Adventure Magazine Cover — page 56: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Megs eet eo t " 1 - hd , ' .* ’ ane 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 Hat 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 junipés, miles distant, to sleep. Within three hours a Adventure 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 chink after a time that he had distanced his pur- suers. 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 hu- man; and away he would dash, breathless, frightened and looking over his shoulder. He circled; he ran over baré 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 aheyance 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 EComichboo SS (E©)