Avahte-Shinaw: The Big Wolf of Dark Canyon

AVAHTE-SHINAWV The Big Wolf of Dark Canyon By Albert R. Lyman Dark Canyon, yawning and silent, reaches away to the west in zigzag course from the heart of Elk Mountain to the Colorado River. On every side of the mountain in San Juan County, Utah, and the county is three times more extensive than the state of Del- aware. With a knowledge of its ten thousand miles of wild territory, Avahte-shinawv, or king-dog, as the Piutes called him, found no region more nicely suited than Dark Canyon to the murderous ways of his wolfhood. Around the mountain springs in its upper tribu- taries, he made his headquarters for most of the year, but in the splendid isolation of its lower country, he celebrated his winter festivals. Avahte came to Utah with a pack of wolves driven from the state of Colorado by a gang of exasperated cow-punchers in the year 1910. His chosen reservation in San Juan extended from the sage-brush prairie at Slickhorn, thirty miles south of the mountain, to lower Indian Creek far to the north of it. He never lingered long in a place, and visited the various quarters of his dominion once a month, unless it were in the severe winter seasons, when he avoided the deep snow of the higher country. From the beginning of his career as a full grown wolf, he marked his path with remains of fat cattle wherever he went. He killed not only to appease his voracious appetite for flesh, but to answer a wanton lust of wholesale destruction. He made the slaughter of cattle his consuming art, killing as many as three in one night. His name became dreadful, the cost of his operations, startling. The cow-men of Peavine and Kigaly offered a tempting sum for his scalp, and the Wooden-shoe outfit doubled the figure. Besides that, the Dark Canyon Company advertised a reward all its own, and the big wolf was coveted by every hunter and trapper hearing his ominous name. The first to stop on his trail with steel traps and animal scents, was a man named Woolf. He trapped coyotes, bobcats and other easy game while he studied the habits of the king-dog, following his tracks, scrutinizing the reeking carcasses in the deeply-cut traces of their death struggles, and listening to the hoarse howl echoing away into the distant brakes and coves of the mountain. Avahte followed the trapper's tracks with all the friendly tolerance of one wolf for another. He seemed to have no fear of men; he made his kills almost within

A VAHTE-SHINA W V 8 5 1 hearing of their camps, and advertised his absolute monarchy with bantering voice on the midnight air. In the summer months he held to a small circle near Kigaly and Peavine springs in the heart of the mountain, where he appeared from the groves of oak and underbrush without warning, to spread terror among quiet cattle as they browsed the flowers, or chewed their cud in the shade. From their mad stampede he selected the choicest young animal, sheared its hamstrings in two with his scissor-like jaws, and claimed its flesh for his own. But while the king-dog bantered Woolf from some dark retreat in the near-by timber, or from safe places in the open far away, and slaughtered his unblemished victims in friendly proximity to the trapper's camp, he avoided the traps with unfailing instinct. Woolf played his part in the losing game till he began to believe Avahte in league with the supernatural, and saddling his ponies he departed from San Juan. In the wild stretches of Slickhorn, among the green groves of the mountain and on to the north of it in Dark Canyon and Indian Creek, the king-dog marked his trail with fresh slaughter. A snarl of noisy coyotes followed ever after him, and though never daring to settle their sharp teeth in one of his victims till he had sampled it himself, they always licked the bones clean when he gave them the signal. Sometimes he kept them waiting weeks at a time, and they refrained from his feast with servile obedience. The lure of the growing reward offered for his destruction, brought to his trail a man named Boudish who, with his son, began to ascertain just where the old wolf was in the habit of going, and how often he passed. While they followed studiously after him, he sniffed their tracks with equal sociability. "We'll get 'im," affirmed the old man, when he saw the great track on their own. With a knowledge of the big wolf's chosen course, his pre- ference for certain territory, and his bump of inquisitiveness for what they were doing, the Boudishes set their traps and placed their scents with eager hands. Avahte was due to pass that way again in about five days, and at the end of that time, as young Boudish followed his trap-line in the early morning, he found one "set" gone; it had been jerked violently from its place, and the heavy clog to which it was attached had hurtled madly after it, making few, but deeply cut marks where it struck the earth. The fury with which it had departed was written on the weeds, the brush and the trees wherever it passed. It was the big wolf, — the deep impressions of his great angry feet in the soft earth indicated the frenzy of his resolution to be free at all costs. Instead of holding to the track with all its distracted detours, young Boudish "cut signs" ahead, crossing the track with sufficient frequency to make sure of its general course, and going forward with

