86 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



dawn and dusk, but sometimes even at mid- 

 day. It is as blood-thirsty as the mink itself, 

 and its life is one long ramble for prey, 

 gophers, prairie-dogs, sage rabbits, jack-rab- 

 bits, snakes, and every kind of ground bird 

 ; furnishing its food. I have known one to 

 fairly depopulate a prairie-dog town, it being 

 the arch foe of these little rodents, because of 

 its insatiable blood lust and its capacity to 

 follow them into their burrows. Once I found 

 the bloody body and broken eggs of a poor 

 prairie-hen which a ferret had evidently sur- 

 prised on her nest. Another time one of my 

 men was eye-witness to a more remarkable 

 instance of the little animal's blood-thirsty 

 ferocity. He was riding the range, and being 

 attracted by a slight commotion in a clump of 

 grass, he turned his horse thither to look, and 

 to his astonishment found an antelope fawn at 

 the last gasp, but still feebly struggling, in 

 the grasp of a ferret, which had throttled it and 

 was sucking its blood with hideous greediness. 

 He avenged the murdered innocent by a 

 dexterous blow with the knotted end of his 

 lariat. 



That mighty bird of rapine, the war eagle, 

 which on the great plains and among the 

 Rockies supplants the bald-headed eagle of 

 better-watered regions, is another dangerous 

 foe of the young antelope. It is even said 

 that under exceptional circumstances eagles 

 will assail a full-grown prong-horn ; and a 

 neighboring ranchman informs me that he was 

 once an eye-witness to such an attack. It was 

 a bleak day in the late winter, and he was 

 riding home across a wide dreary plateau, 



