THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 85 



tastes and habits were similar, taking the better 

 stocked timber and bottom lands and forcing the 

 coyote into the open prairie and the sage plains 

 to make whatever shift he might. He has been 

 equal to it, the hardness of his desert life, I like 

 to think, making a better wolf out of him. I say 

 wolf, and the better the wolf the more we may 

 hate him. But one cannot help admiring many of 

 his ways and traits. 



The exigencies of desert life have made mu- 

 tual help and team-work necessary among the 

 coyotes, two of them hunting together more suc- 

 cessfully than one, a fact that perhaps explains 

 their mating and staying together from year to 

 year. It is generally supposed that coyotes mate 

 for life, the pair appropriating an old badger's 

 burrow, or even digging one of their own, and 

 then, with squatter's rights, taking for their own 

 hunting-grounds enough each way from their den 

 to support them. These haunts, of course, over- 

 lap, two or three pairs sometimes getting together 

 in a hunt ; but generally the coyote works alone, 

 or in single pairs, each pair's own range being 

 apparently respected by the near neighbors. 

 • There are few chapters of natural history more 



