Published in The Waukegan Daily Sun on 12/17/1897.
Dog Drawn Into Ambush-Tricks To Make Away With a Badger.
    No cuter animal is found in the west than the coyote. The coyote is to the plainsman what a fox is to an Eastern farmer; only the coyote is more in evidence. Forest and Stream tells about a dog that had its principal sport chasing and otherwise worrying coyotes, and was led into ambush by one coyote and then set upon by seversl other of the prairie wolves and almost done to death.
    “About 9 o’clock one night,” the paper says, “one of the coyotes came to the kitchen door and howled aggravatingly at the dog, which thereupon set after the coyote full tilt. The coyote fled around the house, down to the corral and around the blacksmith shanty, the dog yelping after. Behind the shanty were other coyotes, six or seven of them, and all of them made for the dog in a way that made it feel lonely. The ranchman heard the fight and the dog’s howls of pain, and, grasping a rifle, started that way on the run, yelling as he went. The coyotes each took a farewell nip and fled, leaving a sore dog behind. Since then the dog has not been so much interested as on former occasions in coyotes. It follows single coyotes vigorously, but the appearance of another sends it back as fast as it can run.”
    The coyote likes badger flesh very much, but one coyote is not equal to a badger in a fight; consequently, the coyote, when it meets a badger, has to resort to strategem till aid arrives. The manner in which it does this, according to the sportsman’s paper, is interesting.
    “A few weeks ago,” the writer says, “as I was riding along I saw a coyote and a badger. The coyote seemed to be playing with the badger. He would prance around it, first as if to bite it, then run off a little ways, the badger following, evidently very angry. When the badger saw me it ran into its hole. while the coyote went off forty or fifty yards and lay down, evidently knowing I had no gun with me. The coyote’s device was evidently to tease, and so keep the badger interested till another coyote happened along when the badger would have been killed.”-New York Sun.
Post a Comment