howled, and I tried to locate him by the
sound. I knew it would be impossible to sight him for his dun-colored
coat blended perfectly with the surrounding bowlders. At last I
decided he was due west of me. Cautiously I started toward him, but as
soon as I moved he materialized from the jumbled pile of slide rock a
hundred feet north of where I stood. The echoes had fooled me
completely. I wondered then, and many times since, why he howled with
me so near. He surely saw me. Was lie familiar with the echoes of the
gorge? Did he know their trickery? Did he lift his voice there to
confound me? He is somewhat of a ventriloquist anywhere, perhaps he
liked to howl from that spot because the abetting echoes deluded him
into thinking his talent was increasing and he excelled all his rivals
in the mysterious art! Or perhaps like some singers I have known, he
enjoyed the multitudinous repetition of the sound of his own voice!
After more than a score of years I am no nearer a solution of the
riddle.

Twenty miles from the spot where the music-fond coyote sang, near the
headwaters of the Poudre River, I rode one day in pursuit of a pair of
marauding wolves. As soon as they discovered me tracking them, they
took to an old game trail that climbed several thousand feet in ten
miles distance and headed toward the timberline. From their tracks I
could tell the country was strange to them, for animals, like men, are
uneasy in unfamiliar surroundings.

Somewhere a prospector set off a blast. The sound rolled around and
echoed from all about. The wolves were startled at the repeated
reports, as they thought them, and at sea as to the direction from
which they came; so they hid away in a dense new growth of Engelmann
spruce. When I rode in sight with rifle ready across my saddle, they
lay low, no doubt fearing to blunder into an ambush if they took flight.

A campbird sailed silently into the tops of the young trees and peered
curiously downward. Its mate winged in and together they hopped from
limb to limb, descending toward the concealed animals, and conversing
in low tones of their discovery.

My horse stopped at my low command; I raised my rifle and fired into
the undergrowth beneath the trees. The wolves sprang out at a run,
with lightning bounds, crossed a small opening and disappeared into the
heavy forest beyond. I continued firing at them, without effect. Just
before they vanished into the spruces, I fired a