of the five was run down
and shot.

There was but one ray of hope in the whole dangerous business and men
seized on that. Mad coyotes lost their cunning and ran stupidly on some
chosen course, biting every living thing that crossed their trails, but
refusing to be turned aside even to avoid an approaching man. Riders
poured through the foothills on fleet horses, shooting down the stricken
ones, all other business suspended till this menace had been stamped
out. And through it all the ravages among the wily coyotes were far less
than among domestic stock.

The spreading of coyotes over new territory, which had been only gradual
before, was accelerated by the poison and madness that had blighted the
foothills. Thickly settled districts far to the east, where coyotes had
formerly appeared but infrequently, were now invaded by great numbers.
Poison and traps could not be used effectively against them in
localities where there were dogs on every farm, and the coyotes were
safer there than on the open range. Reports that reached Collins showed
that for eight hundred miles south along the base of the hills the
coyotes were quitting the flats and roaming through the fastnesses of
the Rockies.

Breed noted the steady flow of strange coyotes into the high basins of
his new range. In the late summer his pups dropped one by one from the
family circle, going off on some business of their own. During the
latter part of August Breed was conscious of a vague sense of
loneliness. This grew more pronounced and then suddenly he knew! The
rally call for the pack rolled through the valleys and echoed among the
peaks, and from far and near he heard familiar voices raised in answer.
The parental responsibilities were over for one season, the pups gone
forth on their own, and the members of the pack were free to follow the
yellow wolf.

As Breed ran through the hills the pack gathered, and each coyote fell
into his old place. Peg and his mate ran close on the right of
Breed,--but the place on the left was vacant.

Cripp was coming, however. The cry for the pack had penetrated the fog
that obscured his reason and touched a responsive chord buried deep
beneath. That cry was meant for him. The coyotes made a kill and
feasted, but before their hunger had been satisfied a living skeleton
came moving toward them, and they scattered wildly and left the meat to
Cripp.

Several strange coyotes joined Breed's pack and these new members seemed
possessed of some haunting fear. Breed noted their constant air of
expectancy and the intent regard with which they favored every coyote
that drew near to them. They seemed always suspicious that some friend
would suddenly turn upon them, and whenever some eager coyote clashed
his teeth while feeding, these strangers that had come so recently from
the low country started uneasily at the sound.

Night after night Cripp followed the pack and came to the kill. The
coyotes all avoided him but the strangers were assailed with a ghastly
dread of his grinning mask, and their fears were communicated to the
rest of the pack. Breed himself caught it. An air of tense watchfulness
pervaded their gatherings, a guarding against some menace as yet unknown
but which the actions of the strangers indicated might be upon them at
any moment.

After a week of this sort of thing Breed and Shady were bedded on a
ridge slope that flanked a broad meadow when Breed saw a moving speck at
the far edge of it. It proved to be a coyote, though at first its
peculiar gait denied this. He came straight on across the open, and
Breed saw one of his new friends trot from a willow clump in the meadow,
take one look at the advancing stranger and become galvanized into a
flitting streak that left the valley. Even at that distance his deadly
fear was evident, and Breed knew that the unknown danger had become
actual and was embodied in the queer-gaited coyote that was coming
toward him.

He ran with an automaton-like stiffness, never changing his course, and
occasionally stumbling as if unaware of the character of the ground over
which he passed. His head swung out slightly to either side and he
snapped each time. There was something sinister in every move, as if his
body was driven on without conscious volition, actuated by some
dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and
his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the
thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a
draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there
grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then
he whirled and snapped back at him. The mad coyote kept straight on and
Cripp followed at his own queer shambling gait. He drew close and ran
alongside, and for a hundred yards they exchanged slashes in a senseless
sort of way. Breed could see the blood oozing from the fur of the mad
coyote's neck, and the blobs of white foam sliding down Cripp's shiny
hide. Then the mad coyote fell and Cripp kept on for another ten yards
before he missed him. He wheeled and returned, stumbled and fell and
crawled back to his foe, and they lay there toothing one another in an
impersonal, detached way, as if it did not matter.

Breed's soul revolted at this scene and he fled the spot. When he raised
his howl that night he was twenty miles farther north, but the coyote
pack answered from close at hand. Many of them witnessed the same scene
from adjacent slopes of the valley. The others had viewed similar
sights, and there was a general coyote movement north through the
mountains, a widespread exodus ahead of the madness that was creeping up
into the hills.

Breed had formerly been imbued with the home-loving nature of the
coyote, and this had led him to restrict his wanderings to a
comparatively limited area instead of ranging hundreds of miles in all
directions after the manner of wolves. This love of a permanent home
range now operated in a peculiar way. All ties were severed behind him,
the land he loved bristling with such a wide variety of dangers as to
preclude all possibility of his return. The wanderlust which now seized
him appeared a complete reversal of his former desire to remain in one
vicinity where every topographical feature was to him a familiar
landmark; but in reality this very wanderlust was an expression of home
love; every step he took away from his old range was unconsciously
actuated by the desire to find some new spot which would take the place
of the old.

