Part 3

The family home was a simple affair, such as the original families of human kind might have begun life with. Anything provided with an olfactor could ascertain its propinquity at a distance of forty yards, for it gave off the stinging, musty odor of the wolf tribe. There were also numerous faint trails hard by, some of them blind trails, contrived cunningly to draw the stupid hunter astray. The genuine paths led into a broader, clearly-defined one which ended in a hole about two feet square in the wall of an arroyo, and this entrance was concealed from the casual observer by a scrub-cedar that clung to a precarious foothold and subsisted on nothing. No water had come down this channel in generations and they felt safe on that score.

The hallway of the home was little more than a yard long. It led into a den whereto no light penetrated--a hollowed space perhaps two and a half feet high, and large enough for the head of the house to turn around in. There were also some ramifications to it, four smaller cells dug out in the same fashion, and out of one of these another passage led upward. It came out on top of the embankment, twenty feet away; for Scartoe was a cautious rascal and had no intention of letting his domicile become a trap. He desired it to be a haven and, therefore, he had selected a residence with a back door, though most of his tribe contented themselves with an entrance.

This caution was habitual with him and was the child of experience. Experience had taught him some bitter lessons and had given him his name. For, in the spring of the year when he reached his full height and was filled with conceit of his strength, a famine threatened. The wolf ranged far and got nothing. Hitherto suspicious of the haunts of men, he overcame his fears at last and raided the ranch headquarters and came away with a lusty young rooster. Next night he attempted to repeat this feat, and while nosing the skeleton of a cow lying close to the home pasture fence, something snapped over his foot. A numbing pain shot through him. When he bounded high and backward to clear, he was jerked to the ground.

Clasped like a vise about his toes was a steel trap, a mercilessly powerful contraption of chains, weighted with two hundred pounds. It had him, but fortunately his leg was not caught. In his frenzy of terror, freedom was worth any sacrifice or pain. He sank his teeth into his own flesh and gnawed his toes off, and holding the bleeding stump up in front of him, fled on three legs. Not a sound did he make during his agony. It was not pluck, but a stoicism begot of fear. Had he whined, a charge of buckshot would have ended his days; for the cook dozed fitfully behind a woodpile fifty yards away.

When the foot grew well he was a trifle short in the left foreleg; but it made scarcely any difference in his gait. The only difference was in the trail he made, and from that he was known as Scartoe.

The hurt the cow gave him healed with astonishing rapidity, for sunlight and dry air are Nature’s magicians. While taking a siesta in front of his den next afternoon and tenderly licking the ragged wound, he was witness of a strange encounter. His pups were frisking about, tumbling and growling and snapping in youthful enjoyment of life, while the mother lay beside him, encouraging these evidences of prospective adult ferocity.

At the foot of the knoll whereon they reposed, something rose, wavering, with a fear-thrilling rattle, and the pups scattered. At the same moment a sharp hiss answered this first challenge. With eyes glowing and ears cocked, husband and wife waited for the battle between these enemies.

A dark green reptile with cream-colored bands, about forty inches in length, was circling a rattler. The latter lay coiled, ready to strike, his folds curling and uncurling in long ripples as his head turned to follow the movements of his enemy. Fully six feet in length he was and of a prodigious thickness; but fear had already entered the heart of him. The king-snake sped around him with the speed of light; once, twice, thrice the rattler launched a blow, but there was no foe there. Then the malignant killer was on him.

A king-snake is immune from the rattler’s poison and wages constant warfare on all reptiles. Such is the steel-wire strength of his coils that the size of an adversary never daunts him for an instant. He will tackle a snake twice his size and weight, and he will kill him, too. It was all over in a few minutes. Round and round his victim he folded himself; each second the pressure increased. There was some desperate flaying of the ground as the combatants struggled, for the enemy of all brute creation was fighting for his life. When he lay dead, the king-snake let go and tried to swallow him. He did, in fact, get him half down, but the practical difficulty in the way of surrounding an object larger than one’s self triumphed over his appetite. So he gave up the attempt and the reptile.

