194 HUNTING THE GRISLV, 



its foot It was, I believe, in Wisconsin, and 

 he had twenty or thirty hounds with him, 

 but they were entirely untrained to wolf- 

 hunting, and proved unable to stop the crippled 

 beast. Few of them would attack it at all, 

 and those that did went at it singly and with 

 a certain hesitation, and so each in turn was 

 disabled by a single terrible snap, and left 

 bleeding on the snow. General Wade Hamp- 

 ton tells me that in the course of his fifty 

 years' hunting with horse and hound in Mis- 

 sissippi, he has on several occasions tried his 

 pack of fox-hounds (southern deer-hounds) 

 after a wolf. He found that it was with the 

 greatest difficulty, however, that he could per- 

 suade them to so much as follow the trail. 

 Usually, as soon as they came across it, they 

 would growl, bristle up, and then retreat with 

 their tails between their legs. But one of his 

 dogs ever really tried to master a wolf by 

 itself, and this one paid for its temerity with 

 its life ; for while running a wolf in a cane- 

 brake the beast turned and tore it to pieces. 

 Finally General Hampton succeeded in get- 

 ting a number of his hounds so they would 

 at any rate follow the trail in full cry, and 

 thus drive the wolf out of the thicket, and 

 give a chance to the hunter to get a shot. . In 

 this way he killed two or three. 



The true way to kill wolves, however, is to 

 hunt them with greyhounds on the great 

 plains. Nothing more exciting than this sport 

 can possibly be imagined. It is not always 

 necessary that the greyhounds should be oi 



