by some of his kills. Breed knew the voice of every coyote in
the little band that made up his pack. Even when their notes reached him
faintly through a maze of other howls his ears identified their voices
as certainly as the eyes of man pick out the faces of his friends among
a crowd. Those coyotes in whom dog ancestry was less than four
generations removed betrayed that fact to him when they howled.

There are those who believe that the shepherds and police dogs sprang
originally from the jackal. In any event, there are more dogs that
revert to the wild bunch from these wolfish types than from all other
kinds combined. The gulf between shepherd and coyote is not wide, and
except when raiding coyotes and stock-guarding dogs meet in a clash of
interests they are more apt to mate than to fight.

Throughout the whole of Breed's range there was but one note which
puzzled him,--and it was not the ancestry but the present habits of the
one who made the sound that baffled him. The parental mixture was
plainly evidenced in the voice. It was the cry of a she-wolf, a
half-blood coyote and dog, and Breed heard her howl night after night
yet could not locate her. He would answer her cry and announce that he
was coming, but always she evaded him. When he picked up her trail and
followed it persistently, it invariably led him toward an isolated
cabin. The wolf in him held him back from too close an approach to the
homes of men. When he stopped she called again from up near the
twinkling windows of the house. There was a lonesome note in her cry,
and it was furtive, carrying both fear and invitation in its tones as if
the she-wolf felt herself an outcast and both longed and dreaded to
break down the bars between her wild relatives and herself.

And she was an outcast, without doubt. Collins had trailed her mother, a
renegade shepherd, to the den. He had turned in the rest of the pups for
bounty, keeping her for a pet. She was slightly heavier than a coyote
and the fur of her back was dark, the badge of shepherd parentage. The
yellow underfur showed through the black guard hairs of her back-strip
when the wind ruffled it, the black shading to yellow on flanks and
sides, and from this Collins called her Shady.

Shady's relations with men and beasts were unsatisfactory in the
extreme. Stockmen hate the coyote with an intensity that they show
toward no other animal, and with good reason, for the coyote meets them
on a more equal footi