FOREST AND STREAM. 











































































































Hunting Coyotes in Death Valley. 
Los ANGELES, Cal., July 22—Editor Forest and 
Stream: In the mesquite thickets of the dried 
out beds of desert streams, in occasional caves 
in the lava buttes which form the mountains of 
the California desert and in the willow copses 
marking the course of every live creek, the 
coyotes have their homes and bring forth their 
young. Rabbits, quail, rats, chipmunks and even 
the big lizards (chukawallahs) furnish them with 
an abundant supply of food, and the causes of 
their increase to the great numbers which now 
infest the desert are not far to seek. 
Seated one morning in the shade of a wagon 
at Saratoga Springs, at the extreme southern 
end of the Death Valley sink, Bob Lee, half- 
breed son of old “Cub” Lee, Englishman and 
wanderer of Resting Springs, rode up on his bay 
cow pony. 
“Want to kill a coyote?” he asked. 
I had been hunting with Bob before, had seen how 
his coyote hunts. were conducted, and knew this 
Was an invitation for him to remain all day with 
me, eat camp grub three or four times and smoke 
all my ‘tobacco until nightfall, when, if he still 
felt in the. mood to kill coyotes, we wonld go 
out and kill them. Despite all these things I 
assented. Bob dismounted, took the hackamore 
off his horse’s nose and left him to wander as he 
pleased over the alkali flat, picking up his feed of 
bunch grass as best he could. I produced tobacco 
and cigarette papers, set him a camp chair ont- 
side the tent and resumed cleaning my rifle. For 
an hour he sat and smoked, then the camp cook 
called us to dinner and Bob discarded the canvas 
stool for the greater comfort of the benches and 
beans and potatoes and tomatoes and corned beef 
of the commissary. 
After dinner I went back to the tent, and on a 
little typewriter I had there began making up 
diary for the day. -On the shady side of the tent 
Bob 
slept. I was sorry afterward that I had 
not followed his example. About 5 o’clock, the 
best and coolest part of the desert day in the 
late fall, I got out the little carbine and went 
out to wake the halfbreed. He broneht from the 
rear end of my wagon bow and arrows which he 
had gotten for me from one of the tribesmen up 
around Resting Springs These were Indian 
weapons, not the painted gauds which are sold 
for the real thing in the curio stores of the coast 
and the East. 
“How far?” I asked, 
“An hour’s walk; maybe more,’ he answered. 
And these were practically the only words spoken 
during that hour’s walk. The way led first over 
the rolling sand, then into the sandhills, where 
of necessity we walked slower. Almost as soon 
as we passed the sand fell into our tracks, the 
shght breeze filling them so rapidly that in five 
minutes our trail was completely obliterated. 
Then we plunged into the hills. below the old 
Ibex mine, where near a hundred thousand dol- 
lars’ worth of machinery is lying idle, and over 
into the bed of a cafon. No water was visible, 
but Bob said there were pockets in the hill and 
one considerable’ tank further up the cafion to 
which coyotes, foxes and wildcats came to drink. 
Back from a mesquite clump we lay down in 
the center of a circle of stones marking the place 
where a tepee once stood. 
These rocks were small. and we gathered 
enough of them, after we had rested and smoked 
a few minutes, to build up a respectable blind. 
and in my mind I thanked the aborigine who had 
carried them from the slope of the nearby hill 
for his skin home in the long ago. How long 
ago that time had been the rocks themselves bore 
witness.. They were more than half buried in 
the earth—not sand—on which they were laid. 
The Indians who inhabit this section now, few 
and scattered, but still real nomads, have no 
memories, not even a folktale of the people who 
came before them, of whom they are supposed 
to be the descendants, but to whom I believe they 
are not the slightest kin. 
Once over these hills and valleys, barren as 
they now are and apparently devoid of life, there 
wandered a roving population of red men. The 
artifacts they have left at Elephant Head Springs, 
at Owl Holes, at Saratoga Springs, and on the 
table Jands which skirt the Panamints, show 
that they were skilled and that they brought 
their materials from long distances. At all of 
these springs I found bird arrowpoints of jasper, 
a material they must have brought from the 
Dakotas at least. Possibly they procured it from 
traders among the tribes, but if so, those who 
have come to inhabit this land after them have 
no memory of such wandering peddlers or those 
who made the artifacts 
We built the wall high enough so that we 
could sit or lie comfortably behind it, and car- 
ried a few armfuls of brush from the creek bed 
to scatter around it. By the time we had fin- 
ished darkness had begun to gather. Far off 
across the valley a coyote howled. In an instant 
there came, seemingly from the ground at my 
side, an answering howl. Again the coyote 
barked and the decoy at my side answered him, 
and when the cry came back out of the shadows 
it seemed a bit nearer. Bob turned over on his 
side and barked twice, short and sharp, unlike 
the call he had first made. Then, almost before 
the sounds had left his lips he lifted up his voice 
in the long howl which is the family mark of the 
coyote tribe throughout the West. 
This time the call from the hills was nearer, 
and after two more cries a shadow slipped across 
a little moonlit patch. Again the halfbreed called, 
and then lay still, the last echoes of his voice 
dying away in his throat, leaving the impression, 
even to me, who was near by, that he was at 
a great distance. Evidently the coyote was de- 
ceived. He stood in the plain light, scarcely two 
rods from the blind. Closer he came, passing us 
by on one side, evidently suspecting nothing from 
the pile of stones. 
I started to raise the rifle, but Bob laid his hand 
on my arm. I saw his left arm straighten out, 
saw the white of the bow in the moonlight, heard 
the soft swoosh as the string was released, and 
then the wolf leaped into the air and fell back. 
Bob walked ‘out, struck the coyote in the head 
with a stone, to be quite sure that he was dead, 
and brought him to the blind. 
“No use the rifle,’ he said. 
away with one shot.” 
Four times more he called, and got another 
coyote. Others came out where we could see 
them, but none within range of the bow save 
these two. 
beyond twenty yards, but the coyotes Bob killed 
were shot through as clean as a rifle bullet could 
have done. 
Just before we went home the _ halfbreed 
changed his call, and out of the hills came, not 
one, but three answers, all short, sharp barks. 
The weird dialogue continued for a few minutes, 
and then, out of the darker shadows across .the 
wash, came two little gray foxes. Both stood in 
plain sight, possibly twenty-five yards away. 
“Shoot! Quick!” said Bob. I raised the rifle, 
just as one of the foxes wheeled, and at the 
crack the vixen pitched forward. Before I could 
shoot again her mate disappeared. 
I remarked on the fact of the pair traveling, 
and apparently hunting together, and Bob said 
it Was common occurrence in his hunting ex- 
perience to find them so in all seasons of the 
year except when the young were in the form. 
Then the vixen usually hunted alone and apart 
from the country over which her mate roamed. 
We journeyed homeward and I offered Bob a 
bed for the night, but he caught his pony and 
rode away into the white night of the desert 
world. Harry H. Dunn. 

