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We mounted our horses and rode in the opposite direction, but before we left we gave a yelp in a laughing sort of manner to make the Indians believe that we thought it was cayotes. We rode quietly away about three hundred yards from the fire, dismounted, tied our horses and crawled back near the fire. All this time the Indians had kept up their cayote barking and were drawing near the fire.
The occasion was extraordinary, and never contemplated the exigency beyond immediate solution. As James Dows, one of the coolest in judgment and wisest in counsel of the Executive Committee, pertinently described the situation in the pithy remark, "We started in to hunt cayotes, but we've got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don't know what to do with him."
I said: "George, we will shake hands on that," which we did, and I added: "You can also rest assured that if ever you are shot down while in company with me, no Indian will ever scalp you as long as I have the strength to stand over your body, nor shall the cayotes ever pick your bones if I live long enough to see that you are buried," and the reader will see later on that I kept my promise.
It was "recreation" with a vengeance! Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas. "Romantic adventure" could go no further. They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly.
The cayotes howled in the distance; there was a rush of unclean night birds above him, and the growling of panther cats in the underwood. But in his soul there was a terror and a darkness that made all natural terrors of small account. His own hands were hateful to him. He moaned out loudly like a man in an agony.
We built a little fire to warm by, and shortly after we had started it we heard what an inexperienced man would have called two cayotes, but we knew they were Indians and were in different directions and this was their signal for meeting.
We took some of the roots, which are bulbous, and shall try to furnish them with sufficient hardships to make them grow. One night, while in this region, we camped on a hill where the cayotes came up and cried round us, which made it seem quite wild.
That night while we were cooking some of the meat for supper, the cayotes raised a howl and it seemed as though they would take possession of our camp in spite of us; but by firing a shot among them once in a while, we were able to keep them at bay. In those days hunters never took along anything to eat, for a man that could not kill what he could eat was considered worthless.
Sergeant Mathewson remained alone all night on the open prairie to watch them and protect them from the cayotes, till the Police team came next day to take them to town." Mathewson had a lonely and dangerous vigil on the blizzard-swept plain, but it was characteristic of these big men to stand guard in such pathetic cases.
Let us watch from an ambush the manoeuvres of a pack of savage cayotes the name given to one species of wolf while hunting their prey. Our ears are first assailed by a few shrill, currish barks at intervals, like the outpost firing of skirmishing parties. These are answered by similar barks from the opposite direction, till the sounds gradually approximate on the junction of the different bands.
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