852 IMPROVEMENT ERA all possible speed. Once when he "cut" back around a point of trees and rocks, he discovered the big footprint bounding free with neither clog nor trap and making down the slope with long bounds. The foot that had been in the trap left a red stain. Turning back along the trail among the trees, Boudish dis- covered where the desperate king-dog had jumped through the forks of a low tree, and when the heavy clog caught, he wrenched himself free by his splendid strength. Avahte had seen a trap — not as a lifeless thing, but as a fiendish part of Boudish's track, jumping treacherously up from the dust, and biting his foot with savage power. He would follow their track no more, and when the trappers learned of his displeasure towards them, they began to lose hope. "A trap-wise wolf knows more than a man," declared the elder Boudish, and packing their donkeys they went back to Colorado. Again the king-dog became undisputed monarch of all the rich range he wished to claim. He feasted on the fat of the land; he deigned to eat the daintiest morsels of the choicest cattle he could find. He made a bloody path from Slickhorn through Long Flat, across the mountain by Kigaly and into Dark Canyon where he killed three heifers in one night. The foreman of the Dark Canyon Cattle Company, finding the steaming carcasses, declared with crisp words and strong feeling that they would drive the old thief to death or out of the country. "He's got all the trappers hoodooed, and he costs me more than all my hired help," swore the foreman in a rage. But the foreman found it impossible to take his men from their work long at a time, and he hired two Piutes to spend their whole time on the trail of the elusive Avahte, making it a point to go himself when he could, and to have his whole crew join in the chase when their duties would permit. It was here that the king-dog got his name, for to the red men of Elk Mountain he was Avahte- shinawv, and their tradition vested him with origin and ancestry which gave wonderful charm to the hunt, especially so when justified by promise of reward. The Piute horseman's ability to race over rough country in record time, is a wonder to those who know it, and Posey and Scotty could get as many miles out of the cayuse as any member of their horse-killing tribe. It was stipulated in the contract that they mount themselves, and that their wages should be trebled if they got the wolf. It took them but a few hours to find the big track newly- made across the country, and they took it up with the avidity of blood-hounds after a hare. But the king-dog chose his way far ahead of them, as if he had known all about the plot, and quickened his steps to be out of its reach. They held eagerly and pantingly after him all day, but darkness hid the track and they stopped without a

