The Outlaw Wolf

by Raymond S. Spears

The Outlaw Wolf

by Raymond S. Spears

A LOBO WOLF arrived from somewhere east or north in the Tumble Down range of mountains, and Terry Wayne found where the brute had killed a calf in a small park, or basin, grown to scattered junipers, over the first ridge from the ranch at the Pretty Spring.

Terry studied the dining place of the ravenous invader, sitting on his horse to look the ground over. The calf had made a short race of a hundred yards or so, and had never raised to his hoofs after the first crashing attack.

“There’s a job!” Terry thought to himself, and that afternoon returned with five No. 5 traps, with grapples on chains, to set them.

He knew well enough that there was small chance of catching the wolf. Nevertheless, he put out the traps, working from his horse a quarter of a mile distant, wearing moccasins that had been wet in beef blood, and buried the traps around the dead carcass in holes. Each trap was wrapped in soft waxed paper, and covered with alkali and sand where the kill happened to be made.

Two days later he had a coyote, and thereafter he caught two skunks, a badger and a wild cat, but the killed remained at large. In fact, the lobo had killed another calf within four days, and Terry Wayne was told off by his father, who owned the Pretty Spring ranch, to kill the dangerous and expensive guest of the cattle range.

Terry did not much relish the work. He already knew something of the monotony of failure when it came to seeking the death of outlaw wolves. Nevertheless, he took down the trapping books that were part of his working library, and read them—all that they told about wolves, coyotes and foxes. The more he read, the less hopeful seemed his task.

He rode up into the mountains, carrying a can of water, a blanket and rations for several days. In his saddle sheath was his .25-35 caliber rifle, and on his hip a .22 caliber automatic. He carried sixty shells for the rifle and four hundred—eight boxes, for the .22. One never can tell what he will need, nor how much. An extra horse, to carry his pack, enabled him to take any load he cared for.

The wolf was a stranger in the mountains. A huge, big-pawed dog, probably he would tip the scales to two hundred pounds. Certainly, he jerked the calves about where he fed on them with angry strength, and the crushed bones displayed the power of jaws. It was increasingly easy to find tracks and sign of the animal’s presence. But none of these showed any fixed habits in the animal.

Wayne rode over into the Wash Breaks, where there were several springs and he made a camp there at one of the drivlets of water. He rode with his traps up into the ridges, and set several of them in the passes that showed game trails over the summits. The wolf seemed to have neither a regular trail nor a fixed den. His range, however, was the range of the Pretty Spring cattle country, and a considerable portion of his food was branded with the Wayne cattle mark, but not all of it.

BEFORE long Terry had found where the wolf had killed jackrabbits, a yearling deer, sage hens and even a duck he snapped in an alkali tuille marsh at the foot of the range near the Wash Breaks. He searched in sand, alkali, and around the springs for paw prints of other wolves. There were none. The great wolf was alone, and he was probably an outlaw even among his own kind—a pack leader that had been displaced by a younger, stronger dog.

There were evidences in all that the wolf did to show his angry temper. Wolves are never gentle, but this one jerked and dragged his victims about with savage lust. He killed three weaned calves in one pocket gulch, and ate only part of one. But such was his fear of poison, steel and man that he did not return to the wasted meat, leaving it for pack followers—skunks, wildcats, coyotes and the like. The wolfer found the place by the fragments.

Terry shot cottontails and young jackrabbits to eke out his food supply. He used others to tempt the wolf with poison, but there was no sign that any of these baits was ever touched by the wolf, though lesser animals were caught by the pills and destroyed.

For two weeks the youth rode out after the wolf, and then returned to the ranch to admit that so far he had neither seen the wolf, nor even tempted the brute a little bit. He did know, however, that the outlaw had come to stay. The wolf had found a dozen dens in the mountain range, good for winter shelter when the mother earth is warm. There were thickets and even clumps of trees where he could lie day or night as pleased his wayward inclinations.

