THE PRAIRIE WOLF.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 103, 11 December 1878, Page 2

THE PRAIRIE WOLF.

Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope and the first wolf. If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts ' And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted, with his race afterwards, an*d can s -speak with, confidence. • The cayote is a long, slim, sick and-porry-lcoking skeleton, with a g rty J wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerable bushy tail that for ever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakeness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and along, sharp face, with slightly lifted- lipjand exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote- is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friend'ess. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologising for it. And lie is so homely !—so scrawny and ribby, coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the coarse he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time, till he is about but of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you ; he will trot fifty yards and stop again—anotner fifty and stop again ; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him ; but if you do he developes a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have ra'sed the hammer you see that yon need a minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have “ drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, yon will enjoy it ever.so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The cayote will go swinging gemly off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirelv full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet .vi der frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking h’s long wake across the level plain t A 1 this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and in / save the soul of him he cannot why it is that he cannot get perceptibly ' closer ; and he begins to get aggravated, an I it makes him madder and madder to s-e how gently the cayote glides along, and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile ; and he grows still more and more incensed to sec how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoi-le swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he not ces that he is g tting fagged, and that the cayote actually lias lu s acken speed a little to keep from turning away fro n him —and theti the town dog is rnad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “ spurt’’ finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his fa'-e, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say : “ Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub—business is business and it will not do for me to be fooling along tins way all day” —and forwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solilary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude !

It makes his head swim. He stops, and. looks all around; he climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs back i o his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost waggon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dear will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, “ 1 believe I do not wish for any of the pie.”—Mark Twain.