For two weeks these wanderings were erratic and uncontrolled by any
conscious purpose. He roamed on the Shoshone and the Thoroughfare, the
Yellowstone and the Buffalo Fork of the Snake, then swung back across
the Sunlight Peaks. Shady had acted queerly of late, frequently leaving
Breed for hours at a time and climbing to some commanding point from
which she would look far off across the hills, as if seeking something
which was always just beyond the range of her vision; but she always
came back to him. Breed found nothing out of the way in this. Mated
coyotes were prone to follow separate trails for hours, even days, and
then meet again. Shady had clung to him persistently, refusing to be out
of his sight except when at the den with her pups, and this new
manifestation seemed a natural one to Breed, an evidence that his mate
had come to trust in her ability to shift for herself in the wild. But
it was not this. Now that her pups had been schooled and sent out to
face the world alone, Shady hungered to see the man who had raised her
from a pup, and to feel his fingers scratching behind her ears.

As the pack straggled out among the ragged Sunlight Peaks Shady looked
down across the lower slopes; one valley opened into another in an
interminable procession and far down across the spruce tops a rift
between two flanking hills afforded a view of the low country,
shimmering in the sun. Sand Coulee Basin, her old home! And a variegated
mass in the distance marked the Rainbow Buttes, rising isolated and
alone from out the badlands. Shady struck a swift gliding trot and
dropped down the slope, disappearing in the first twisted masses of
timber-line spruce.

For the first few hours after her departure Breed gave it no thought,
but when she failed to turn up he grew increasingly uneasy. Ten hours
and he called to her and there was no reply, twelve and he circled to
pick up her trail but it had cooled. He prowled the peaks for three days
and nights, disconsolate and lonely, even though in close touch with the
coyote pack, and sending out call after call for his mate. Shady had
spent the first two days in almost continuous travel, put in a single
hour with the Coyote Prophet, reveling in the feel of his exploring
fingers and the friendly sound of his voice; then she departed as
suddenly as she had come and spent two more days in reaching the summit
of the Sunlight Peaks where she had left her mate, for after all his
hold on her was far more gripping than that exercised by the man.

She heard Breed's lonely cry and answered it, and an hour later she was
frisking about him with doggish enthusiasm. The yellow wolf accepted her
lavish display of affection with dignity; his joy in the reunion was a
match for her own, but the wolf in him was unequal to matching the
effusiveness of the dog in her.




CHAPTER X


All through the Yellowstone country the evidence of Breed's teachings
was apparent on every hand. The progeny of the members of his original
band had been taught pack-hunting by their parents, as they themselves
had learned the art from Breed. For a hundred miles each way from Two
Ocean Pass the hills were full of the disciples of the yellow wolf. The
elk now fled from coyotes as once they had fled from wolves. The coyotes
brought all their native trickery and resourcefulness into play and made
pack-hunting a very different affair from that practiced by timber
wolves. They did not hunt bunched, but scattered, saving their own
strength and wearing down that of their prey. When an elk was singled
out the coyotes relayed him and kept him on the move. Whenever he
attempted a straightaway flight some coyote flashed out in front of him
to turn him back, and he was headed through bogs and spongy ground on
the slides at the foot of old snow drifts until his strength was gone.

Breed's movements now lost their aimlessness, and each day found him a
few miles farther north. The home love in him was working, but he
himself was unconscious of the fact that he was seeking some land that
would answer all requirements. It was not given to him to plan largely
for the future, and each move was occasioned by the dissatisfaction with
the country in which he found himself, rather than from any definite
idea of mapping out a course for a permanent range and there
establishing his home.

Nevertheless he held steadily to the north and the faithful pack moved
with him. Other coyotes flanked their line of march, urged on by fear of
the madness that lay behind and finding courage for their pioneering in
the fact that every night they heard the howls of the coyote pack ahead.

The game herds were milling restlessly in high basins. The blacktail
bucks had short new coats of sleek blue-gray; they had shed the long
hair of the previous season,--the season of short blue, the Short Blue
Moon of the Northwest Indian tribes. Broad vistas of the low country
showed through revealing gaps in the hills, marked by the blue-gray
tinge of the sage; a pale haze hung in the hills and turned distant
green spruce slopes to silvery blue; the rivers had long since passed
the flood tide of melting drifts, and were cleared of the roily effects
of late summer rains, and lakes and streams, now free of sediment,
showed blue-green to their very depths; the high peaks were held in
silhouette against a clear blue sky. Everything showed a touch of
blue,--such is the Short Blue Moon.

And the love-making time of the antlered tribes is ushered in with the
season of short blue. As Breed moved north the whistling snorts of
lovelorn bucks reached his ears day after day. The clarion bugles of
challenging bulls was promise of meat in plenty. Bighorn rams squired
their bands of ewes on the plateaus and pinnacles above timber line.

Breed's course was by no means a straight line. Hunts drew him to the
east and west and frequently back to the south, but the general trend of
it all was a northward migration for the coyote pack. Some days they
gained twenty miles, some but three or four, and on others they lost
ground. At the end of a month the land of the Yellowstone was a hundred
miles southeast.

