# The Last Wolf

The New West—war against mankind.
TheLASTWoLF
$^{by}$ Raymond S. Spears
Author of “To Make It Self-Defense,” “The Spirit Behind the Bluff,” etc.
THE destruction of wolves had been reduced to a science in the Bad Lands of Clay River. Old-time ranchers had shot some, their cowboys had occasionally lassoed one, and when the nesters came, they killed a few. Trappers first cleaned out the beaver, otter, mink and other valuable furs up the river, and occasionally picked up a coyote and wolf, hides hardly worth bothering with.
Then when the deer, antelope and other big game had been killed off, and the settlers had fed their dogs with prairie-chickens, sage-hens, and the like, and shipped wagon-loads of the birds killed as they crouched in compact flocks on the ground, receiving a few cents a dozen for them, wolves turned from the bird-nests and young wild brutes to kill sheep, calves and horses, and a few trappers turned from their skinned beaver dams to pull down the bounties offered for the raiders of herds and flocks.
Wolves and coyotes were immediately swept from the face of the land. Packs of the fearsome brutes were inveigled into traps and in range of far-driven bullets. The bounties supplied the wolvers with sustenance, and the capture of the brutes gave them sport for which they gave up their ambition to become men of substance and position in the community.
The trappers and hunters were wandering strangers in the lands where they had swept the wild life from the very horizons, so that the passing tourists could roll in automobiles from range to range of prairie, mountains, and, looking with all the eyes that they had, still fail to discover a sign of any life larger than prairie-dogs, save for an occasional lank, hungry, thirsty and fugitive jack-rabbit.
The idea that a wild live thing could be more valuable than a dead hide, farmer-stretched in the sun, and worth for its spongy, greasy, foul-smelling mass of hair, blood and fat several cents in coin of the realm, was preposterous. If this living thing took from the face of the earth a little toll in flesh—well, he was a horror to contemplate. Not one survived in the Clay River Bad Lands, in the Missouri Empire.
There was a pack of wolves over in the Pozum Range, west of the Rockies; and its dens were fifty or sixty miles from the nearest house. These wolves lived on jack-rabbits, starved prairie-dogs, birds’ eggs, and various other meats—part of the time. The rest of the time they ate juniper berries, grass and anything else that would give their gaunt sides a less hungry emotion.
There were no deer, no antelope, no other wild game, except a few stunted and wobegone outlaw horses who lived in deadly, daily fear in the midst of an alkali flat, whence they could see for miles in any ` direction, and where a motion on the horizon thirty miles away started them, and where the dust-cloud of a passing automobile on the trail left them for hours in a shiver of alarm.
One day a rancher passed along that trail, and luck was with him, He saw in one pack at a distance of not more than half a mile, nine wolves skulking up a range of mountains which had been vast and grand in some long-gone geological epoch, but which were now washed-down hills and dusty knolls in a desert breadth. It had been thirty years since Old Dan Habosher had seen a pack of wolves like that! They gave him cold chills, for if they attacked his three thousand head of cattle in the next county, two hundred miles away, they would eat a heifer a week, or anyhow every two weeks.
Accordingly Old Dan notified the cattle association, and that Fall a trapper slipped over into the Pozums and spread seven dozen No. 5 traps around the Pozum Range, and in three weeks he had caught eight of the wolves. This was doing pretty well; at one hundred and fifty dollars bounty on each wolf, the trapper was an opulent citizen of the country, for who but a great man could make four hundred dollars a week, wages? All the previous Winter he had caught three hundred and eighty dollars worth of fur, but now he entered the ranks of the best danged trappers in the country.
The wolf which escaped was a yellowish-gray brute nearly four feet long, three feet high, with a broken tail and a twisted paw. Even he had not escaped unscathed, for a bullet had broken a joint in the tail, and a trap with a weak spring set for coyotes had badly cut a forepaw. In a land where wolves had attained a weight of around two hundred and fifty pounds, this dog lobo would weigh something more than a big coyote, say a hundred pounds. He heard the jangle of the traps that his unlucky mates jerked from their beds as they leaped when the jaws closed on their legs; and, when he had lifted one trap himself, he raced away in panic from the region where wolves were damned.
At night he raised his voice, yelping and howling; but it was a lonely land for wolves. Wherever he wandered he heard no reply to his call, except that from some ranches packs of hounds made answer, the meaning of which he learned three hundred miles from the terrors of the Pozum Mountains.
