106 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
down the deer, pronghorn, and others, tiring them 
out by trickery and overcoming them by numbers. 
The buffalo formerly afforded him an unfailing 
supply in the way of carrion and fragments left 
by his Brahmins, —the timber-wolves,—who stead- 
ily followed the herds and seized upon decrepit 
or aged stragglers, and upon any calves that they 
were able to “cut out” and pull down. In such 
piracy the coyotes themselves engaged whenever 
they saw an opportunity, although it tried their 
highest powers; and success, when attained, fol- 
lowed a system of tireless and sanguinary worry- 
ing. The poor bison or elk upon which they 
concentrated might trample and gore half the 
pack, but the rest would stay by him and finally 
nag him to exhaustion and death. 
Iremember once reading an account of the strat- 
egy by which a large stag was forced to succumb 
to a pack that had driven it upon the ice of a 
frozen lake, as they had deliberately planned to 
do. Part of the wolves then formed a circle about 
the pond, within which the slipping and exhausted 
deer was chased round and round by patrols, fre- 
quently relieved, until, fainting with fatigue and 
loss of blood, the noble animal fell, to be torn to 
pieces in an instant. 
Far less worthy game attracts him, however. 
In California and New Mexico he has become so 
destructive to the sheep that incessant war is 
waged upon him by the ranchmen. In Kansas 