The big gray wolves were more plentiful here, but scattered and not
traveling in packs. At every wolf howl Breed felt the old hatred of
Flatear surge up in him, but though he frequently met wolves none of
them proved to be his enemy. The big grays showed only a casual interest
in coyotes, evidencing neither enmity nor delight at any chance meeting,
indifference the keynote of their attitude.

Autumn blended into early winter and the gain toward the north was less
apparent, Breed lingering in the vicinity of good hunting grounds as he
found them, moving on when the supply of meat diminished. He held to the
main divide of the Rockies, and when the heavy storms of midwinter set
in, he was well across Montana and nearing the Canadian line. The deep
snowfall had driven the game down out of the peaks to the lower valleys
of the hills and Breed was forced to follow. He moved westward across
the South Fork of the Flathead to the Kootenai Range. There were fewer
elk here than in the Yellowstone, living in scattered bunches and not
congregating in droves of hundreds on the winter feed grounds. Deer
ranged the Kootenai country in plentiful numbers and Breed elected to
stay. Mating was close at hand and the northward movement halted.

Stray coyotes drifted continually up from the south and joined the ranks
of the pack, and there were stray wolves crossing the range from the
Flathead to Swan River and back. Many of these mated with the unattached
coyotes as they straggled north. Breed's pack was rapidly thinned down,
pairs dropping out to den till at last only Peg and Fluff were left.

When the chinook set in Fluff chose a den site and stopped. Breed held
on for another five miles, then Shady refused to travel. She picked her
own site and showed a keener interest in home building than she had the
season past, working short shifts to relay Breed on the digging, and the
three tunnels that led to this new nest hole were longer and more
elaborately curved and twisted than those of the old den on the
Yellowstone. The last day of February seven pups came to share the den
with Shady.

The rest of the pack had denned to the south and few encroached on
Breed's hunting territory. Deer were still plentiful, even after a
winter of hard hunting, and he found little difficulty in supplying
meat. There was but one flaw in his contentment.

One day when the pups were a month old and had recently been out for
their first romp Breed hunted across the divide and down the western
slope of the Kootenais. He stood on a ridge in the gathering dusk when
he was suddenly aware that other hunters were abroad before him. His eye
caught flashes of white through the green of the spruce on the opposite
slope. He knew that a band of deer had been startled to sudden flight,
that the jerky gleams of white were the brief exposures of the
underparts of their tails as they were upflung in hurdling windfalls.
The wind was wrong and Breed could not catch the scent. He traced their
course through the timber by their white flags and saw three deer break
cover and start out across a long narrow opening on the slope, the path
of a snowslide that had stripped a lane through the trees on the steep
side hill, its trail a clean split in the solid green of the spruce. In
the center of the slide the lead deer suddenly collapsed and the sharp
report of a rifle rolled across the hills.

At the sound of the shot Breed heard a few deep-chested dog notes half a
mile down the narrow valley. He looked that way and saw a slender tongue
of smoke curling lazily above the trees around a bend. The deep note was
strange to him, but again the association of ideas came to his aid.
Shady's occasional fits of barking and her strange ways; the wolf hounds
that had belonged to men and had chased him in Sand Coulee Basin; this
note that rose in answer to a rifle shot and came from near the smoke
that denoted a cabin. Breed himself was unconscious of assorting these
ideas, but he knew that the hoarse note came from some dog beast that
belonged to man.

A lone prospector had built his cabin on the west slope of the
Kootenais, and hereafter Breed avoided this vicinity.

When the pups were six weeks old Shady felt the call to help Breed
rustle food and she hunted by herself in the neighborhood of the den,
but her earnest efforts were unavailing, as there was no small game and
she was unable to stalk a deer.

[Illustration: Breed was compelled to hunt farther from home as the deer
quit the valleys. _Page 191._]

Breed was compelled to hunt farther from home as the deer quit the
valleys to descend to the foothills for the first nips of green grass.
One morning, when far south of the den, he heard again the note of the
hound. It rose and fell, an eager bellow that moved slowly through the
hills, and Breed did not like the music. This same baying reached him on
three other days. The reason for all this uproar was beyond his
comprehension, but from the fact that it came from a dog he knew that it
meant no good for the wild things.

A few days after he first heard this strange sound he came face to face
with a pair of coyotes that had run with his pack. Their air was one of
dejection and there was no springiness in their gait. From their
dispirited manner Breed knew that tragedy had overtaken his friends,
that some calamity had befallen their pups. Later he met a second pair,
a dog coyote and a she-wolf, and they too were traveling aimlessly,
their family torn from them. But Breed had no way of linking these
disasters with the music of the trail hound. The prospector kept a
single hound and when he found a fresh wolf kill in the spring he put
the dog on the tracks that led from it, keeping him in leash, and the
hound led him to the den. He had found good hunting near his cabin this
spring, as the hills were full of the dens of the small yellow wolves
that had turned up in such numbers the preceding winter, but his
activities so far had been confined to the country that lay south of
Breed's range.

Breed led the pups forth for a few short trips as their strength
increased. In his hunts toward the south he frequently crossed the
trails of other coyotes that had led their offspring out for a ramble.
At least one out of every three families were breeds, and the pups were
uniform. They were heavier than coyotes and their backstrips were dark;
but their language was pure coyote, their voices perhaps slightly deeper
and with fuller volume, but the change was so slight as to escape
detection from the ears of man. These pups were the same sort of hybrids
as Breed, their parental strains identical, yet among them all he found
only one with his own qualities, the coyote fur and the voice of the
wolf. In all others this was reversed.