“He knows I’m after him,” Terry told the ranch crew. “Perhaps he thinks I won’t stay with him!”

Coyotes, with $5 bounties on them, and skins worth $3 or so, paid the wolfer fair wages. He was needed more on the ranch, but the outlaw wolf must be killed or driven away. They had a round up of beef cattle to make, and these animals must be driven to the railroad pens. Terry worked several days at this, and then returned to go the rounds of his traps. Several had been disturbed.

Coyotes had turned two or three upside down. The big wolf had walked over a pass trail, stepping between each pair of four traps laid for his benefit in the highway of the wild creatures. It was not chance, as Terry knew. The wolf was showing his contempt of the trapper and his engines. More than that, the wolf had found a luscious jack-rabbit, which had been shot at thirty yards with the .22, and never touched by human hand. By that rabbit was a round pellet, beef blood with enough acid in it to kill a whale.

“I reckon I’m a sheep-head myself!” Terry grinned as he saw the bait covered over by pawed up sand and gravel. “Course that old boy knowed a jack-rabbit never dripped beef blood!”

Live and think—that’s the wolfer’s way! Terry tried rabbit blood pellets beside shot rabbits, but without results, except that he picked up some fur that was going into prime. None of his successes, however, amounted to anything while he failed in the job to which he had been assigned.

He was living on the range, now. He stopped by the Wash Breaks springs for a night or two, and then would go away back into the mountains, where he had to make a dry camp. He welcomed a snowstorm that covered the highest peaks, and started little rivulets down the gulches and cañons when the sunshine struck into the white caps. He killed a fine three-year-old buck just at the upper edge of the timber line, and spent five days up there trying to discover some weakness in the wolf’s intelligence to betray the raider.

One day riding down the trail in the Middle Valley, he saw where the wolf had crossed the valley on his pack and saddle horses’ trails. The wolf had followed the track for miles, ten or twenty feet from them, and fairly keeping step.

Three days later he found his pack horse cut down by the wolf in the park where he had camped. The tracks showed what had happened. The wolf had charged down at the horse, hamstrung and thrown it, and then dined at his evil leisure.

The wolf hunter stared at that mangled carcass. His first feeling was one of alarm, or dread. He looked around, as though he thought the wolf might turn on him! He patted his saddle horse, doubtfully, wondering if the wolf might not attack some night, and have the advantage.

That very night, far away, he heard the lobo howl. It was a wild, weird, yelping song in the darkness. The outlaw was lonely, and at intervals stopped the refrain to listen, perhaps hoping that some other wolf would make answer, and that they could join together in evil companionship.

TERRY rode homeward again the next day. He was shamed by the wolf’s prowess. How could a wolf hunter ever excuse the loss of his own pack horse to the villainy of the outlaw meat-eater? He couldn’t. All he could do was report the facts, take the jibes and jeers of his father and the cowboys, the sympathy of his mother, and having obtained his supplies, immediately join the fugitive in the loneliness of the Tumble Downs.

The youth felt the change in his own spirit. There is a difference between looking after cattle, managing horses, living at a ranch, and going forth into the mountain heights hunting a grey, competent wolf to the death. He could not scorn that loud-voiced, stealthy-traveling, hard-hitting brute. Terry knew that the wolf was perhaps his equal in strategy. He rode with no illusions regarding the problem. He watched with swinging head, all day long, his carbine in the crook of his elbow usually—but always at arms length ready to grasp.

He was riding into the timber belt, an open growth of evergreens on the higher mountains, when suddenly, almost at his very feet, he surprised the wolf. He recognized the grey, shaggy, slinking brute on the instant. He saw the turned face, the green eyes, the wrinkling snout and the rising hair along the spine—there was the Old Boy himself!

For an instant Terry saw the wolf full length and half-height, as the animal crouched, running through heavy sage. He snatched at his carbine, threw the butt to his shoulder—saw the quivering of the bushes and fired. He fired three shots—all was quiet.