* * * * *

“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow.”

Scartoe stood on a butte, with his nose pointing to the moon, his tail between his legs, and weirdly gave vent to his feelings in song. It began with two short barks and trailed into a succession of piercing, reverberating yelps, that melted into one another and rolled and echoed, as by the ventriloquist’s art, until the night grew hideous with the clamor. One would have sworn that a hundred coyotes held the hill, and were indulging in some funereal close-harmony.

This was his evensong. It came welling from his throat in a flood, in spite of him, and the coyote could no more control the impulse, the inheritance of ages, than a man can choke back the hiccoughs. His stomach would retch and his neck muscles work in the throes of it until the song was released. Once again, in the course of twenty-four hours, did the impulse seize him. Just before the sun crept over the edge of the world his nose would be tilted toward the gray vault of heaven.

“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow!”

He desisted at last and, considerably uplifted, departed on his hunt for food. A score of his fellows he met in his prowling, some hunting in couples; but Scartoe was a family man and a lone marauder, and would have none of them. In the half million acres composing the ranch were fully four hundred of his brethren. This in spite of a once vigorous warfare, in which poison and trap and gun and dog had been the weapons. In the last three years the campaign against the coyotes had waned, though each head would bring the taker a bounty at the county-seat and another at headquarters.

It is not to be wondered at that the thieves became arrogant and venturesome. They reveled in their depredations and pitted their keen wits against man’s intelligence with increasing boldness. What if twenty thousand of their brethren had been killed in the previous twelvemonth, in the national forest preserves alone? Many times twenty thousand survived in the cattle country; and official estimate gives it that each coyote does damage to stock to the amount of one hundred dollars annually. Scartoe must have passed, on the silent trails in his night hunt, the destroyers of ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock in a year.

Once he paused in a patch of broomweed to send his doleful cry to the stars. It gurgled from his throat like water from a bottle. He gave tongue no more that night. From the mouth of a cañon, far to his right, sounded a long-drawn howl, plaintive, threatening. Hardly had it ceased than a piercing scream broke from a hackberry tree within a hundred yards of where Scartoe crouched. Truly the lords of the wilds were abroad to-night; but it was not the panther’s cry which drove Scartoe from the trail. What he was giving right-of-way to was the lobo.

The coyote drew off a short distance and sank humbly to earth as a loafer wolf came running out of the shadows. He was a huge fellow, almost red along the back, gray as to his underbody, and he loped purposefully, bent on slaughter. Scartoe sank lower and groveled. In imagination he was fawning upon this mighty creature that inspired him with dread and respect; for, though of the same race, they were far apart as the poles. He knew the magnificent courage of the loafer and, when the King hunted, to him belonged the trail.

He watched him go by, and once more wended his devious way across country. A nice little scheme had hatched in his brain as he lay there, born of a long-time feud. Forty turkeys, eighty chickens and nineteen cocks were now to his credit; to the credit of the ranch-house cook stood the toes of his left foreleg. One turkey-gobbler remained--that he knew with accuracy, and Scartoe speculated pleasurably thereon.

Had he been a human being, he would have laughed as he slid under the outer barb-wire fence at headquarters. Ten paces away he had scented the handiwork of man. Sprinkle and smooth the sand as he might, set bait and lay trap ever so cunningly, the cook could not foil that marvelous instinct. There were but two holes by which Scartoe could enter the pen; before he started he was well aware that a trap lay in each. Approaching one, three feet from it, he scratched loose stones and earth behind him in a shower on a spot which looked too smooth and inviting to his eye and where his nose told him a man had fussed with his hands.

At last he was rewarded. A stick he rolled over touched the spring, and the steel jaws leaped together with a clash. He proceeded to dig all around the trap until it was wholly exposed, after which he gave a disdainful sniff and jumped over it. Thirty seconds later he emerged from the pen bearing a fine, fat gobbler, and away he went, careless of the trail of feathers his dragging prey made.