Breed's own pups grew strong and active, capable of covering ten miles
of rough hill country in a single night, and the family would soon have
left the den but that Shady indulged in one of her flighty streaks,--a
streak prompted by the dog strain in her rising temporarily above the
wild.

She had hunted tirelessly but had failed to bring home a scrap of meat.
Her hopes ran high and she ranged continually farther from the den till
she eventually crossed over the divide for a look at the west slope. The
breeze held steadily from the west and Shady caught a whiff of wood
smoke and moved toward it to investigate. She scouted along the edge of
the timber, watching the cabin in the little clearing for signs of life.
It appeared deserted. She crossed to it and sniffed at a crack,--then
fled for her life. At the first sniff there came a deafening bellow and
a great hound surged round the corner of the house.

As Shady fled she rolled her eyes back, coyote fashion, for a glimpse
behind. She noted that the hound seemed to have trouble in getting
started, and once back in the timber she stopped. She heard the rattle
of a chain,--the hound was anchored! From long experience in the past
Shady knew the futility of striving to break a chain. The dog was
powerless to harm her. Even if he should free himself it would avail him
nothing; these slow running hounds were known to her, and their speed
was no match for her own.

Shady returned to the cabin and peered round one corner at the raging
hound whose six-foot chain prevented his clearing the next corner by
more than a foot. She moved along the side of the house till within ten
feet of him and sat down, her tongue lolling out contentedly as she
watched the frenzied hound almost strangle himself in his efforts to
reach her.

A flutter of canvas caught her eye and she rose with her forefeet
against the logs as she stretched her nose up toward it. The prospector
had rolled the cloth round a ten-pound piece of fresh venison to keep
the flies from it. Shady sprang and seized it, swinging clear of the
ground, all four feet braced against the logs, then fell sprawling as
the nail from which it was suspended bent and allowed the cord to slip.
She started off across the open, and the first fold of canvas flapped
loosely under her feet and tripped her. Halfway to the timber the meat
dropped out and she took it, leaving the cloth behind; something over an
hour later she turned up at the den with the first meat she had ever
furnished for her own pups.

The prospector returned to his cabin and while still a mile away he
heard the bellowing of the dog. The first sight that greeted him was the
canvas, flapping limply in the open, and he found Shady's dust tracks
round the cabin, and swore. He ducked hurriedly into the house and
reappeared with a shotgun, unsnapped the chain from the cabin wall and
resnapped it in his belt, and he was off, with the eager hound tugging
ahead of him on Shady's trail.

Shady, elated by her first success, had left the den for another hunt.
As she swung back toward home she heard the steady bellow of a hound and
put on full speed ahead. The baying ceased except for an occasional
bark, and when Shady came to the last fringe of trees along the ridge
she saw a man standing at the den. The hound was chained to a single
tree some thirty yards away and she knew there was naught to fear from
him. The man started excavating with a light miner's pick and a
short-handled shovel which he unslung from his back. In half an hour he
had opened one tunnel till he could peer into the den hole. Then he
unwound a strange instrument from about his waist, a wolfer's "feeler",
three strands of wire twisted into a pliable cable ten feet long, the
three ends of the strands extending forklike a bare two inches beyond
the cable braid at one end. This simple invention eliminates much
tedious excavation work, the sensitive tool following the curves of the
branching tunnels which each wolf pup makes for himself as soon as he is
able to dig. Shady prowled along the edge of the timber and viewed these
preparations suspiciously.

The man inserted the end of the feeler in a hole that led off the main
cavity of the den, and advanced it by gentle thrusts, twisting it as he
pushed to clear the forks. There was not a sound from the den. The
feeler would go no farther. He grasped it flat between the palms of his
hands and twirled the cable rapidly from right to left. There was a
sudden spitting explosion of baby snarls from the depths of the hole.
The man gave one tentative tug and felt resistance, then hauled the
feeler in hand over hand and drew forth a fighting pup, the three tines
twisted firmly into his soft fur. The hound opened up excitedly; the
short pick swept up and down,--and the pup was a lifeless heap.

Terror and rage flooded Shady in equal parts. She gave one sharp
cry,--and the other two openings disgorged a shower of frightened pups
that scattered toward the timber as so many flushed partridges, fleeing
in response to their mother's sharp command, and Shady raged straight at
the man!

The prospector was an old hand at rifling wolf dens. Occasionally a pup
would dart from another exit, and the shotgun was an effective weapon
with which to check his flight. But never had he seen such a mad
outpouring of pups as this, and in all his long life in the hills a
she-wolf had never rushed him, even in defense of her pups. Shady's
charge was reversed so suddenly as to appear that she turned a flip in
mid-air when she saw the man's hand stretch forth and lift the shotgun
from the ground, for she knew well its purpose and its power.

