WITH HOUND AND WILD-CAT 
BY HARRY H. DUNN 
“The hills are dearest that our childish feet 
Have climbed the earliest; and the springs most sweet 
Are ever those at which our young lips drank, 
Stooped to their waters o’er the grassy bank.” 
ND so I think of those first hunt- 
Ts ing trips of youth, those days 
afield, on foot or on horseback, 
or in the old spring wagon; alone or in 
company with some one of the many 
old Nimrods that still, thank God, 
adorn every country crossroads in 
America. 
Itseems to. me the best of all of 
them were those born of foggy, dew- 
drenched mornings in the hills of 
southern California. There, astride a 
sure-footed little sorrel pony, I fol- 
lowed headlong the deep-throated 
hounds. There, too, slower and with 
more work beneath the hot sun of the 
afternoon, the dogs and I tracked now 
and then a lank, red-coated mountain 
lion in all his wanderings beneath the 
tangle of willow growth that choked 
the wider cafions. 
Differing essentially in many char- 
acteristics from riding to hounds in the 
Eastern and Southeastern states, there 
is yet no sport in all the category which 
I have tried, to equal the hunting of 
wild-cats and coyotes, with now and 
then a fox or mountain lion thrown in, 
over Southwestern hills. In the first 
place, the game one hunts is different; 
there are plenty of foxes in southern 
California, but they are of an inferior 
breed to the long-tailed, red-haired fel- 
lows that the hounds of old Kentucky 
are wont to trail. In the main they are 
small and gray, and they “hole up” at 
the first close cry of the dogs. In the 
more inaccessible places there are a few 
red foxes, but they, too, are poor sport- 
makers, and lions are so infrequent 
south of the Tehachepi mountains that 
they do not count. The chase of the 
California lynx in its two varieties— 
the small plateau lynx and the larger 
bob-cat of the hills—has, however, in 
a measure, taken the place of these and 
it is of the running down and killing 
of them that I shall tell, adding a bit 
concerning the peculiar breed of dogs 
that has come’ up to meet the demands 
of the hunters of this region as well as 
the short-limbed, broad-chested horses 
that are the best for this game. 
In the first place, the wild-cats of 
California are game creatures, good, 
long-winded runners, treeing only when 
compelled to do so by the close prox- 
imity of the dogs, and fighting bravely 
to the end when shaken out of some 
tree or dislodged from an insecure 
perch on the rim of a cliff. As has 
been said, there are two varieties of 
these cats. One of them is small, in 
some cases scarcely larger than an 
overgrown Maltese tom; in perfect 
pelage, this cat’s coat is of a reddish 
tinge, marked, of course, with the 
usual wild-cat spottings along the 
flanks and on the insides of the legs. 
He is a frequenter of the lowlands, 
being found quite as often among the 
willow groves within stone’s throw of 
the surf as in the oak forests of the 
hills. In such localities the peculiar- 
ities of the plateau lynx’s coloring 
makes him very hard to discover—in- 
deed it is quite out of the question to 
stalk him as one might a coyote or a 
fox or a blacktail. 
The other variety is much larger, 
often weighing up to fifty-five pounds, 
though the usual run is below thirty. 
They are animals of the higher foothills 
and of the mountain slopes up to three 