“You-all kin see for yourself what he done,” cried the cook, gloriously profane, next morning. “He knowed that was there all the time and simply sprung it. Got that lil’ ol’ gobbler, too; last one I had.”

“Ki-yotes is shore smart,” the straw boss agreed. “Smart as humans, I reckon.”

“Smart as humans?” the cook retorted contemptuously. “Why, ol’ Dick is a human.”

“That’s so,” said the straw boss thoughtfully. “Well, they’s smarter, then; smart as a good hoss.”

“That ol’ ki-yote and me’s been fighting for three years. I near had him once; but he done chawed his foot off--they’s that treacherous. Only last week I done set a rooster in that mesquite tree there, and put traps all around. He had to step in one to git that bird. Know what he done?” The cook’s voice rose to a howl. “I’ll eat my shirt if he didn’t go off and git a friend, who sprung the trap and got caught. Yes, sir. Then ol’ Scartoe, he done jump in and got the rooster.”

“Ever try poison?”

“Won’t touch it. He kin smell strych-nine farther’n he kin see. Ate some once and near died, I reckon, for I seen the place where he was took sick. Every trap I set, he just scratches stones or sticks on to it until he springs the thing.”

The straw boss, riding to a division camp the next day, came upon Scartoe trying to imitate a rock as he slept on the brow of a hill. The rider had no gun, but got down his rope and rode toward the sleeper carelessly, so as not to alarm him. The coyote let him approach within thirty yards, then awoke to yawn; but he was wrong in his estimate of the straw boss, because that worthy gentleman, hot with the memory of the recent indignity, let out a whoop and gave chase. Before he could warm up into anything like his usual form, a rope sped through the air and encircled Scartoe’s neck.

Now, there are three rules to observe in roping coyotes. The first is not to rope them, and the other two do not matter. A noose was nothing new to Scartoe and he knew the parry. Before it could tighten and jerk him into eternity, he took one slashing bite at it and the rope parted, cut clean. Next moment the coyote had mingled with the scenery.

He was a serious-minded animal, yet he permitted himself some diversions. When his wife found the remains of the beef, Scartoe realized that there was a round-up in progress, which meant food in plenty, and he took to following the outfit from camp to camp, singing to them about nine o’clock every night and again before the dawn. They showed their appreciation by taking pot shots at him with a .30-30; but he bore a charmed life. He managed to pick up much good meat by this association, too, for the outfit killed a heifer every other day and left enough to feed half a dozen coyotes. Sometimes he had to scare away foolish cows or steers, which, attracted by the smell of blood, would be holding moaning wakes over the remains; and always he had to be on the watch for the buzzards or they would forestall him.

Lightly footing it about camp one night, he startled a work-horse, himself a night prowler, bent on stealing buns from the chuck-wagon which he helped to haul during the day. A coyote would never attack a horse, placing too much value on his life, but this beast was a young, inexperienced creature and did not know that. With a snort of dismay, he dashed off. Pleased with himself, Scartoe gave chase in pure sport, precisely as a playful dog might have done. Twice around the camp they ran, then through it, stampeding eleven staked horses and smashing the guy-ropes of the fly, which fell on the cook, who never claimed to be a Christian and had no fears of an after-life.

The punchers awoke, cursing volubly, and one of them, sleeping remote from the others on the edge of camp, shied a boot at the wolf. He stopped in his run, smelled of it, then bore it homeward. It would make a fine plaything for the babies. The puncher rode twenty-seven miles to headquarters next day, in his socks, to get a new pair of boots.

Four months passed thus pleasurably. Sometimes the family nearly starved, at others the puppies sagged in the middle from overeating. Always there were bones and odds and ends of hides old Scartoe had hidden away to gnaw on in moments of leisure, but they made poor stays to hunger.

When winter shut down on the land Scartoe got rid of wife and children. He simply wandered off when the puppies grew big enough to care for themselves; and he found another home in an isolated ravine. In the cold nights that followed he took to consorting with other bachelors, roving spirits all. Very often they hunted in bands. They were few in number, because it is not coyote nature to run in packs, but this union gave them strength and made them infinitely more dangerous. Two score times they stalked and killed lonely, unprotected calves.

