Adventure Magazine Cover — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

ae Adventure wind had blown five miles from home in a blizzard of two weeks previous, and this had saved him from actual starvation. Crook Paw slunk up and down, eating - rabbits as he could catch them. He felt .comfort long denied him in the narrow aisles of sage-brush and buffalo tangles. One thing disturbed him and made him nervous. Smoke from cabin chimneys smote his nostrils when the wind changed; he could go in no direction that he would not find the tracks and signs of humans. They came riding by day in his vicinity, their voices chilling him, and their odors contaminating the air so often that he grew to have a kind of familiarity with it. He no longer fled when first he caught that scandalous whiff. On the deserts he had fled at the remotest appearance of a human; now he let them pass by his sleep- ing-place in buffalo-brush at thirty yards. He wandered about at night, lying close by day. Warm weather came, and he re- joiced in the green stuff he could now eat. Leaves, weeds, and later on berries and such like pleased his fancy. But just when the hue and cry of his arrival in those parts had died down his loneliness led him to howl for companionship, and humans heard it. Then he killed a new-born calf when the old cow had gone to the river to drink. He killed a colt one midsummer night, and in the Fall he hamstrung a heifer; and it happened that somebody immediately discovered each felonious kill. Worst of all, Hanyak Wisiker had a flock of nineteen sheep, and Crook Paw found them in a bottom. He killed nine, ate an outrageous meal and went off by himself to sleep half a week. Two or three days had passed before he could get up an appetite. Then he found some chickens in false security by a wheat-shed a quarter of a mile from a house. He hunted these half the night and after he had scattered them ate four or five. The cattle, sheep, horse and homeland associations each offered a hundred-dollar reward for the killing of infamous Crook Paw. Popular subscription added another hundred, and the county offered a hundred, too. Thus the old scalawag of a wolf was worth a Winter’s wages for a trapper or hunter. : Word went forth, and in the second year of Crook Paw’s occupation of the Clay River buttes and washes thirty-six trappers came in, some with horses, some with automobiles and some on the train, and they put down three thousand traps to catch him. Times were pretty hard, for Crook Paw was about the only fur in sight. A few skunks, mink, and muskrats were abroad; and after the harassed folk had entertained about as many trappers as they could stand for a while the bounty hunters took to . watching one another’s traps as well as their own. There were two or three fights, and six hundred traps disappeared, one way and another. Crook Paw had a considerable choice of baits. Some tried fish, some meat, some asafoetida, some anise, some smoked honey and singed feathers. There were so many blind sets in the bad-land cattle-paths that fourteen calves and eighty-six dogs had their legs broken in the huge steel jaws. The reward still stood after a year and a day of intensive trapping by trappers, some of whom built large and elaborate pens, and doped their shoes with special preparations for the attraction of wolves. Crook Paw learned all about traps, from curiosity baits consisting of feathers stuck in snow or sand, to live sheep tied with chains, and traps set in groups. For his part, he preferred to catch his food running free where it listed. | The campaign to catch Crook Paw was good news. The details were too many to write, even if one knew their elaborate, boiled-trap, whipped-steel, grease-papered trickeries. Old Crook Paw, sneaking, slink- ing, never drawing a full breath, shuddering with eternal fear, was famous far and wide. He was an invasion, he was the menace of the herds and flocks, he was'the last and worst wolf that ever roved the boundless empire. A widow who was having hard work eking out her living while she proved up on a homestead claim made a lot of buffalo- berry jam and jelly, in the third Fall of Crook Paw’s reign in the Clay River Bad Lands. She noticed that some dog was stealing her chickens, and it made her angry. She had some rat poison, which was effective for everything from ants to gophers and weasels. Accordingly she put some of it into a wad of jelly, knowing dogs like such stuff sometimes; and, having locked up her chickens, she put the “pill” out beyond the chicken shack. Next morning she found a funny-looking brute lying dead, all drawn up in cramps. Eomichbooks (E@)