the coyote signs in his immediate
neighborhood. He still found their tracks singly or in pairs, where they
wandered in all directions through the sage in their hunts for jacks, or
padded thick round some spot where they had killed a calf, but he soon
discovered that whenever he found a track which the breed-wolf had left
the night before he had only to swing out to the right or left to find
the trails of many coyotes pointing in the same direction,--a general
movement of coyotes over a wide front. Collins had heard many tales of
late which accorded with a prophecy he had made long ago; for three
hundred miles north and south men who rode back into the mountains
reported seeing coyotes far back in the very heart of them and of
hearing their howls from among the highest peaks. His prediction that
coyotes would take to the hills and feel as much at home high above
timberline as in the flats had come to pass.

Collins studied long over the many coyote trails which always paralleled
the tracks of the yellow wolf and made still another prophecy,--that
breed-wolves would teach the coyotes to hunt in packs.

CHAPTER II

No man who has lived long in the open and observed the ways of animals
and birds doubts that each tribe has a language of its own,--the
vocabulary of cadence and inflection. A man may watch a marsh teeming
with waterfowl, their contented chuckles filling his ears; then every
wing will lift at once, every bird roused to sudden flight by the change
of a single note so faint that it makes no impression on the ear of the
watching man, yet sufficient to warn the birds as surely as a gunshot. A
widely scattered bunch of range cows will graze placidly for hours, and
suddenly every head will be raised and every cow gaze off in the same
direction.

Coyotes catch all finely shaded inflections and interpret them as
unerringly as a man notes the difference between a bawling cow and a
blatting sheep. Mate communicates with mate through all the coyote
refrains of the night; half-grown coyotes answer their mother's voice
but are silent when another calls. All that wild outburst in which men
read only an uproar of meaningless savagery is in reality the
intelligent conversation of the coyote nation.

Breed's range covered fifty miles each way and there were some two
hundred coyotes who used the same strip or whose range overlapped his
own, and of these there were but few who had not at one time or another
profited