The thunderous roar of black powder sounded behind her and a charge of
heavy shot raked her hips and loins as she gained the trees. Shot
pierced both ears and furrowed along her skull. The man turned and
pulled the second barrel at the rearmost pup and he went down limply, a
puff of fur flung into the air above him, his life snuffed out in a
single instant as the heavy charge pulverized him from end to end.

A piercing series of yelps issued from the timber as Shady gave voice to
her agony. The prospector nodded. The mystery was cleared; for he knew
that he might shoot a wolf or coyote to mincemeat and neither would make
a sound.

"A dog," he said. "A renegade. I should have knowed it all along; her
stealing thataway right alongside of Buge; and her bristling up to
me--no wolf would carry on like that."

He strode to the tree and unleashed the hound.

"Go to it, Buge!" he said. "Go clean up them pups."

As the dog sped into the timber a sharp note sounded from far down the
slope. Shady had partially recovered her upset faculties and called the
pups, and they gathered swiftly to her and ran their best. Even in her
crippled state Shady could have outrun the trail hound, for her wounds
had not yet had time to stiffen, but the pups could scarcely hold their
own, and the dog's endurance was far greater.

Breed was returning to the den with a ragged chunk of venison when he
heard the double roar of the gun and Shady's agonized yelps. Her later
cry to gather the pups indicated the general direction of her flight.
Then the steady tonguing of the hound broke forth. Breed flanked the
dog's route till he drew abreast of him. The baying voice filled the
valley and echoed among the rims till it seemed that the whole breadth
of the hills was filled with dogs, but Breed knew that the sound came
from but one. He could hear no sounds of man, and he dropped swiftly in
behind Buge to decipher the signs of the trail. There were the hot
tracks of Shady and the pups, the hound's tracks on top of theirs, and
no man had come that way. Breed spurted ahead and sighted the dog, and
swung out to flank him and get the wind.

Buge ran with his nose close to the ground. He was gaining on his prey,
and his mind was so wholly centered on the trail that he was unaware of
the deadly yellow wolf that ran almost abreast of him and forty yards
downwind. Breed was puzzled as to how to handle the situation that
confronted him. He feared the hound, believing that an ally of man might
be endowed with man's strange power for harm. The dog was a slow,
cumbersome animal and Breed knew that Shady was far speedier, yet he
wished the spotted beast would quit her trail. He saw Buge's nose lifted
from the trail as he caught the warm body scent from close at hand. The
dog ran now with head held high, the body scent reeking in his nostrils.
Then Breed saw Shady and the pups running under the trees a hundred
yards ahead. The steady baying rose to a slobbering bellow as the hound
followed his prey by sight. The gap narrowed, and Breed could see his
slavering jaws, the froth drooling stringily back across his shoulders.
The last pup was running desperately a bare twenty yards ahead,--and
then the great hound was suddenly thrown off his feet as a fighting
yellow devil struck him from the side without a sound to announce his
rush. Breed's shoulder had caught him fairly in the middle of a stride
and the shock of the impact slammed him down six feet away; as Buge
landed heavily on his side two flashing rows of teeth closed on his
throat and sliced into it, and his life was torn out with the yellow
wolf's backward wrench.

Then Breed ran on after Shady and the pups, knowing now that a single
short-haired dog, despite the terrifying volume of his voice, was no
formidable antagonist for a wolf when once caught outside the radius of
man's protection.

Night settled down over the hills as Breed came to the end of Shady's
trail and found her lying in a half-swoon with the pups crouching near.
Breed felt that he was leaving this country to return no more, and
almost unconsciously he raised the call for the pack, knowing that the
pack season was far in the future, yet longing to hear the voices of his
friends. Far to the south a pair of coyote voices answered him, and
still beyond them, so far that the sound did not reach Breed's ears, a
second pair of coyotes relayed the message that the yellow leader
called.

Breed urged Shady on, but in three miles the wolf family was forced to
lay over for a rest. Here a pair of coyotes overtook them. The slow
march was resumed with frequent halts for rest, and before morning two
other pairs of coyotes caught up with them, and these were all members
of the original pack that had hunted together in Sand Coulee Basin. Just
at dawn the dog coyote Breed had met some time earlier in the spring
brought his she-wolf mate and joined the band. All of the new arrivals
had lost their pups through the efforts of the hound that Breed had
slain, and they were free to follow where the leader willed.

Breed moved east across the Flathead and for two days he urged Shady on
relentlessly till they were far up the sheltering slopes of the main
divide. Shady then took shelter in a windfall, and for the next three
days she refused to move. Her wounds stiffened and festered from
imbedded shot, and she was dry and feverish. Three stray coyotes crossed
the Flathead and joined those that prowled within a few miles of Shady's
retreat.

The third night Breed heard a well-known voice far down the slope and he
threw all the force of his lungs into a welcoming cry.

A coyote invariably deserts a den that is neared by man. Peg had
discovered Breed's rifled den and his keen nose interpreted the signs.
He had heard the leader's call and wondered why it had been raised so
early in the year. He followed the sign till he found the body of the
hound. It was morning when he reached his own home, and the following
night Peg and Fluff had led their pups off in the general direction
taken by Breed. The trail had cooled, but in moist and sheltered spots
he found sufficient trace to guide him, and in the heavy timber where
the great drifts lingered he could follow it by sight. Then at last he
heard Breed's voice above him and an hour later Peg and Fluff led six
half-grown pups to the windfall.