Having howled, and heard the reply in challenge to his call for a friend or a mate, he went off up into a clump of junipers, miles distant, to sleep. Within three hours of sunrise he heard the hounds coming, trailing Airedales tracing out the windings of his wanderings; and as in alarm the wolf sneaked to look down into the valley he discovered horsemen riding, and a long line of dogs, perhaps a dozen or more, some rangy brutes, Russian Borzoi, or wolf-hounds, strains of greyhounds and the smaller, more intelligent Airedales.
The wolf turned and fled. He had chased rabbits by scent in the snow. It was his turn now to be trailed. He raced away, stopping at intervals to look back from some height, or from the edge of a flat that he had crossed to climb some farther ridge. He would see the hunters riding, and the dogs coming. Sometimes he heard them, the occasional shouts of the men, and the eager cries of the dogs.
Racing at top speed, the wolf would think after a time that he had distanced his pursuers. He would take comfort to himself, and crawl under the shelter of some rock or juniper, where the afternoon sun would warm his shivering, bedraggled figure. Just when he was nearly beguiled, he would hear a shrill yelp, or the rolling voice of a human; and away he would dash, breathless, frightened and looking over his shoulder.
He circled; he ran over bare rock; he tried back-tracking and jumping from high bluffs; the old-time hunters on his trail knew every trick he played, and the time came when the tired dogs and the tired horses discovered their sneaking, cringing quarry darting from cover at only a few hundred yards’ distance.
Their whoops and yelps betrayed their exceedingly great joy at this, the revival of an ancient thrill long in abeyance because the source of it had been, in those parts, wholly destroyed. The wolf saw lank, lean dogs, the Russian sight-hunters cutting straight, on the sight-line, coming for him. The wolf knew the sensations of a jack-rabbit now—a jack that has been circled around by wolf after wolf, till three or four had outlasted the speed and endurance of a single rabbit.
The wolf mustered all his strength, speed and hope. He rushed over the divide ahead and down a long slope. Suddenly hope was dismayed. There was a sidehill grown to prickly-pear, cactus in lobes and spines by the acre, many feet high. The fugitive had never seen so much prickly-pear in his life.
He was cornered. Behind him were running the high-bounding, long-jawed wolver dogs, several of them. The wild brute had no alternative. He dashed into the prickly-pear where it was thickest, preferring thorns to the fangs of the overwhelming brutes behind.
Jack-rabbits had runways amid this growth. The wolf started a score of them as he crawled and edged, cringed and whimpered along the tortuous way, pricked, stung and even torn to the living flesh. He crossed a little open space and darted into another cluster. He stopped at last, lying flat, with thorns in his sides and their points holding him down on all sides.
A moment later he heard the yelping bafflement and pain of the fool dogs behind. With all their experience, the sight-hunters didn’t know prickly-pear when they saw it. They must needs bound high, looking for the game they hunted, and come down amid the thorns and spines from above. The humans and Airedales, topping the ridge, heard the squealing anguish and reckoned that the wolf was at last at bay, and was fighting five or six times its weight, tooth-armament, and agility—and winning out. The grand skedaddle was at hand at last. The joy of the kill in a riot was theirs, to reward them.
The fagged horses sprang their knees; the Airedales lost their heads. The men pulled their revolvers and carbines, and, to make the occasion one never to be forgotten, shot and yelled into the air with all the sane, intelligent and superior dignity of humanity in the presence of the lower orders of brutes and such.
They roared down to the edge of the field of un-Burbanked cactus. The noble Borzoi were crawling out of it, limping on all four paws, their faces and smug-fat sides scratched and bleeding, while they whimpered with the astonishment that fools invariably display when their utter folly brings its due reward.
The shouting and the shooting died slowly and reluctantly away. While two or three of the men rode around the edge of the tall prickly-pear and pointed their sharp noses out over the spines, blinking as they saw the reflection of the setting sun down the masses of spines and thorns, like the pathway of moonbeams on the ripples of water or across an alkali flat, the other humans in quick and hasty alarm fell from their horses, who sighed and blew with relief and wished they had a drink.
Then the dogs were caught, and thorns were pulled out, and other thorns broken off inside the trembling flesh, beneath the dusty, muddied skins.
