Waterfowl 71 



for their chief foes the coyotes, badgers, skunks, and 

 other flesh-eating prowlers; and as all these are 

 greatly thinned off by the cattlemen, with their fire- 

 arms and their infinitely more deadly poison, the 

 partial and light settlement of the country that ac- 

 companies the cattle industry has had the effect of 

 making all these birds more plentiful than before; 

 and most unlike the large game, game birds bid fair 

 to increase in numbers during the next few years. 



The skunks are a nuisance in more ways than one. 

 They are stupid, familiar beasts, with a great pre- 

 dilection for visiting camps, and the shacks or huts 

 of the settlers, to pick up any scraps of meat that 

 may be lying round. I have time and again known 

 a skunk to actually spend several hours of the night 

 in perseveringly digging a hole underneath the logs 

 of a hut, so as to get inside among the inmates. The 

 animal then hunts about among them, and of course 

 no one will willingly molest it ; and it has often been 

 known to deliberately settle down upon and begin 

 to eat one of the sleepers. The strange and terrible 

 thing about these attacks is that in certain districts 

 and at certain times the bite of the skunk is surely 

 fatal, producing hydrophobia; and many cowmen, 

 soldiers, and hunters have annually died from this 

 cause. There is no wild beast in the West, no mat- 

 ter what its size and ferocity, so dreaded by old 

 plainsmen as this seemingly harmless little beast. 



I remember one rather ludicrous incident con- 

 nected with a skunk. A number of us, among whom 

 was a huge, happy-go-lucky Scotchman, who went 