When Shady was once more able to travel Breed led the way to the north,
the band not traveling together, but every coyote's course laid out to
accord with Breed's, and within hailing distance so that each might
apprise the others of his whereabouts at night. When the pups were old
enough to shift for themselves Breed had crossed the Canadian line and
was two hundred miles north of it along the great divide that marks the
boundary between British Columbia and Alberta.

All along this route clear from the Yellowstone there had been coyote
country to the east of him. The prairie wolves had long since populated
the valleys of the Musselshell, and, farther north, the Marias River and
the Breast. There were coyotes east of him now, running the prairies of
Alberta and Saskatchewan, but he had at last arrived at a point west of
the extreme northern limits of the coyote range. All over the continent
to the south and east of him pioneering coyotes were pushing on into new
lands: they had penetrated the hill country of Pennsylvania to the east,
and south almost to Panama; but it had fallen to the lot of the yellow
wolf to lead the way for the horde that was invading the northwest
hills.

During the first storm of the early fall Breed pulled down a yearling
mountain sheep on a high plateau. A motley crew answered the meat call.
Breed, the yellow hybrid, Shady, the half-blood renegade, and four pairs
of coyotes born in Sand Coulee Basin; the dog coyote with his
timber-wolf mate and several of Breed's and Shady's conglomerate pups;
all were there to feed. And when the bones were picked Breed led his
nondescript band on into the unmapped wilds of the British Columbia
hills.




CHAPTER XI


Wolfing was no longer profitable in the foothills and Collins pulled up
stakes and left. He loaded his belongings on his pack horses and
journeyed far to the north. Later he sold his horses and traveled by
canoe, and after a roundabout course he preëmpted an old cabin between
the Laird Fork of the Mackenzie and the head of Peace River. The climate
was moist and the underbrush growth was often so dense as to force him
to hack out a trail in spots as he laid out his trap line. The side
hills were matted tangles and the valleys shaking bogs, and Collins had
little love for his new surroundings. There were no cheery sounds at
night, only the howls of wolves. In midwinter of his first season in the
north he was roused out of a sound sleep, certain that somewhere close
at hand a coyote had howled. During the brief gray light of the
following day Collins stopped and gazed long at a small, wolf-like track
in the snow.

"Coyote!" he announced triumphantly. "It was him that howled."

Twenty yards farther on he crossed a second coyote track, and for half a
mile there were trails pointing to the north. There was one that showed
evidence of a missing foot, a peg-leg such as those he had often seen on
the open range. Then Collins halted and studied the next two trails that
appeared side by side. One was a wolf track, and there were two toes
missing from one hind foot. The smaller tracks were evenly spaced, and
placed one before the other in a straight line after the manner of
coyote and wolf, but ten feet beyond where Collins stood the trail
showed the wavering gait of the dog with an occasional track out to
either side. A sudden mist blurred Collins' eyes and he dashed it off
with the back of his mitts.

"It's Shady," he said. "Old Shady and that yellow Breed,--both still
alive and way off up here." Collins threw back his head and sent forth
the clear piercing whistle that he had used to summon Shady in the long
ago. Three times the shrill blast, long and sustained, was sent far out
across the snowy hills.

Three miles to the north Shady lay curled up with Breed. She suddenly
raised her head. Breed too opened his eyes and cocked one ear to listen.
Shady was conscious of no actual sound. Some faint vibration reached her
ears and seemed to play upon some chord deep within; the impressions
were hazy and indistinct, yet she was aware of a vague sense of loss, a
wave of something akin to homesickness, and she whimpered softly, then
closed her eyes and slept.

Collins heard more and more coyotes howl, and in the next two months he
had brief glimpses of perhaps a dozen as they moved across some opening.
At least half of these seemed larger than the coyotes he had known, and
they had dark fur on their backs. The Coyote Prophet studied long over
these strange things. The coyote voices roused an ache for the homely
cabin in Sand Coulee Basin a thousand miles to the south; and each time
one howled he said:

"I'm going back. Once it comes spring I'll make tracks out of here. This
here's no fit country for a white man, and me--I'm going back."

But Collins did not go back with the opening up of spring. Rumors of a
gold strike sent men stampeding toward the fabled spot, a long journey
to the north and east. Three parties crossed over the old trail past
Collins' shack. The old wolfer caught the fever and followed the last of
them. Before he left he made one last prophecy.

He predicted that the hill coyotes of the northwest from the Yukon to
the Yellowstone would be larger and have dark fur on their backs from
frequent infusions of wolf blood; that within a dozen years the fur
markets would distinguish between these dark silky-furred ones and the
woolly yellow coyotes of the plains. He scrawled this message on a
wrinkled scrap of paper, signed it, tacked it on the wall, and started
off down the trail.

A month later a party of five men stopped overnight in the deserted
cabin. One of them deciphered the queer scrawl.

"Crazy," he announced. "Some old coot went off his nut from being holed
up alone--and this is all he left."

A tall lean man whose warped legs betrayed his sage-country origin
leaned over and studied the signature.