“My gracious!” one of the men gasped, “If we hadn’t come, the dogs would ’a’ tore themselves to pieces in this prickly-pear! Gosh! I never saw anything like this! Hey—Bill! See ’im anywhere? Never mind letting the dogs kill ’im! Shoot ’im if you see ‘im! Don’t b’lieve we better let the dogs kill ’im in here.”
“Oh—Jack! Catch Prime, there! Don’t let Prime into them thorns! He’s a’ awful lot of spunk, Prime has—hang on to ’im! He might tear ’imself all to pieces, if you don’t!”
When the thorns were all broken off or pulled out, and the dogs had been tied up to prevent them eating the wolf alive, night fell, and the hunters turned reluctantly in the starry desert alkali—turned from the chase. They spoke in admiration of the wolf.
“Ain’t he the cunning ——, though, coming here? Why, say, you know, he knowed what he was doing! My land!” one of the boys cried. “I never saw nothing like it! Say; you know, he’ll be killing a lot of cattle around here. He’ll eat two-three a week, he will, jes’ the best parts, tenderloins an’ round steaks, rib steaks, and prob’ly the kidney fat, an’ so on. You take these wise old wolves an’ they’re bad! Yes, sireee!”
One Borzoi with points of thorns in each paw, half-blind, his shoulders poisoned by the cactus, sank back when the rope strained on his neck.
“Look’t that! Look’t that!” Bill cried. “I tell you, my Popsy-Doodle’s the bestest, ambitiousest wolf-houn’ in this country! Look’t ’im! He’d ruther choke to death’n leave that wolf skulkin’ there! He would! See’t? Hear ’im whine? He’s begging to be left here, to tackle that old he wolf alone! By gosh, I’ve heard of spunky dogs, but he’s the limit! So—so, old boy, so-o! Come on! We'll come back tomorrow—He-uh! He-uh! Come on, old boy!”
Popsy-Doodle whimpered, limped and slavered at the jaws; but he consented to be persuaded and led away. Bill, sorry to take his dog from so noble a desire to eat up a scoundrel devasting outlaw wolf, at last hoisted the dog by the collar, kicking, choking and gurgling, to hang him dangling over his saddle like a ragged blanket.
THIRST, hunger, the urge of unremitting terror drove the wolf out of the prickly-pear patch the next night. He shrank across the alkali flat toward a range of mountains that loomed dark purple amid the stars. Beyond that range-perhaps the wolf would find a happy country, where there were no humans, and perhaps another wolf—if a wolf dare dream of such bliss as another of his kind.
He caught a jack-rabbit, an old sick one, and ate it. Jack-rabbits are rank meat, but a wolf eats them. He found, in a valley an alfalfa field. He was the only wolf in all that land. Here were two hundred acres of alfalfa, and the water with which the field was irrigated was more delicious than any water the desert wolf had ever swallowed.
And here was a happy hunting-ground, too. There being no wolves normally in those parts, some four thousand jack-rabbits quarreled with some thousand mollie cottontail rabbits for the privileges of the holes in the vermin-proof wire fence.
The wolf, crouching beside one of the holes, grabbed a cottontail and ate it. He seized a young jack-rabbit and ate that. He hadn’t eaten anything but a sick jack in ten days or so. Now he ate rabbits all night.
He ate till his belly dragged on the ground. Then he crawled into a clump of willows beside the run of water that flowed down out of the overshadowing mountain range, to digest. In three weeks he weighed thirty pounds more than in the palmiest days he had ever known out in the old home Pozum Range. He ate jack-rabbits and cottontails, dozens, scores of them. All he had to do was lie by a fence opening and grab.
Then one day the owner of that alfalfa field came along. He found the tracks of a wolf. No other wolf was in the country. He recognized it instantly, the crippled-paw print being unmistakable. He caught his breath. He had a flock of sheep, and suppose that wolf should get into them?
He sighed as he saw about four hundred jack-rabbits’ ears above the alfalfa field. It was awful, the way nature was treating him, making homesteading such a burden on poor nesters. Not only were all the jack-rabbits for miles around come to eat his alfalfa, even learning to climb rabbit-proof fences, but now a wolf had come—that wise old scoundrel, outlaw wolf, which the boys two hundred miles west of there had hunted with their wolf pack, and the sly old —— had escaped them all, tearing the finest wolf dogs to pieces in prickly-pear, and even biting the dogs in the hind legs when they ranged through the cactus looking for the wolf, which held his scent and hamstrung the dogs, according to the hear-tell of a automobile pack-pedler who happened to be at Bill’s cattle ranch over thataway.
