A wolf is a terrible fighter.He will decimate a pack of hounds by rabid snaps with his giant jaws while suffering little damage himself;nor are the ordinary big dogs,supposed to be fighting dogs,able to tackle him without special training.I have known one wolf to kill a bulldog which had rushed at it with a single snap,while another which had entered the yard of a Montana ranch house slew in quick succession both of the large mastiffs by which it was assailed.The immense agility and ferocity of the wild beast,the terrible snap of his long-toothed jaws,and the admirable training in which he always is,give him a great advantage over fat,small-toothed,smooth-skinned dogs,even though they are nominally supposed to belong to the fighting classes.In the way that bench competitions are arranged nowadays this is but natural,as there is no temptation to produce a worthy class of fighting dog when the rewards are given upon technical points wholly unconnected with the dog's usefulness.A prize-winning mastiff or bulldog may be almost useless for the only purposes for which his kind is ever useful at all.A mastiff,if properly trained and of sufficient size,might possibly be able to meet a young or undersized Texas wolf;but I have never seen a dog of this variety which I would esteem a match single-handed for one of the huge timber wolves of western Montana.Even if the dog was the heavier of the two,his teeth and claws would be very much smaller and weaker and his hide less tough.Indeed I have known of but one dog which single-handed encountered and slew a wolf;this was the large vicious mongrel whose feats are recorded in my /Hunting Trips of a Ranchman/.
General Marcy of the United States Army informed me that he once chased a huge wolf which had gotten away with a small trap on its foot.It was,I believe,in Wisconsin,and he had twenty or thirty hounds with him,but they were entirely untrained in wolf-hunting,and proved unable to stop the crippled beast.Few of them would attack it at all,and those that did went at it singly and with a certain hesitation,and so each in turn was disabled by a single terrible snap,and left bleeding on the snow.General Wade Hampton tells me that in the course of his fifty years'hunting with horse and hound in Mississippi,he has on several occasions tried his pack of fox-hounds (southern deer-hounds)after a wolf.He found that it was with the greatest difficulty,however,that he could persuade them to so much as follow the trail.Usually,as soon as they came across it,they would growl,bristle up,and then retreat with their tails between their legs.But one of his dogs ever really tried to master a wolf by itself,and this one paid for its temerity with its life;for while running a wolf in a canebrake the beast turned and tore it to pieces.
Finally General Hampton succeeded in getting a number of his hounds so they would at any rate follow the trail in full cry,and thus drive the wolf out of the thicket,and give a chance to the hunter to get a shot.In this way he killed two or three.
The true way to kill wolves,however,is to hunt them with greyhounds on the great plains.Nothing more exciting than this sport can possibly be imagined.It is not always necessary that the greyhounds should be of absolutely pure blood.Prize-winning dogs of high pedigree often prove useless for the purposes.If by careful choice,however,a ranchman can get together a pack composed both of the smooth-haired greyhound and the rough-haired Scotch deer-hound,he can have excellent sport.The greyhounds sometimes do best if they have a slight cross of bulldog in their veins;but this is not necessary.If once a greyhound can be fairly entered to the sport and acquires confidence,then its wonderful agility,its sinewy strength and speed,and the terrible snap with which its jaws come together,render it a most formidable assailant.Nothing can possibly exceed the gallantry with which good greyhounds,when their blood is up,fling themselves on a wolf or any other foe.There does not exist,and there never has existed on the wide earth,a more perfect type of dauntless courage than such a hound.Not Cushing when he steered his little launch through the black night against the great ram Albemarle,not Custer dashing into the valley of the Rosebud to die with all his men,not Farragut himself lashed in the rigging of the Hartford as she forged past the forts to encounter her iron-clad foe,can stand as a more perfect type of dauntless valor.
Once I had the good fortune to witness a very exciting hunt of this character among the foot-hills of the northern Rockies.I was staying at the house of a friendly cowman,whom I will call Judge Yancy Stump.