Later, they were so hard put to it for food that courage was born in them. One night four surrounded an eight-months’-old steer one of them would never have tackled singly, and slew him. It was Scartoe who devised the plan that the three should run him by a bush, behind which he crouched. It was Scartoe who leapt swiftly, unerringly, for the nose and brought him down. And it was he who got the lion’s share of the spoils.

Yet they were cowards for all that. A coyote is always a coward, even when driven frantic by hunger.

With the storm kings holding sway, their foraging became less and less fruitful. Several of his race departed for new hunting grounds, but Scartoe stayed in his own domain and weathered the gales.

Twice had he to eat of his own kind. Toward break of a wintry day he and one companion slunk homeward from an unsuccessful scout, their empty stomachs crying aloud for flesh. They watched each other in suspicion, for in each one the same desire was uppermost. Ahead of them, crossing their trail, a wounded coyote dragged himself--spent, done almost to death in a grapple with a nester’s dog. They fell upon and slew and ate him. Later, a full month, or perhaps two, when the same companion grew wasted and weak from hunger, and in all the forsaken country they could not kill, when not even a field mouse rewarded long hours of hunting, Scartoe ran at him and, with one shrewd stroke upward, slit his throat and let out the life blood. He ate his fill and came once more into his strength.

Only once during that time of stress did he pit his cunning against man’s guile. That was when the snow was off the ground and a party of visitors at the ranch-house hunted him with imported dogs. Scartoe made the most glorious mess of his trail. He went back on it, crossed, recrossed, waded up-stream, returned to the starting point, and employed all the tricks his long years had taught him. Then he lay down behind a dead prickly pear and watched the hunt; watched the chagrin of the men; watched every movement of the dogs, nosing and worrying. Tiring of this in half an hour, he went to his den and slept. They never untangled the web of his weaving.

When spring came Scartoe was looking shabby. He was morose, too, and had a longing for companionship. A week of fine weather improved him so that he was almost the Scartoe of old; but the longing for companionship was tenfold greater.

On a February morn he lifted up his voice to herald the dawn.

“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow.”

A joyous bark answered. It was not the call of his kind, yet it thrilled him, for in it there was a note he knew. He stiffened and trembled with expectation. A young collie came bounding toward him. She paused doubtfully a dozen yards away and growled. Scartoe threw up his head, thrust out his tail from its usual abject droop and went toward her blithely. Then his hair bristled, his muscles tightened and he was ready for combat.

Behind her came another coyote. He was big. Even the veteran, large as he was, appeared small in comparison. Where the newcomer had picked up the living that had given him such weight was a puzzle; but certain it was he had ten pounds the better of it. Not a thought gave Scartoe to that handicap.

The big wolf wasted no time in preliminaries. His strength and skill had been tried in mêlées innumerable, and foes had been swept before him like chaff. But Scartoe was a general. Like lightning he dodged the swift rush; like lightning he ripped even as he swerved, tearing a piece from his enemy’s neck. Coyotes will not grapple and cling with locked jaws, as do the brave among dogs; they depend on the swift cutting powers of their dexterous jaws. Three times they came together; three times old Scartoe gashed his antagonist so that the blood spurted. Still he could not quite reach the throat for the death stroke.

And then the end came. Too eager in his desire to finish the battle, he left himself open for the merest flick of time, as he wheeled for a fourth onslaught. With one hurtling, upward dive, the big brute gained the jugular, and Scartoe was thrown back, his throat torn, the life ebbing from him.

The collie frisked about the victor, playfully showing her teeth, and they trotted away together.

An hour after sunup, the ranch-house cook, on a quest for his infant son’s collie pet, came upon the torn, lifeless body.

“Jumping Jupiter!” he exclaimed, prayerfully. “It’s ol’ Scartoe.”

III CORAZÓN

A man is as good as his nerves --Cowboy maxim.

