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Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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