"Collins," he mused. "Now whoever would have figured to cut his trail up
here? He maybe was crazy,--but anyway, I'll bet five hundred that scrap
of paper will pan out just like it says."

A hundred miles beyond the cabin Breed and Shady were educating their
third litter of pups. The nature of the country had prevented the
excavating of a proper den and Shady had taken possession of a windfall.
Breed was vastly disgusted with this new land, heartily sick of being
shut in by the interminable hills and of traveling through swampy
jungles of tall brush, and he was glad when the pups were old enough to
shift for themselves.

He gathered the pack and started on, his course this time more east than
north, and he covered better than twenty miles each day with a definite
purpose of leaving behind him this country so thickly overlaid with
brush that its effect upon him was almost a feeling of suffocation. He
came out into the lower hills and crossed occasional open spots. Then,
after ten days, he crossed through a rolling country and just at dusk
came out on the shoulder of a hill; before him lay broad stretches of
low plains, open meadows alternating with strips of heavy timber, the
whole a wonderful park-like landscape swimming in the twilight. From
nearby hills he heard the coyotes beginning to tune up, and each one was
facing toward the plains, the first spot they had seen in three years
which reminded them of home. Breed led the way and brought his band out
into the first reaches of the Mackenzie Barrens that stretched back
among the trees.

Breed found no trap lines here, and there were no mad coyotes or poison
baits. Another two days and the trees were left behind, open country
stretching ahead as far as his eye could reach; the brush was stunted
and reminded him of sage; there were clumps of dwarf spruce much like
the twisted cedars of the badland brakes, and thickets of stunted
willows such as those that sprouted from every side-hill spring in Sand
Coulee Basin. It was like a homecoming after being exiled for three long
years,--and Breed was content at last as he bedded on a knoll. The range
was once more dotted with stock--only these were wild caribou--and old
habits cropped out in Breed; he knew there were no men here, yet all
through the short two-hour day he frequently raised his head and his
eyes swept the range for signs of the devilish riders. When he left his
bed he found fresh evidence that he was home, that Sand Coulee Basin
could not be farther away than over the next tongue of high ground; for
he had not traveled a mile before he smelled coyote blood and traced it
upwind to find an old friend stiffened in death, and with her throat
slit open,--the work of the silent assassin that had terrorized the
foothills of Hardpan Spur.

Breed's hatred of Flatear had been dulled with time. He had met hundreds
of wolves since the fight in the notch, and at first he had sought for
his enemy, but later this search had been manifested only by a careful
investigation of each new wolf he met, a vague suspicion that the big
gray might be an enemy; but this had become almost a mechanical process
rather than a distinct impression of why he should expect to find an
enemy among wolves.

Animal memories are a mixture of impressions received through the senses
of hearing, sight and smell, and after a considerable lapse of time it
requires the coordination of all three of these senses to reconstruct
the thought in its entirety. The sight of the slain coyote filled Breed
with rage but lacking a definite object upon which to vent it. The scent
around the spot further enraged him, and the picture of the great gray
beast swam nebulously in his mind. A wolf howl sounded close at hand and
stirred still another long-dormant pool of impressions; the whole
crystallized into a distinct likeness of Flatear,--and Breed was off on
the hunt for his ancient enemy.

Flatear saw a great yellow wolf rushing down on him and he whirled and
bared his teeth. The gray wolf weighed a hundred pounds, Breed slightly
over ninety. They circled cautiously for an opening, hind parts tensed
and drooping, ears laid flat and lips drawn back to expose the yellow
tusks. Flatear sprang first and Breed met the open mouth with his own.
The clash of teeth sounded far across the barrens and silent shapes
changed their direction and moved toward the sound. Three times Breed
took the force of the drive on his teeth and the jaws of both wolves
dripped blood. A wolf came slipping up to watch, and two breeds of the
yellow wolf's pack stationed themselves ten yards away. Three more
wolves appeared; then Peg and Fluff came to the scene and Peg moved
behind Flatear and crouched.

Breed's snarl warned him off. The three-legged coyote was old and hoary,
in his fifteenth year and with but a short span of life ahead; his teeth
were rounded and worn down but his spirit was stout, and he longed to
mix it with the wolf. His leader's order held him back, but he remained
the nearest of the lot, watching every move of the combat as if
appointed judge of it.

Flatear rushed time and again, using his greater weight to batter down
his antagonist's guard, but Breed gave back each time and Flatear's
driving shoulder never reached its mark and his teeth were met with
teeth. Breed was losing ground and Flatear pressed him hard. The yellow
wolf seemed to have but one style of defense and no heart for attack.
The fight was a mere procession of retreats before Flatear's heavy
drives, and the gray wolf grew accustomed to this monotonous defense,
and his attacks were unconsciously conformed to it, becoming equally
mechanical, his one purpose to wear his enemy down by sheer strength and
weight.

