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Updated: May 4, 2025
A shattered foreleg had healed with an ugly twist, the foot pointing inside and leaving only the prints of two warped toe pads when it touched the ground. Peg and Cripp circled twice round the steer at a distance of thirty feet. They had known other breeds and had found that some would share their kills.
Night after night Cripp followed the pack and came to the kill. The coyotes all avoided him but the strangers were assailed with a ghastly dread of his grinning mask, and their fears were communicated to the rest of the pack. Breed himself caught it.
Peg and Cripp were as sane as himself, yet a moment past they had been stricken before his very eyes. It had been very real, and Breed started suddenly from the knoll and headed for the base of the hills five miles away, nor did he stop until he was far back among their sheltering ridges.
Five miles below him a coyote had raised his voice; another answered. By traveling steadily Cripp and Peg had covered much ground since Breed's first cry of the night had reached their ears and the two coyotes were ten miles within the first folds of the hills and still seeking the yellow wolf, the leader of the pack.
A faint trace of it pervaded the place, coming mainly from the bait itself and almost blotted by the meat scent. Cripp and Peg watched every move from a distance of ten feet. Two young coyotes had come to the spot and one of them worked in toward the bait from the opposite side, using the same tactics as those employed by Breed.
Then a new and appalling menace reared its ugly head in the foothills, striking not at coyotes alone but at every living thing. There were many coyotes such as Cripp, with the hair slipped from their hides, the ones that had survived a dose of poison but were unable to shake off its devastating after effects. Hydrophobia broke out among these and they ran amuck, striking alike at friends and foes.
Peg flashed round a sage and laid open his flank, and as he whirled to face this new enemy Cripp slashed him from behind. Three coyotes darted past Breed and before he had recovered from the shock of the surprise his enemy had fled. Flatear did not flee from fear but from an overwhelming sense of the whole world gone mad, the shattering of tradition and the overthrow of natural laws.
Even then, though he did not know it, his pack was gathering to him. The two wise old coyotes who had fed with him the night before knew that wherever they found the big breed-wolf, there they would also find meat. They had started up at his first call and Peg was coming swiftly from the south, Cripp from the west.
All through the summer the coyotes shunned the specter of living death that plodded silently up and down the valleys and the ridges. When it came suddenly through the trees, drawn by the scent of a fresh kill, some coyote family scattered swiftly and left the feast. Cripp was as apt to howl in broad daylight as at night, and the sounds were meaningless, the unintelligible jargon of an idiot.
Breed went out to greet them and they sidled away as he advanced, stopping when he stopped and turning to face him. Cripp allowed him to draw close, his teeth bared in warning against a too effusive greeting, while Peg drew swiftly in behind the wolf. The peg-leg coyote stretched forth his nose for one deep sniff, then sprang ten feet away as Breed whirled.
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