He galloped to the spot, a scant fifty yards distant, flung himself down to find the carcass, or the blood-drips. He found neither. He traced the wolf a quarter of a mile through that sage and lost the trail in coarse gravel on an alluvial fan out of a deep, narrow gulch.

“He’s a wizard!” Terry sniffed. “I need a silver bullet!”

Pretty soon he amended his remark, saying:

“What I really need’s a cure for the trembles!”

He took the blame on himself. All that the youth lacked was wit to fool the cunning brute. Three times in twelve days Terry found where the killer had struck into the Pretty Spring herd, tearing down an old cow, a heifer and a late calf.

More and more the wolf was learning the range. He used the passes to cross mountain ridges, instead of going over the high places, as he had once or twice at first. He showed a liking for a dense mass of pine on a low knoll in one park, and in this Terry found a wind cave with many outlets. He tried traps there, but knew they would be futile. Steel nor poison would bring that wolf to terms.

Terry went over the range and down on the east side. A sheep ranch was there in the tuille marsh. The cattle ranch and the sheep ranch were not on good terms, though they spoke when they met, cowboys, sheep-herders, owners and the women folks. Terry rode in and had supper with them. He told what he was up against, and learned that the wolf, two weeks before, had come down into the flock and killed seventeen sheep one night and broke away again, regardless of indignant dogs, men and shooting.

“You're hunting him?” Terry inquired.

“We chased around some—didn’t do any good; got to take it, I suppose!” The sheep owner shrugged his shoulders.

“We don’t feel that way about it,” Terry said, “I’m staying with him!”

In the morning they all called “Good luck” and Terry rode away. He went back into the wolf country, where it covered the cattle range and leading his pack horse, took up every trap that he had out, and picked up every poison bait and pill. Two days later he rode down into the Pretty Spring ranch with all his outfit.

His father scowled; the cowboys all grinned,

“Quit?” Mr. Wayne demanded.

“I’ve just begun,” Terry replied, and carried his four bundles of wolf traps to the store house, one at a time, and hung them up on heavy spikes. He brought in the sheet iron box, which held the bottles and containers of the poison, and climbed a ladder to hang it by the handles from the roof of the store-house.

He sat down that night at the table with all hands, and told them briefly what he had done. He told exactly what had happened when he shot and missed the wolf. It was inexcusable to miss under the circumstances, for if ever wolf needed killing Old Boy did. It wasn’t in Terry Wayne to leave out his own mistakes as well as include his own stratagems that had all failed.

“Now what?” one of the cowboys inquired.

“I’ve another idea,” Terry replied. “It’s the only one I’ve left. ’Taint so overly bright, but it might work!”

He didn’t tell what his idea was, and no one trespassed on his private business. Three days later, when he had eaten about twenty-seven meals of home cooking, he rode forth again. He had his .25-35 rifle, a pack of grub on his saddle horse with him, and he summoned Woof, his dog, to go with him.

Woof was a three-year-old mongrel of the deserts. He ran mostly to legs, tail and neck-bone, but he was a good dog, with an Airedale head, and a Russian borzoi strength. While he was using poison and traps Terry couldn’t think of using the dog. Now he threw aside the lures and cunning and trickery, to go into the open for the next round with the raider.

WOOF picked up a cold track of Old Boy, and bristled at the smell. Terry called him off after riding along the trail for a mile or two. The trail was several days old. They could find a fresher one than that, and two hours before dark they were on the main ridge of the Tumble Downs, and in the gap picked up the trail again, this time only a few hours old going eastward.

“Sheep hungry!” Terry thought to himself, and rode till ten o’clock that night to reach the sheep ranch.

“He hasn’t been here!” Terry was told.

Tired with that long day’s ride, Terry and the dog slept at the sheep ranch that night. In the morning, learning where the three flocks were grazing, he started toward the southerly one, and when he reached it, found that the wolf had been there the previous night.

