Wolves and Wolf-Hounds. 399 



produce a worthy class of fighting dog when the rewards are 

 given upon technical points wholly unconnected with the 

 dog's usefulness. A prize-winning mastiff or bulldog may 

 be almost useless for the only purposes for which his kind 

 is ever useful at all. A mastiff, if properly trained and of 

 sufficient size, might possibly be able to meet a young or 

 undersized Texan wolf ; but I have never seen a dog of 

 this variety which I would esteem a match single-handed 

 for one of the huge timber wolves of western Montana. 

 Even if the dog was the heavier of the two, his teeth 

 and claws would be very much smaller and weaker and his 

 hide less tough. Indeed I have known of but one dog 

 which single-handed encountered and slew a wolf ; this 

 was the large vicious mongrel whose feats are recorded in 

 my Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. 



General Marcy of the United States Army informed 

 me that he once chased a huge wolf which had gotten 

 away with a small trap on 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 Hampton tells me that in the 

 course of his fifty years' hunting with horse and hound in 

 Mississippi, 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 persuade them to so much as follow the trail 