And when Breed, instead of cringing away, struck at him with every ounce
of his ninety pounds, Flatear was unprepared. He had started his spring
and Breed's counter drive was aimed so low that his chest skimmed the
ground. Flatear slashed savagely downward but the yellow wolf's head was
well under him, and even as Flatear's teeth grazed Breed's shoulder his
forward sweep was checked in mid-air as powerful jaws closed on a
foreleg with a sickening crunch of bones. The opposing weights of both
wolves pivoted on that one leg, and in addition to the fracture
Flatear's whole side and shoulder were wrenched clear to his spine.

There was an uneasy movement among the spectators, now numbering more
than a score, wolves and coyotes for the first time in history mingling
to witness the settling of a personal feud. Peg now sat down
contentedly, his tongue lolling out in a satisfied grin.

Breed's tactics changed and he wheeled round his disabled enemy with
lightning feints; then his shoulder struck Flatear with a solid smash
that crumpled him and he went down with Breed's teeth at his windpipe.
His end was of the sort which he himself had handed to so many
others,--and the new range was safe for coyotes.

The silent spectators were startled by a faint whining sound. This
whimpering grew louder and the wolves slunk away but the coyote pack
remained. Breed's sudden hunt for Flatear had caught Shady unprepared,
but she had finally cut his trail and was following it to the spot.

For three months Breed saw no more of wolves, and when next he did see
them the beasts were white. He had led the pack to the basin of the
Copper River at the edge of the Arctic Circle. Their travels were over,
and they now ranged a limited area of less than a hundred miles in
extent. Except that no high hills flanked their new home, its features
were much like the old. There were no longer any days and nights, but a
seemingly endless period of varying degrees of twilight, and the rolling
hills were deep with snow.

Breed had met many new animals since leaving the land of the
Yellowstone; he had known moose and goats in British Columbia, caribou
on the barrens and the iron-gray sheep at the head of the Nelson. Now
there were strange shaggy beasts with hair that hung nearly to the
ground, and they came out of the north in small droves, the white wolves
traveling on the flanks of the herds. He found musk ox easy prey and
there was no lack of meat.

A few days after the first of these appeared Breed and Shady topped a
ridge and saw the one thing necessary to make the image of the old home
complete. A light twinkled some half a mile away, as Breed and Shady had
so often seen the lights of Collins' cabin. Shady whined as she looked
at it and Breed raised his voice and howled. As if in answer to the howl
a shrill whistle floated to them and Shady at once slipped from Breed's
side and headed for the fire.

Collins had turned back from the fabled gold fields, heartsick for the
sight of his native foothills, disgusted with the Arctic night and a
flat white world, and with two companions he had braved the terrors of a
winter journey and headed into the south. They traveled light, supplies
for three packed on a single sled, drawn by six dogs. Food had run low
and for a week they had been forced to subsist on starvation rations;
one more day and they would have killed a dog,--and then they crossed
the trail of a musk ox herd. There was now food in plenty but Collins'
mental exhaustion did not vanish with returning physical strength. He
was obsessed with the idea that he would never see the sagebrush hills
again and his companions could not rouse him.

They fastened the dogs in a clump of dwarfed spruce and built a small
fire on the downwind side of the trees.

The old wolfer sat huddled in his furs before the fire, dreading to
enter the little tent to crawl into his sleeping bag alone with his
thoughts; for the white madness was driving its iron into his soul and
striking at his reason. His mind coined queer white couplets; the white
wolf pack and the white ice pack,--a whole world shrouded in white
night.

His companions had looked upon the white madness before; had seen men
die from the deadly monotony of it all. It was conceivable that a book
of bright pictures, anything with warm colors might penetrate the pall
of white fog that clouded his brain and shatter the obsession,
reinstating reason on its tottering throne. But there was only the
howling of white wolves out across the white snow fields. Then a wolf
howl sounded from close at hand.

It seemed to pierce Collins' stupor and strike some memory filed long
ago in his subconscious mind, and he suddenly straightened and glared at
them.

"I can pick him out from amongst a thousand wolves," he stated. "There's
no wolf shiver to that howl. It's a yellow wolf! As yellow as gold, not
a damned white hair on him anywheres! It's Breed, the yellow wolf of
Sand Coulee Basin--there's color come into this white hell hole at
last!"

A shrill whistle pealed from his lips and his companions shook their
heads. Then the wolf howled again and they stiffened with surprise as a
score of wild voices answered. The sounds were new to them and the snowy
waste was filled with bewilderingly different inflections that ripped
back and forth through opposing waves of sound till it seemed that
jeering cachinnations rose from a thousand fiends.

They read the gleam in Collins' eyes and his disjointed utterances as a
sign of hopeless madness,--but in reality it was returning sanity. A new
warmth stole over him, and the certainty that he would win through.

"Here they come," he said. "The little yellow devils! They've spread
from the Arctic to the Neck, like I always knowed they would. There's
music a white man can listen to--the music of the little yellow wolves."

Then the two men sat silent and wondered if they themselves were mad.
For the dogs were snarling and straining at their leashes in the scrub
spruce, and a strange yellow she-wolf with a strip of dark fur along her
back came creeping toward the fire. Her eyes regarded the two men
suspiciously and one ear tipped toward the dogs beyond. She slipped up
and rested her head on Collins' knee, enjoyed his friendly voice and
rubbing fingers for a single minute, then vanished in the night as the
yellow breed-wolf called his pack.