With manes streaming in the wind, a band of bronchos fled across the grama flats, splashed through the San Pedro, and whirled sharply to the right, heading for sanctuary in the Dragoons. In the lead raced a big sorrel, his coat shimmering like polished gold where the sun touched it.

“That’s Corazón,” exclaimed Reb. “Head him or we’ll lose the bunch.”

The pursuers spread out and swept round in a wide semicircle. Corazón held to his course, a dozen yards in advance of the others, his head high. The chase slackened, died away. With a blaring neigh, the sorrel eased his furious pace and the entire band came to a trot. Before them were the mountains, and Corazón knew their fastnesses as the street urchin knows the alleys that give him refuge; in the cañons the bronchos would be safe from man. Behind was no sign of the enemy. His nose in the wind, he sniffed long, but it bore him no taint. Instead, he nickered with delight, for he smelled water. They swung to the south, and in less than five minutes their hot muzzles were washed by the bubbling waters of Eternity Spring.

Corazón drew in a long breath, expanding his well-ribbed sides, and looked up from drinking. There in front of him, fifty paces away, was a horseman. He snorted the alarm and they plunged into a tangle of sagebrush. Another rider bore down and turned them back. To right and left they darted, then wheeled and sought desperately to break through the cordon at a weak spot, and failed. Wherever they turned, a cowboy appeared as by magic. At last Corazón detected an unguarded area and flew through it with the speed of light.

“Now we’ve got ’em,” howled Reb. “Don’t drive too close, but keep ’em headed for the corral.”

Within a hundred yards of the gate, the sorrel halted, his ears cocked in doubt. The cowboys closed in to force the band through. Three times the bronchos broke and scattered, for to their wild instincts the fences and that narrow aperture cried treachery and danger. They were gathered, with whoops and many imprecations, and once more approached the entrance.

“Drive the saddle bunch out,” commanded the range boss.

Forth came the remuda of a hundred horses. The bronchos shrilled greeting and mingled with them, and when the cow-ponies trotted meekly into the corral, Corazón and his band went too, though they shook and were afraid.

For five years Corazón had roamed the range--ever since he had discovered that grass was good to eat, and so had left the care of his tender-eyed mother. Because he dreaded the master of created things and fled him afar, only once during that time had he seen man at close quarters. That was when, as a youngster, he was caught and branded on the left hip. He had quickly forgotten that; until now it had ceased to be even a memory.

But now he and his companion rovers were prisoners, cooped in a corral by a contemptible trick. They crowded around and around the stout enclosure, sometimes dropping to their knees in efforts to discover an exit beneath the boards. And not twenty feet away, the dreaded axis of their circlings, sat a man on a horse, and he studied them calmly. Other men, astride the fence, were uncoiling ropes, and their manner was placid and businesslike. One opined dispassionately that “the sorrel is shore some horse.”

“You’re damn whistlin’,” cried the buster over his shoulder, in hearty affirmation.

Corazón was the most distracted of all the band. He was in a frenzy of nervous fear, his glossy coat wet and foam-flecked. He would not stand still for a second, but prowled about the wooden barrier like a jungle creature newly prisoned in a cage. Twice he nosed the ground and crooked his forelegs in an endeavor to slide through the six inches of clear space beneath the gate, and the outfit laughed derisively.

“Here goes,” announced the buster in his expressionless tones. “You-all watch out, now. Hell’ll be poppin’.”

At that moment Corazón took it into his head to dash at top speed through his friends, huddled in a bunch in a corner. A rope whined and coiled, and, when he burst out of the jam, the noose was around his neck, tightening so as to strangle him. Madly he ran against it, superb in the sureness of his might. Then he squalled with rage and pain and an awful terror. His legs flew from under him, and poor Corazón was jerked three feet into the air, coming down on his side with smashing force. The fall shook a grunt out of him, and he was stunned and breathless, but unhurt. He staggered to his feet, his breath straining like a bellows, for the noose cut into his neck and he would not yield to its pressure.