“T better notify the sheep association!” Larens, the nester, decided. “No use any ordinary man trying to do anything with that wolf. Why, he’d likely kill a man’s sheep just out of spunk an’ deviltry! I better not show I’m int’rested in his tracks too much. He might notice! The secretary’ll send trappers——”
Larens climbed back on his horse and rode gingerly and rapidly away. He was looking at the sky-line; and the fat, sleepy wolf saw the horse coming, having been awakened by the throb of the hoofs. The wolf crawled for half a mile in the willows, keeping under cover up the brook, scared, trembling. When Larens brought two trappers there a week later they found the old tracks and followed them, in mud and dust on the stream and on the arid land.
“He’s left the country,” the trappers said, reading the signs. “He’s been gone a week—no fresh tracks. Just the caked mud and the dust tracks, half-filled by the wind.”
“Hes gone away!” Larens gasped. “How'd he know I was going to have you boys after him?”
Crook Paw, as he was now called, clambered into the mountain forests. He found the heights sheltered from wind, but cold and snowy. He found rabbits, mice, and along streams occasional dead fish, whose flavor appealed to him as a pleasant delicacy.
When the snow fell deep he made a new discovery. He crossed the track of a deer, which he followed. Somebody had shot the deer through both hams, low down, and the wolf easily overtook the animal, assaulted and killed it. Having torn the meat from the bones and feasted heartily on the thin, scrawny brute, the wolf traveled on.
It happened that Art Couse, the trapper, came upon the track of the lone wolf, pursuing the deer, survivor of the Autumnal fusillade. The trapper turned anxiously to look over his shoulder into the dark evergreen shadows. He turned his ears to listen to the winds, lest they bring unheard the blood-curdling, echoing, careless howls of wolves on the hunting-trail, lusting for the flesh of man!
He heard many sounds that made him start and shudder. Clutching his rifle and his side-arms, he followed his fearsome line, with traps set for marten, mink, fisher and such beasts. He saw no more wolf signs, nor heard, for sure, a wolf upon the hunting-trail. At the same time the green timber would never be the same again for him. He had seen where a noble buck had been pulled down in the deep snow and torn to pieces by a fanged, famished, red-jawed wolf—none other than Crook Paw, the rascal outlaw for whose terrible crimes the very bears themselves shrank from him, leaving him to pursue his gaunt, cruel, devastating way.
Art Couse made a special trip out to the settlements to buy more cartridges, obtain a better automatic pistol and give fair warning. Crook Paw had crossed the Continental Divide and was likely at any time to come raging down into the fair prairies of the Trans-Missouri Empire.
And Crook Paw, stepping gingerly over wind-blasted snows, rambled on. He shivered amid the desolation above the timber-line and shambled through the evergreen forests till away down the slopes he found where there was a happy hunting-ground such as he had never dreamed of. There at the borders of the timber was a herd of game.
Deep snow had driven elk and mountain sheep down from the heights. When they reached the lower limits of forested wilderness they found that the hay, wild fodder of the meadows and sidehills, had all been carefully reaped and cut close. The snow-covered mounds of hay stood in the midst of clearings and along valley bottoms. Here and there five thousand feet below were log cabins, with humans waiting around the fires for Spring to come—the Chinook to open up the frozen land. Around each haystack was a high barbed-wire fence.
The elk and sheep were wandering around in these valleys, and then when Crook Paw came among them he was amazed to find that when he set upon these huge brutes, gay skippers in the Summer forests, they ran upon weak legs—stumbled forward with their noses in the snow when he rushed upon them and tore the living flesh from their hams.
Crook Paw had begun to have a pretty poor opinion of this world. He had found no creature of his own kind, heard no answering howl to his lonely cries flung across the landscape. Now he found all that he could eat, for the mere biting. He tore at the throats of gaunt elk, and he ate into the sides of the weakened mountain sheep. With the careless delight of his kind Crook Paw took to wandering around with his paunch distended with more meat than he had had since he found the jack-rabbit and cottontail runway out of the alfalfa field. The humans, in their cabins, were miles away, far down the mountain range.
