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By the time the den was completed the chinook wind had cooled, and winter tightened down over the hills once more, freezing the surface dirt so solidly as to make excavating impossible. Breed repaired to the last frozen elk carcass in his neighborhood and found Peg there before him. An hour later a she-coyote came to the feed. She sprawled flat in the snow and tore ravenously at the frozen meat.
A she-coyote picks her own den site and starts the hole, but because she is easily exhausted near denning time it falls to the dog to complete the den. When Breed returned to Shady he found her scratching leisurely at the nest she had scooped out.
After two days of hourly excursions of this sort she spent a few moments outside the den, and thereafter these periods were lengthened until she remained on the warm slope fully as much as in the den. Night after night Breed heard the howls of the lone she-coyote that had denned in the windfall. Always she faced toward the land that had been her home.
The pack had split up and scattered in pairs, each she-coyote selecting some likely spot and remaining in that vicinity. The first day of the chinook every she-coyote started her den, and the sites, though widely separated, were identical in many respects.
A she-coyote whose mate is killed after the running moon will raise her pups alone and refuse to accept another mate; yet the howls she sent out were calls for a mate, and from this Breed knew that she did not believe that Cripp was dead. He pondered long over this mystery of why Cripp still lived but did not join his mate. The supply of elk meat rapidly diminished and at last was gone.
Some of these rubs looked like blazes made by an axe. The Airedale Fox, a wonderful dog, routed out a she-coyote that evidently had a den somewhere, for she barked angrily at the dog and at us. Fox could not catch her. She led him round in a circle, and we could not see her in the thick brush. It was fine to hear the wild staccato note again.
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