5. CHAPTER V.
ANOTHER night of alternate tranquillity 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 mile 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
forsakenness 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 through the
sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, 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
worldly 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 fagged, 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 is 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!
It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all 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 on the carcases 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-frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat
anything they can bite. It is a 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 miles to
breakfast, and 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.