Some one came up with a pair of bobs and a team of horses to haul a load of hay from one of those barb-wired fenced-in stacks. He brought a neighbor with him. The two were astonished to find their sleek horses prancing. They saw ahead of them, on the snow, a crimson stain. They saw a cloven hoof sticking from a little drift of snow. They saw elk and mountain sheep pressing down to the very stack of hay for which they were headed.
There, in the snow were tracks. The tracks circled around on all sides. The two men, mere homesteaders, hardly recognized those imprints. They looked exactly like a dog’s, but the longer the men looked, the bigger the tracks seemed. There couldn’t be a doubt of it! They were wolf tracks; and as they stared at the elk and sheep stumbling around, they saw that the wolf had been killing these precious game animals.
They wished they had brought their guns. They wondered if the wolf would come and kill their horses. They looked around, and saw that the wolf had killed many animals. Lots of them lying. around had been torn and rent before the blood had stopped flowing.
“My gracious!” Top Hazer, who had a 640 arid-land claim with a dandy big spring on it, gasped. “Think of it! What kind of a wolf is it—how big—that he can kill a bull elk! And there he’s killed a mountain sheep, too! We better hurry up. ’Tain’t safe up in these mountains, with packs of wolves running around!”
The two hastily loaded a sled full of hay; and while one held the elk at bay with a pitchfork to keep them from eating the fodder off the sled as fast as it was pitched on, the other made the load. Then they wired up the fence again good and strong, and raced away on their steep back trail down into the valley, far below, glad to escape with their lives.
There, having looked around and cleaned up the rifles, they telephoned off across the country, letting folks know that wolves were killing the elk and mountain sheep, and that if something wasn’t done about it there wouldn’t be any game left in the whole State. Packs of wolves that didn’t think anything of pulling down bull elk and eating mountain sheep alive just had to be taken care of! The Government couldn’t expect people to stand for that.
If something wasn’t done to clear the range of wolves, after they’d eaten what they wanted of game they’d be coming after the fat herds and flocks of tame meat. And next anybody knew, it wouldn’t be safe for humans, no sir, not for American citizens, to follow their own public highways. Something ought to be done!
That was just scared and lonesome homesteaders—everybody knew Top Hazer, how he always was blowing, sometimes about hydrophobia skunks and sometimes about red cats in the buttes, and that sort of thing. He always had something to holler about, every month or two. Same way with Hip Runter, Top’s neighbor. They traveled in a pair, and tried to out-whoop each other—and then they’d both swear to each other’s lies.
People laughing at them made Hip and Top go back up to the valley of sheep and elk, carrying their trusty old .30-30s. They dusted off their saddles and patched the crumbling stirrup-straps. They took cowboy blankets, and things to-eat. They burrowed holes into one of their haystacks, with their horses inside the wire fence. They killed a chunky little sheep which had found its way somehow through the wires, and had been eating a haystack all up for six weeks or so, destroying a lot of valuable cattle fodder. But they saved what was left of the stack, under the Destroying Property Act of the game laws.
That night they heard a howling. From their hole under the haystack they listened to the wolves filling the bleak valley with their horrid hunting bay, which boomed and echoed over the elk and sheep who were moving, sighing, coughing, gasping, beneath the sparkle of the cold stars and the blue-black depths of space between the glimmering points.
Happily the moon rose, bright and revealing. From their hole in the haystack the two hunters stared out over the barbed-wire fence across the eddying and wandering groups of elk and sheep. Here and there was a space of pure white snow; and into these spaces they saw the black shapes of the lank, uneasy elk walking, lifting one hoof at a time, and nosing down into the wind-packed snow, and then moving on again, and digging some more. They saw one elk walking, suddenly begin to turn around in a circle, sinking on bending knees, its head weaving.
“Gracious!” Hazer whispered: “He’s got locoed! He’s goin’ crazy!”
Just then they saw something. It was a dark, fleeting shadow of a thing, an animal like a silhouette against the black snow in the moonlight. They held their breaths. One end was pointed, the other a straight, long tail, and beneath were fast twinkling legs.
This thing led straight at the elk which was perhaps going mad. It circled around the elk, started to rush in, backed away, went around the other side and started in again. Suddenly the elk raised its head in a frantic, gasping bawl. It plunged and jumped about, but feebly. The two watchers whispered.