“He killed twenty-one!” the herder sobbed. “All night, and today, I’ve ben rounding them up! He’s a devil, that Old Boy you spike of!”

Here, four hours old, was the fresh track. Woof took it. He would have raced away to give single combat with the great killer, but Terry’s shout checked the eager dog. The trail led up into the mountains, and within six miles they jumped the gorged animal. Old Boy had walked along the foot of a steep, sliding shale bank, circled up the steep and walked back to lie under a juniper clump where he could see his back track for miles. When Terry and the dog appeared, Old Boy quietly slipped away about his own affairs.

Woof took the track from the bed with hot eagerness, but Terry held him down to a gait the horse could keep comfortably. He knew that this would be no dash into success. The wolf was warned, and he was shacking away. The hunter studied the course the raider took.

The fugitive went straight up the mountain. He ascended a steep no horse could climb. He was a wise Old Boy, and knew exactly what a dog meant on his trail. He knew what a horse meant. He knew what a man would mean, too, speaking of other men. He had also a good deal of information about this particular pursuer. He was to learn more about him that day.

Where the horse could not climb Terry sent the dog up to find the general course, then hailed the trailer back, and circled north or south to find a place where they could scramble up, and then work back to pick up the trail again. They crossed the range, which was three or four thousand feet higher than where the sheep had been killed. On the far side there was a gentler slope down into a valley which the wolf crossed on the run.

Terry saw a puff of dust miles away down in the basin. His binoculars showed other puffs and a fleck of activity in it—the wolf going to another range.

Terry ate some jerked venison and chocolate cake for lunch. Woof ate a jack-rabbit with great contentment. It was miles from a drink of water, except what Terry carried in his can. He gave the dog a drink, and they rested in the warm sunshine for two hours, while the horse grazed. Then they resumed the chase.

When night fell they were following along the bare heights of the main Tumble Downs. There, rolled up in his blanket, with the dog and horse near by, he went to sleep. He gave no thought to how long or how far the chase might lead. He was on the trail, and that was enough. Before dawn he was up again, and they all had a sup of water as well as breakfast. Terry worked along the mountain side and in the second cañon found a good supply of snow-water, where he filled his can and all drank their fill.

Then they went up the ridge and in some old snow picked up the wolf’s track. Following it, they found about two miles further on where the brute had slept in the comfortless heights of the range, with snow near by and with the chill wind searching the half-shelter of a rock.

“He's worried!” Terry surmised, but wasted no time thinking about it.

The wolf kept up that day. He crossed the divide a dozen times. He skulked along slides and on the tops of the low cliffs that 2characterized the backbone of the wasting, disintegrating range. Terry made one detour of five miles, trying to find a way through for the horse. While the Old Boy kept on the back, it was a simple matter to strike up to the trail.

Woof shambled along more contentedly. He, too, realized that this was a long race. He would look back, and wait, without the hail of Terry to restrain him. He welcomed the snow that they found in the shadows, and out of the wind, eating mouthfuls of it—and there, too, the wolf had assuaged his thirst.

When night fell the wolf had turned down out of the main range, and was three thousand feet below in the great basin. Going was good there, and as there was moonlight, Terry kept Woof on the track for an hour after dark. They camped where they found a bed under a juniper. The wolf, at dark, had lain down. Now all night long, having once been routed out, the brute would worry and start, kept awake by dread of a night approach.

While the raider’s nerves were wearing, Terry, the horse and dog rested. At dawn they started on, but turned away to go to a spring three miles away for a good drink. All had full stomachs except the wolf. He had started with a full feed of mutton. Now hunger was tormenting him, as well as the increasing conviction that some new kind of man had developed there in the Tumble Downs.

Terry watched his horse with anxiety. Trip was a fine desert mountain traveler, but never had traveled like this before. They had been where no horse had ever gone and there had been terrific strains of scramble, slide and balance. On the climbs Terry walked up, leading the horse behind the dog. A little limp in Trip’s foreleg appeared. The horse was about done.