“Scare ’em all 
These Piute bows are not worth much - 
The Boy Behind the Man. 
Newport, Ky., July 30—Editor Forest and| 
Stream: Once when I was quite a little fellow,| 
daddie and I were off for a hunt one morning| 
rather earlier than usual. The fresh fall atmos-| 
phere was sweet and invigorating. He carried} 
the inevitable musket—the poor man’s shotgun| 
—and I was equipped with a fowling piece that) 
was-unique. It was an old fashioned pepper box| 
pistol of .32 caliber, with six six-inch barrels 
arranged in a circle around the central pivot on| 
which they revolved. It had a flat horizontal 
self-cocking hammer and was essentially danger- 
ous at both ends. I had found it a short time 
before in the attic of a vacant house. It was| 
therefore all my own property and I was cor- 
respondingly proud of my acquisition. Daddie| 
had seriously objected—and. with much reason—- 
to the “infernal machine,” but after seeing me 
load and fire it at an inanimate target with more 
or less success, he reluctantly consented to its 
joining the expedition. I carefully loaded it with 
a generous powder charge, and in deference to 
its modest bore, a small measure of No. to shot. 
We had reached a piece of rolling meadow 
land on the outskirts of the city and were be- 
ginning to think of game when my attention was 
caught by a beautiful Kentuckey cardinal that 
flitted past us a short distance away, a brilliant 
dash of carmine against the green and gray| 
brown of the autumn tints. The instinctive de-| 
sire to slay prompted me. I raised the old pistol 
in a wobbly: fashion toward the bird, the ex-| 
pected discharge materialized, and the unscathed 
grosbeak followed the vagrant shot in a rapid 
retreat toward more congenial climes. while 
daddie, after he saw what I had fired at. turned} 
angrily upon me and said: | 
“What kind of game is that to fire at? Never 
let me catch you firing at small birds again.) 
I’m glad you didn’t kill it. for it saved you a/' 
licking. Now, Jack, remember; never kill small 
birds and never. by any chance shoot at game) 
birds sitting.’ But here a diversion interrupted. | 
Daddie stiffened into a_ statue. his hoarsely-| 
whispered. “Mark, mark!” riveted my wonder-' 
ing attention, and following his pointing finger, | 
I saw a bunch of small brown birds skurrying | 
up the slope toward a sheltering thicket a hun- | 
dred and fifty yards away. 

“What are they, daddie?” 
“Ouail.” 
“What, those little birds! They look like|! 
sparrows.” 
“They are quail I tell you, and a large covey, | 
too. There must be twenty-five or thirty of 
them,” said he: with an air of finality that set-| 
tled the question which, to my inexperienced| 
eyes, distance alone had raised. 
“Great heavens, what a covey!’’ he exclaimed. 
“Your pistol shot must have scared them up.| 
Well, it’s good for something after all.” 
We proceeded cautiously after them, but hav-) 
ing no dog and the cover being very heavy we 
failed to locate them after an hour spent in faith- |; 
ful effort and wisely concluded that they had 
left the immediate neighborhood. . 
“Never mind,” said daddie. ‘We'll come after| 
ae 
them another day and bring Tim Shelly’s dog. | 
They'll keep and we'll find them after the snow F 
falls.” “hy 
And thus we rambled on until toward even-} 
ing, when, while I was playing dog and crawling} 
up the dry bed of a rough monntain stream, jj 
looking closely here and there for track or sign, t 
right beside my outstretched hand and partly ex- 
tended from beneath a tussock of hunch grass, 
I saw the large hind foot of a° cotton-tail rabbit. 
It was not six inches from my left hand. but to 
save me I could not see another speck of his 
anatomy, so‘completely was he hidden under the 
overhanging clump on the edge of the low bank. 
I froze to a point instantly, and for a second or 

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