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Another night of alternate tranquility and
turmoil. But morning came, by and by. It was another glad awakening to fresh
breezes, vast expanses of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive
solitude utterly without visible human beings or human habitations, and an
atmosphere of such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed
close at hand were more than three miles away. We resumed undress uniform,
climbed a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted
occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back
and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away, and
leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new and
strange to gaze at. Even at this day it thrills me through and through to
think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to
make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings.
Along about an hour after breakfast we saw
the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I
remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of
the farther deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or
respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and
can speak with confidence. The cayote is a long, slim, sick and
sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray-wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably
bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of for-sakeness
and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly
lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over.
The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.
He is always poor, out of luck and
friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would
desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even
while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is
apologizing for it. And he is so homely! - so scrawny, and ribby, and
coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a
flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was
pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot
from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he
stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and
stop again - another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his
gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All
this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he
develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his
heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon,
that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie
rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon,
and by the time you have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that
nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him
where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will
enjoy it ever so much -especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of
himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.
The cayote will go swinging gently off on
that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful
smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of
encouragement and wordly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to
the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more
fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious
legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher
and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake
across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty
feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why
it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get
aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote
glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows
still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by
an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed
trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fragged, and that the cayote
actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him -
and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep
and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with
concentrated and desperate energy. This "spurt" finds him six feet behind
the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant
that a wild new hope id lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles
blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to
say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub, -- business is
business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day" --
and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long
crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in
the midst of a vast solitude!Page 17:
It makes his head swim. He stops, and
looks around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance;
shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs
along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost
wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at
half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there
is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that
direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe I
do not wish any of the pie."
The cayote lives chiefly in the most
desolate and forbidding desert, along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit
and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. He
seems to subsist almost wholly in the carcasses of oxen, mules and horses
that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of
carrion, and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who
have been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned
army bacon.
He will eat anything in the world that his
first cousins, the desert-frequently tribes of Indians will, and they will
eat anything they can bite. It is curious fact that these latter are the
only creatures known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for
more if they survive.
The cayote of the deserts beyond the Rocky
Mountains has a peculiarly hard time of it, owing to the fact that his
relations, the Indians, are just as apt to be the first to detect a
seductive scent on the desert breeze, and follow the fragrance to the late
ox it emanated from, as he is himself; and when this occurs he has to
content himself with sitting off at a little distance watching those people
strip off and dig out everything edible, and walk off with it. Then he and
the waiting ravens explore the skeleton and polish the bones. It is
considered that the cayote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the
desert, testify their blood kinship with each other in that they live
together in the waste places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and
friendship, while hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their
funerals. He does not mind going a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he
is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be
traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and
adding to the burdens of his parents.
We soon learned to recognize the sharp,
vicious bark of the cayote as it came across the murky plain at night to
disturb our dreams among the mail-sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect
and his hard fortune, made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long
day's good luck and a limitless larder the morrow.