BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 151 



brush, bits of skin on the spined cactus, the others 

 might vow coyotes had worried a badger. Ba tiste 

 would have it that the badger had been slain by a bear. 

 The cached carcass of fawn or doe, of course, meant 

 bear; for the bear is an epicure that would have meat 

 gamey. To that the others would agree. 



And so the shortening autumn days with the shim 

 mering heat of a crisp noon and the noiseless chill of 

 starry twilights found the trappers canoeing leisurely 

 up-stream from the northern tributaries of the Mis 

 souri nearing the long overland trail that led to the 

 hunting-fields in Canada. 



One evening they came to a place bounded by high 

 cliff banks with the flats heavily wooded by poplar and 

 willow. Ba tiste had found signs that were hot oh! 

 so hot! The mould of an uprooted gopher hole was so 

 fresh that it had not yet dried. This was not a re 

 gion of timber-wolves. What had dug that hole? 

 Not the small, skulking coyote the vagrant of prairie 

 life! Oh! no! the coyote like other vagrants earns 

 his living without work, by skulking in the wake of 

 the business-like badger; and when the badger goes 

 down in the gopher hole, Master Coyote stands near 

 by and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to 

 escape the invading badger.* What had dug the hole? 

 Ba tiste thinks that he knows. 



That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is an 

 other kind of hole a roundish pit dug between moss- 



* This phase of prairie life must not be set down to writer s 

 license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see any 

 time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within field- 

 glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the 

 badgers are running. 



