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