AVAHTE-SHINAWV 853 glimpse of the gray figure. While they dozed on their meagre blankets with the cayuses browsing the leaves and weeds around them, they heard the banter of the old wolf's hoarse roar from the mountain side above, as if to assure them he was in the best of spirits and ready for the game again next day. In the gray dawn they pursued him, but from every clearing he crossed, he glided under cover again before they appeared. The Piutes brought their rawhide quirts with savage lash down the reeking thighs of their mustangs, but Avahte led on miles ahead, and night found them far from any camp in a cotton-wood gulch of the winter range. The weary ponies could nibble the leaves of the greasewood, but Posey and Scotty found their waist-bands painfully loose till they discovered a porcupine sleeping on a limb above them. Punching him out of the tree, they roasted his oily carcass on the red coals, ate freely of his flesh that night, and licked the bones clean next morning. Thus handsomely stuffed with porcupine, there remained no reason for their return to a base of supplies, and they followed the big track as soon as the gray dawn, revealed it to their eager gaze. On they rode with lash and spur, peering always eagerly ahead for a glimpse of something gray with open mouth and long red tongue, but failing always to see it. The sun mounted high and sank in the west when they were forty miles from camp, their pangs of hunger growing sharper with each mile. But Avahte-shinawv, miles ahead of them, had taken time to kill a fat heifer and gormandize with leisure, leaving a generous part for his starving pursuers. The Piutes gormandized too, taking the evening for the process, and sinking wear- ily down by the carcass to doze when they were full. At break of day they urged their jaded cayuses forward again, doting big on a certain corner into which they hoped to crowd the coveted game. They followed down what in the west is called a "point," with deep gulches on each side, and forming a junction ahead. Fearing the king-dog would escape them on one side while they tracked him along the other, they separated, guarding the whole width of the point as they approached the junction, which they remembered as having a dizzy rim on three sides. Then they saw by the big track that their prisoner had come back to escape them, only to be turned again by the near approach of his relentless pursuers into the strong arms of his corral. Their eagerness became a fever, and they whipped their dog- weary ponies forward, carrying their guns in their saddles before them. On the very end of the point they caught a brief glimpse of the gray monarch he gazed calmly at them, but before they had time to fire he stepped down behind a little ledge, where he seemed to be crouching for a chance to break for the timber of the point behind them. Dismounting, the two Piutes hurried forward guns in hand. But Avahte was not under the little ledge, and he was nowhere to be

854 IMPROVEMENT ERA seen on the rock; he had followed a dizzy shelf along the brow of the cliff, leaped from the end of it to a perilous projection ten feet below, and from there had gone by a desperate drop to the hillside at the base of the cliff. They crept to the edge and saw where he had alighted in a great service-berry bush, from which he had gone, apparently unhurt, to hide in the brush or in the forest below. The Indians headed with their boney cayuses for Dark Canyon, and when they arrived, behold the king-dog was there and well-tuffed with fresh beef, ready for the chase to go on as soon as they got their fresh horses. The chase went forward again, for the foreman The breaks of Grand Gulch looking northwest from Slickhorn, at the buttes of Mossback Mesa, San Juan county, Utah. swore he would keep his expensive guest no longer. They pursued him with increasing fury to the end of the first week, and then to the end of two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, yet the big wolf seemed as strong and hearty as ever. His appetite was excellent, his art of slaughter improved, and he was farther away than when the race began. He made his kills almost within hearing of the cow- punchers as they snored in their blankets, and he called to them with unfaltering banter while they poked their fire and cursed him cordially. And during the whole month he had been seen but once: when the Piutes thought they had him cornered on the point. But now Posey and Scotty found themselves completely afoot, — the foreman had no horses to mount them, and no men nor time to go on with the hunt. Again the king-dog howled the exultation of his monarchy from

AVAHTE-SHINAWV 855 Slickhorn to Indian Creek, from the great reef of the Comb Wash to the dizzy walls of the Colorado. His career as wholesale butcher of choice young cattle had reached well into the years, and he had pre- served his life and his vigorous wolfhood at a cost of seven thousand to ten thousand dollars a year. His hoarse howl echoing up the broken mountain sides in the still night, or coming faintly from dark depths of tall timber, announced his invincible and bloodthirsty presence, making cattle-men shrug their shoulders and curse in despair. From all quarters of his dominion the night winds carried the strong tones of his defiance above the saucy banter of his beggarly coyote following. Late in November, Warren Allan of Blanding, Utah, a town thirty-five miles east of Dark Canyon, answered the lure of the pro- mised reward and camped with his traps on the old wolf's favorite winter range. The king-dog had followed the herds into the lower part of the canyon, known as Fable Valley, and though the old monarch made no long stops, his track crossed the valley at frequent and regular intervals. He made his entrance each time at the same place, and always alone. Evidently he had forbidden the coyotes the use of his royal way, for they came down by paths of their own. The print of Avahte's foot measured four inches across. Warren bent over it in wonder, and though he caught coyotes and other furry creatures, he studied the old wolf's habits a full month without placing a trap in his path. During three whole days he did nothing but follow the wonderful track through the crooks and turns of its strange course. He carried his blankets on his back, stopped wherever night overtook him, trudging forward again with early dawn. But he could not traverse all parts of the royal path, for in some places the king-dog had leaped from one dizzy rim to another, or slid down over steep smooth rock where no one but a daredevil would try to follow. As Warren lay in his lonely blankets after his long walk, the hoarse howl echoed among the rugged canyon walls above him, — a voice expressing the mighty lure of the real wild, where the big game is to hunt and be hunted. Then from the high rocks where that echo started, an ominous screech-owl mingled with it his piercing cry, after which he descended with silent wing to stand the trapper's hair with terror on end by suddenly repeating his splitting screech within five steps of the solitary bed. Avahte's royal and exclusive highway entered the canyon from the west side. All coyotes kept their beggarly feet out of it, accord- ing to his majesty's august orders, finding ways down among the rocks on each side, for they must gorge themselves on what his highness left, and he left them the greater part of every kill. Then they held loud carnival over each carcass when it fell to them, and they cursed and fought each other with echoing warmth, but the whole cowardly gang always waited for the king-dog to give them the signal for starting by dining on it himself.