“It’s—it’s a wolf! Shoot! Shoot!”
They pulled their rifles up and shot, emptying their magazines, and yelling words of encouragement to each other. The horses in the haystack enclosure began to gallop in terror. One dashed past the hole in the hay, and a bullet by chance broke its neck. The two men held the fort till morning. Then they scurried away on their horses, leaving their dead pack-horse where it fell. `
The battle with the pack of wolves was over, and the humans had escaped. People just had to believe now, especially as forty miles away, out over the open prairies, Deputy Sheriff Cubhaus, an old-timer, found a wolf-track in the snow, a wolf which had a crooked paw, and which was traveling for further orders eastward.
THE alarm was sent forth to watch out for the infamous old rascal. Crook Paw was on the rampage. His insolence knew no bounds! He was raiding the Trans-Missouri Empire! Men who hadn’t seen anything larger than a jack-rabbit in fifteen years thrilled to the call to battle.
Old .44s, .45-90s that had the reputation of killing grizzlies, .40-82s, and a .50-110-540, with which the last antelope had been brought down at eight hundred yards nine years before, were all brought forth, and green-jacketed ammunition was rubbed and polished till it looked like old brass, ready for the wolf that had come back to the stamping-ground of the buffalo, coyote, antelope, cattle-kings and horse-thieves, now given over to peaceful agriculture and the voice of wheat quotations in the telephone.
Once more the wild spirit of the past stirred in the breasts of old-timers. Crook Paw had come to challenge the supremacy of humans. The Last Gore school house, nine miles east of Rosemary Butte, built of sod and old-fashioned, burning lignite in its stove, with eleven helpless little pupils and a brave school-teacher, Miss Amanda Yonson, had no idea of figuring in the annals of the prairies. Yet suddenly one of the children in all innocence and ignorance cried—
“Oh, look at that!”
The teacher started at this unusual break in discipline, and saw a fearsome, bedraggled, grayish brute, with pointed ears and wide open mouth, and tongue hanging long and red over a line of gleaming white teeth.
She screamed, rushed to the door to double-bar it, seized upon the long iron poker, and, sending the children to the windows to repel any attack, held the schoolhouse against the terror of the prairies, which was wise enough to go scurrying on at the first defiant sound. And when that night the people came to investigate they found that the wolf had been there—but in vain. Crook Paw hadn’t been famished enough to attack the school, to eat anybody.
The Empire Clarion gathered and printed the story of the coming of the wolf, using the telephone unstintedly and not questioning in the least any of the accounts heard until it was apparent that the report that those parts were being devasted by raging packs of wolves could do the region no good, especially when transmitted Down East, whence prospective settlers were coming. Then the editor of The Empire Clarion was told flatly that he’d better tone down, so he did.
Crook Paw by some blind luck or instinct went over the brink of the prairie down into the Bad Lands of Clay River. There were a thousand square miles of clay, washes, buttes, coulées, bottoms grown to sparse cottonwood, gullies with buffalo-berry brush, lots of jack-rabbits, some grouse, mice, prairie-dogs, and such like, an occasional nester cabin, and scatterings of cattle that fed on the good bunch grass on the levels.
Wind-caves in the clay strata, ancient water-cut caves, and the broken land offered cover which Crook Paw darted into with all the relief of anxiety and dread that had known no cessation for weeks. A bullet had gashed his left hip; he had been set upon and mauled by two collie dogs and a mongrel hound; he had picked up a chicken that the wind had blown five miles from home in a blizzard of two weeks previous, and this had saved him from actual starvation.
Crook Paw slunk up and down, eating rabbits as he could catch them. He felt comfort long denied him in the narrow aisles of sage-brush and buffalo tangles.
One thing disturbed him and made him nervous. Smoke from cabin chimneys smote his nostrils when the wind changed; he could go in no direction that he would not find the tracks and signs of humans. They came riding by day in his vicinity, their voices chilling him, and their odors contaminating the air so often that he grew to have a kind of familiarity with it.
He no longer fled when first he caught that scandalous whiff. On the deserts he had fled at the remotest appearance of a human; now he let them pass by his sleeping-place in buffalo-brush at thirty yards.
