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<h2> CHAPTER V. </h2>
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<p>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!</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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!</p>
<p>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."</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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