856 IMPROVEMENT ERA Warren was delighted to find on his own track the imprint of the big wolf's foot. Though his wolfish highness had found Boudish a bad man to follow, in Warren he had apparently scented no danger. "He was ready to chum with me in spite of Boudish, the Piutes and everybody else," Allan affirmed, "and he went right on about his business after I arrived as if I were just to his taste. He killed eleven heifers in the canyon while I was there, some of them within half a mile of my camp." About Christmas time, when cold winds moaned through the naked oaks, and the little stream in the canyon crept along under the crust of ice, Warren set his traps for the king-dog. The old monarch had come in at regular intervals from the west side during A typical hillside in the desert regions of San Juan county, Utah, where no horse can follow a wo"lf. the month, springing each time from the same ledges, and sliding down over the same smooth rocks. That highway looked like the best place for a "set," and in it the lone hunter placed three big traps chained together, taking a full half day to arrange them, con- cealing the place with sand the color of the surrounding rock. And he spared no pains in obliterating all tracks, and added the essential lure of scent. When Avahte came down the mountain again, he took another path. WcfOlf and Boudish had trapped in that valley, — possibly in this same highway, and from them the king-dog had learned much,

AVAHTE-SHINAWV 85 7 That chumming business was but a part of his shrewd game. In all the windings of his chosen way, in his loud howl, and in the many carcasses where he wrote red testimony of his ferocity, he had yet re- served the secret of his self-preservation. This latest trapper felt strongly disposed to concede him sole right to the solitude as the other trap- pers had been compelled to do. When there came a fall of dry snow, and cattle huddled near one "set" of the traps, Warren moved them for safety away. Then the old wolf tracked him to the place, and trod down the snow where they had been. "It looked as if he said, 'Move them traps out of my way, and I'll follow it again,' " said Warren. Three days after that, he found where the old wolf had fol- lowed him in the snow to a coyote struggling in a trap, and there he had jumped from the shoe-tracks as if they were hot. Across the can- yon he had found them again and turned abruptly away. "He wouldn't chum with me any more," declared the trapper, smiling, "and my chances of getting him looked mighty slim." Soon after the close of the year it became necessary for Allan to make a trip home, and he left most of the traps, including the three in the royal highway, in their set under the snow. He expected to return in a few days, but business delayed him in Blanding while the winter progressed. Avahte found the lone and dangerous track leading eastward up the canyon, and as the days passed he saw no sign of its return. Neither could he sniff on the crisp winter wind the smell of fire, and no sound by day nor glimmer by night indicated the presence of man. He was alone: the keen instincts of his aggressive wolfhood assured him his tormentors had gone one after another from pursuing after him. He had outwitted them — out-run them, and the white solitude echoed the exultant roar of his hard-fought supremacy. As the fall of more fluffy snow buried all traces of his latest adversary, giving the wild world to him and his prey, he grew bold in the freedom of his dominion. He indulged his art of slaughter without fear and in triumph. He crossed the ghostly wilderness in the open or under cover as he pleased, holding his beggarly following away in disdain. The world was his, right and left, and he forbade the servile parasites living by his splendid prowess from placing their feet in his royal pathway. As victorious lord of all creation, so far as he cared to claim it, he would hold to his chosen course, nor fear to tread where the in- stincts of his nature had led him. Down his old highway from the west side he came with august and sweeping stride, scattering the feath- ery snow as he sprang from rock to rock, till up from one of his landings jumped a great savage trap, gripping his left front foot with silent fury. With indignant surprise the king-dog bolted like a flash, only to jerk from under the fluffy surface, two other traps and a heavy wooden clog. It was no wisdom nor cunning of his in this desperate