He wandered about at night, lying close by day. Warm weather came, and he rejoiced in the green stuff he could now eat. Leaves, weeds, and later on berries and such like pleased his fancy. But just when the hue and cry of his arrival in those parts had died down his loneliness led him to howl for companionship, and humans heard it. Then he killed a new-born calf when the old cow had gone to the river to drink. He killed a colt one midsummer night, and in the Fall he hamstrung a heifer; and it happened that somebody immediately discovered each felonious kill.
Worst of all, Hanyak Wisiker had a flock of nineteen sheep, and Crook Paw found them in a bottom. He killed nine, ate an outrageous meal and went off by himself to sleep half a week. Two or three days had passed before he could get up an appetite. Then he found some chickens in false security by a wheat-shed a quarter of a mile from a house. He hunted these half the night and after he had scattered them ate four or five.
The cattle, sheep, horse and homeland associations each offered a hundred-dollar reward for the killing of infamous Crook Paw. Popular subscription added another hundred, and the county offered a hundred, too. Thus the old scalawag of a wolf was worth a Winter's wages for a trapper or hunter.
Word went forth, and in the second year of Crook Paw’s occupation of the Clay River buttes and washes thirty-six trappers came in, some with horses, some with automobiles and some on the train, and they put down three thousand traps to catch him.
Times were pretty hard, for Crook Paw was about the only fur in sight. A few skunks, mink, and muskrats were abroad; and after the harassed folk had entertained about as many trappers as they could stand for a while the bounty hunters took to watching one another’s traps as well as their own. There were two or three fights, and six hundred traps disappeared, one way and another.
Crook Paw had a considerable choice of baits. Some tried fish, some meat, some asafœtida, some anise, some smoked honey and singed feathers. There were so many blind sets in the bad-land cattle-paths that fourteen calves and eighty-six dogs had their legs broken in the huge steel jaws.
The reward still stood after a year and a day of intensive trapping by trappers, some of whom built large and elaborate pens, and doped their shoes with special preparations for the attraction of wolves. Crook Paw learned all about traps, from curiosity baits consisting of feathers stuck in snow or sand, to live sheep tied with chains, and traps set in groups. For his part, he preferred to catch his food running free where it listed.
The campaign to catch Crook Paw was good news. The details were too many to write, even if one knew their elaborate, boiled-trap, whipped-steel, grease-papered trickeries. Old Crook Paw, sneaking, slinking, never drawing a full breath, shuddering with eternal fear, was famous far and wide. He was an invasion, he was the menace of the herds and flocks, he was the last and worst wolf that ever roved the boundless empire.
A widow who was having hard work eking out her living while she proved up on a homestead claim made a lot of buffalo-berry jam and jelly, in the third Fall of Crook Paw’s reign in the Clay River Bad Lands. She noticed that some dog was stealing her chickens, and it made her angry. She had some rat poison, which was effective for everything from ants to gophers and weasels. Accordingly she put some of it into a wad of jelly, knowing dogs like such stuff sometimes; and, having locked up her chickens, she put the “pill” out beyond the chicken shack.
Next morning she found a funny-looking brute lying dead, all drawn up in cramps.
“There!” she said; and; remembering the county reward for dogs that kill sheep, stock, domestic fowl and such, she bundled this carcass into a buckboard and took it to town. Instantly Deputy Sheriff Royter recognized the dead brute.
“Why—Mrs. Doysen!” he cried. “You’ve killed Crook Paw! How did you do it?”
“I was sick of having him around,” she replied imperturbably, and that was a great joke.
And before the next morning, when the celebration of the killing of the wolf was running its course, Royter saw the reward handed to the widow, and besides that a purse of a congratulatory nature.
Her picture had been taken; her modest tale of the capture of Crook Paw was great news; and word came in that somebody was going to sink a wildcat oil-well down on the Clay River bottoms in the section next east of the widow’s homestead. Royter reckoned that probably his time had come.
He clinched his opportunity. He married the widow.
And the skin of Crook Paw was taken, tanned, and stuffed. And, stuffed, he stands with head erect, a defiant smirk upon his open jaws, his broken tail carefully straightened and gracefully curved, with his maimed paw raised; and he is inscribed with a list of his sins and depredations, so far as known and guessed, and a scrap-book full of the accounts of his life and times is chained to the case.
And once more no wolf voice rolls and echoes through the Bad Lands, nor in the Pozum Range, eight hundred miles away, calling for a mate that will never, can never come.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1950, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 73 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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