Judge Yancy Stump was a Democrat who,as he phrased it,had fought for his Democracy;that is,he had been in the Confederate Army.He was at daggers drawn with his nearest neighbor,a cross-grained mountain farmer,who may be known as old man Prindle.Old man Prindle had been in the Union Army,and his Republicanism was of the blackest and most uncompromising type.There was one point,however,on which the two came together.They were exceedingly fond of hunting with hounds.The Judge had three or four track-hounds,and four of which he called swift-hounds,the latter including one pure-bred greyhound bitch of wonderful speed and temper,a dun-colored yelping animal which was a cross between a greyhound and a fox-hound,and two others that were crosses between a greyhound and a wire-haired Scotch deer-hound.Old man Prindle's contribution to the pack consisted of two immense brindled mongrels of great strength and ferocious temper.They were unlike any dogs I have ever seen in this country.Their mother herself was a cross between a bull mastiff and a Newfoundland,while the father was descried as being a big dog that belonged to a "Dutch Count."The "Dutch Count"was an outcast German noble,who had drifted to the West,and,after failing in the mines and failing in the cattle country,had died in a squalid log shanty while striving to eke out an existence as a hunter among the foot-hills.His dog,I presume,from the deion given me,must have been a boar-hound or Ulm dog.
As I was very anxious to see a wolf-hunt the Judge volunteered to get one up,and asked old man Prindle to assist,for the sake of his two big fighting dogs;though the very names of the latter,General Grant and Old Abe,were gall and wormwood to the unreconstructed soul of the Judge.Still they were the only dogs anywhere around capable of tackling a savage timber wolf,and without their aid the judge's own high-spirited animals ran a serious risk of injury,for they were altogether too game to let any beast escape without a struggle.
Luck favored us.Two wolves had killed a calf and dragged it into a long patch of dense brush where there was a little spring,the whole furnishing admirable cover for any wild beast.Early in the morning we started on horseback for this bit of cover,which was some three miles off.The party consisted of the Judge,old man Prindle,a cowboy,myself,and the dogs.The judge and I carried our rifles and the cowboy his revolver,but old man Prindle had nothing but a heavy whip,for he swore,with many oaths,that no one should interfere with his big dogs,for by themselves they would surely "make the wolf feel sicker than a stuck hog."Our shaggy ponies racked along at a five-mile gait over the dewy prairie grass.The two big dogs trotted behind their master,grim and ferocious.The track-hounds were tied in couples,and the beautiful greyhounds loped lightly and gracefully alongside the horses.The country was fine.A mile to our right a small plains river wound in long curves between banks fringed with cottonwoods.Two or three miles to our left the foot-hills rose sheer and bare,with clumps of black pine and cedar in their gorges.We rode over gently rolling prairie,with here and there patches of brush in the bottoms of the slopes around the dry watercourses.
At last we reached a somewhat deeper valley in which the wolves were harbored.Wolves lie close in the daytime and will not leave cover if they can help it;and as they had both food and water within we knew it was most unlikely that this couple would be gone.The valley was a couple of hundred yards broad and three or four times as long,filled with a growth of ash and dwarf elm and cedar,thorny underbrush choking the spaces between.Posting the cowboy,to whom he gave his rifle,with two greyhounds on one side of the upper end,and old man Prindle with two others on the opposite side,while I was left at the lower end to guard against the possibility of the wolves breaking back,the Judge himself rode into the thicket near me and loosened the track-hounds to let them find the wolves'trail.The big dogs also were uncoupled and allowed to go in with the hounds.Their power of scent was very poor,but they were sure to be guided aright by the baying of the hounds,and their presence would give confidence to the latter and make them ready to rout the wolves out of the thicket,which they would probably have shrunk from doing alone.There was a moment's pause of expectation after the Judge entered the thicket with his hounds.We sat motionless on our horses,eagerly looking through the keen fresh morning air.Then a clamorous baying from the thicket in which both the horseman and dogs had disappeared showed that the hounds had struck the trail of their quarry and were running on a hot scent.For a couple of minutes we could not be quite certain which way the game was going to break.The hounds ran zigzag through the brush,as we could tell by their baying,and once some yelping and a great row showed that they had come rather closer than they had expected upon at least one of the wolves.