858 IMPROVEMENT ERA moment that snapped the two traps with sharp and empty click on the snow, instead of on another of his frantic feet. From this evil place some wolfish instinct called him towards the bottom of the canyon, and he struggled painfully down the mountain side over brush and rocks, fighting here with an oak on which his chains had become en- tangled, and exerting himself there to dislodge the clog from between two boulders. Then he caught his gingling irons around a young pine the size of a man's neck, and in spite of all his desperate pulling and jerking, it hung as if it were locked. He fought fiercely with that tangle of chain and traps and clog, going around the tree and back till he had worn a deep path through the snow and into the frozen earth. He settled his great dull teeth into the gummy bark of the tree, tearing it The walls of the Colorado River, nature's great barrier, forming the northwestern boundary of San Juan county, Utah. from the base of the trunk, and scarring the juicy white wood be- neath. And then in a frenzy he bit chips of wood from the tree, and gnawed with trembling wrath to its very heart. When it fell he severed the last tough fibres which held it, dragged his accursed tangle oyer its much mutilated stump, and headed again down the course of his royal way. Trouble beset him at every turn. A hundred and fifty yards down the mountain he jumped from a nine-foot ledge, but one of his traps caught on some heavy brush, allowing him but chain enough to reach the sloping hillside with three feet. His left front foot was suspended above his head in the unrelenting jaws of the trap. He

AVAHTE-SHINAWV 859 tried in vain to jump back; the ledge was too high, his footing too nearly on edge, his unnatural burden too heavy. In his desperation on three feet he turned round and round, and the chains twisted up so short they held him erect on his hind feet. When after slow and painful exertion he reached the earth again with his free front foot, it was only to hang himself up again by the same motion. When he paused in his intense effort, his desperate cry echoed away on the chilly wind, to be answered by the mocking bark of his beggarly following, now growing desperate with hunger for the kills he failed to make. His mouth and lips were raw and bleeding from thrusting them ever against the hard cold thing which held him, painting it over with many a new coat of red. He whined, he growled, he uttered the most awful imprecation known to his fierce nature. In his writhing and srtuggling he was too intent on escape to care that the dawn followed the dusk, and the dusk the dawn, in one long fight with the greatest of all foes. And yet he fought on and wore out the strength of his powerful wolfhood, sinking ever lower with hunger and weariness, till he hung limply against the cold wall. His gaping mouth revealed a set of terrible teeth made dull with age, and his fiery eyes, frozen solid in their sockets, looked blankly at Allan when he had followed the royal way down the hill to where the king-dog made his last fight. Blanding, Utah. My Faith Have I the faith to trust in Thee, And know that Thou art near, Though threat'ning shadows gather fast, To fill my soul with fear? Have I the faith to feel that Thou Art walking by my side Through these dark shadows in my path My faltering feet to guide? Have I the faith within my soul To know and see the light That radiates from Thee, O Lord, And shows to us the right? Have I the faith, when hopes are high And pleasures all are mine, To turn my thoughts to Thee above, In gratitude sublime? Then, have I faith to muster strength, And grasp thine outstretched hand, To cleave unto eternal truth, Above temptation stand? Ogden, Utah OLIVE BELNAP JENSON