The wolf circled down to the Wash Breaks and drank there. Then he started straight up over the mountain. Terry followed the trail a hundred yards, stopped and cast off the bridle and saddle of Trip, turned the horse loose, and with the can of water, a bag of grub, ammunition and the rifle, went on after the dog on foot.

When night fell, the dog and youth were lying in a pit in the sand, covered with juniper boughs a foot thick to keep out the wind and cold. Terry missed the blanket. He was too tired to sleep very well. He dreamed of hearing the wolf sniffing and whistling. It was Woof, who was dreaming, too.

Terry would never forget the following day. It was up and down, and along the sides of mountains. He was not much used to walking. He was tired to start with He was traveling on his courage, now. Woof’s only sign of exhuberance was an occasional wag of his tail. He stopped, what was ominous, to lick his paws, but resumed the pursuit when Terry said:

“We'll get him, Woof! Keep a-going!”

Overtake that wolf? Terry watched ahead. He knew the prey was not far away. The tracks scuffled and the tail dragged. One paw hardly touched the soft places, showing that the wolf, too, was lame. Terry took off his boots to rest his own feet every time they stopped to rest.

Then he noticed something. Old Boy turned up the mountain toward the deep gap known as Low Pass. The hunter stopped his dog and sat down to rest. Somewhere, less than a mile ahead, the wolf was slinking along watching back all the time. Perhaps human brains would count against the wolf brains.

Jerry looked at the dog. If he could only understand. The wolf was circling toward the pass, and by cutting up the mountain—but the dog would go too fast.

“Slow! Slow!” Terry pointed to the track. “Go slow, now!”

Woof started at a walk—the walk that had grown slower and slower for four days, and this was the fifth one. Terry started straight up the mountain. Woof stopped and looked back.

“Slow, boy! Slow!” Terry cried—“Track him—Slow! Slow, Woof!”

Woof wagged his tail a little and went on. His job, apparently, was on the track. Terry, following a cut-bank wash, headed up through the timber and, racing as fast as he could, every jump a hurt on his blistered feet, climbed nearly two thousand feet to the gap entrance. There, where the V-slot in the mountain was less than a hundred yards from wall to wall, he stopped and sat down.

He gulped three swallows of water, and lying at full length under a juniper, he looked down the mountain side, waiting to see how well he had read the mind of the wolf. He told himself that he was right. He urged that there was nowhere else for Old Boy to go—but he knew the wolf might turn away and go somewhere else. He watched near, but he looked far away, too. The pale valley was far below him.

He saw dust down there, and his heart misgave him. He had not brought his glasses. He could not see plainly. He suspected that the wolf had changed his mind about the pass. He was sure of it, as minutes went by and he saw no sign of either dog or game. He was tired enough to go to sleep. He did doze a little.

Suddenly, right there, just across the gulch and sixty yards distant, he saw the wolf. Old Boy had crossed a quarter of mile of open space totally unseen. His head was up, his tongue dangling out, his ears set forward, and his nose was crinkling angrily. Out of the corner of Terry’s eye the hunter saw Woof coming not three hundred yards behind the game.

Old Boy took three steps toward the dog, recognizing that the pursuer was alone. The wolf hesitated, and on the instant, the white bead sight of the .25-.35 carbine settled heavily in the slot of the rear sight. The next second the report was followed by two convulsive stiff-legged jumps of the outlaw raider of the Tumble Downs. The wolf stopped short, held his head up once more, then lowered it inch by inch, and began to turn around and around. He was making a bed in the cold wind. He was curled up dead when the dog shambled up.

As for Terry; he sat on the opposite side of the pass wash, with his carbine standing between his knees, breathing with long drawn gasps of relief.

“Gee!” he whispered, “I expect I’ve had my fall hunt!”