Sandburrs and Others. Lewis Alfred Henry
“Model of ‘78. Never liked it, though; always shootin’ over. As you pump the loads outen ‘em and empty the magazine, the weight shifts till toward the last the muzzle’s as light as a feather. Thar you be! shootin’ over and still over, every pull.”
Having no interest in magazine guns beyond the act of firing them, I paid no heed to Bob’s assault on their merits.
“Now a single-shot gun,” continued Bob, as he rode an oak shrub underfoot to come abreast of me, “is the weepon for me. Never mind about thar bein’ jest one shot in her! Show me somethin’ to shoot, an’ I’ll sling the cartridges into her frequent enough for the most impatient gent on earth. This rifle I’m packin’ is all right – all except the hind sight. That’s too coarse; you could drag a dog through it.”
Bob’s dissertation on rifles was entertaining enough. My mood was indifferent, and his wisdom ran through my wits like water through a funnel, keeping them employed without filling them up. Bob had just begun again – all about a day far away when muzzle loaders were many in the hills – when my pony made sudden shy at something in the bushes. The muzzle of my gun instantly pointed to it, as if by an instinct of its own. Even as it did I became aware of the harmless cause of my pony’s devout breathings – one of those million tragedies of nature which makes the wilderness a daily slaughter pen. It was the carcass of a blacktail deer. Its torn throat and shoulders, as well as the tracks of the giant cat in the snow, told how it died. The panther had leaped from the big bough of that yellow pine.
“Mountain lion!” observed Bob, sagely, as he con templated the torn deer. “The deer come sa’nterin’ down the slope yere, an’ the lion jest naturally jumps his game from that tree. This deer was a bigger fool than most. You wouldn’t ketch many of ‘em as could come walkin’ down the wind where the brush and bushes is rank, and gives the cats a chance to lay for ‘em and bushwhack ‘em!”
It was becoming shadowy in among the pines by this time, and, having enough of Bob’s defence of the dead buck and apology for its errors, I pushed on through the bushes for the camp. As we crossed a burnt strip where the fires had made a meal of the trees, the sun was reluctantly blinking his last before going to bed in the Sangre de Christo Range, which rolled upward like some tremendous billow in an ocean of milk full five scores of miles to the west.
Bob and I were smoking our pipes in our log home that evening. Perhaps it was nine o’clock. A pitch-pine fire – billets set up endwise in the fireplace – roared in one corner. Our chimney was a vast success. Out back of our log habitat the surveyors had peeled the base of a pine and made a red-paint statement to the effect that even in the bottom of our little valley we were over 8,000 feet above the sea. This rather derogated from the pride of our chimney’s performance; because, as Bob with justice urged, “a chimney not to ‘draw’ at an altitude of 8,000 feet would have to be flat on the ground.”
I was sprawled on a blanket, softly taking in the smoke of a meerschaum. My eyes, fascinated by the glaring, pitch-pine blaze, were boring away at the fire as if it guarded a treasure. But neither the tobacco smoke nor the flames were in my thoughts; the latter were idly going back to the torn deer.
As if in deference to a fashion of telepathy, Bob would have been thinking of the deer, also. It’s possible, however, he had the cat in his meditations.
Suddenly he broke into my quiet with the remark which opens this yarn. Then he proceeded.
“Because,” Bob continued, as I turned an eye on him through my tobacco smoke, “you might get it easy. He’s shorely due to go back to-night an’ eat up some of that black-tail, unless he’s got an engagement. It’s even money he’s right thar now.”
I stepped to the door and looked out. The roundest of moons in the clearest of skies shone down. Then there was the snow; altogether, one might have read agate print by the light. I picked up my rifle and sent my eye through the sights.
“But how about it when we push in among the pines; it’ll be darker in there?”
“Thar’ll be plenty of light,” declared Bob. “You don’t have to make a tack-head shot. It ain’t goin’ to be like splittin’ a bullet on a bowie. This mountain lion will be as big as you or me. Thar’ll be light enough to hit a mark the size of him.”
Our ponies were heartily scandalised at being resaddled so soon; but they were powerless to enforce their views, and away we went, Indian file, with souls bent to slay the lion.
“Which I shorely undertakes the view that we’ll get him,” observed Bob as we rode along.
“Did you ever hear the Eastern proverb which says, ‘The man who sold the lion’s hide while yet upon the beast was killed in hunting him’?” I asked banteringly.
“Who says so?” demanded Bob, defiantly.
“It is an Eastern proverb.”
“Well, it may do for the East,” responded Bob, “but you can gamble it ain’t had no run west of the Mississippi. Why! I wouldn’t be afraid to bet that one of these panthers never killed a human in the world. They do it in stories, but never in the hills. Why, shore! if you went right up an’ got one by his two y’ears an’ wrastled him, he’d have to fight. You could get a row out of a house cat, an’ play that system. But you can write alongside of the Eastern proverb, that ‘Bob Ellis says that the lion them parties complain of as killin’ their friend, must have been plumb locoed, an’ it oughtn’t to count.’”
At the edge of the trees we left the ponies standing. They pointed their ears forward as if wondering what all this mysterious night’s work meant. It was entirely beside their experience. We left them to unravel the puzzle and passed as quietly among the trees as needles into cloth.
Both Bob and I had served our apprenticeship at being noiseless, and brought the noble trade of silence to a science. It wasn’t distant now to the field of the deer’s death. Soon Bob pointed out the yellow pine. Bob was a better woodsman than I. Even in the daylight I would have owned trouble in picking out the tree at that distance among such a piney throng.
What little wind we had was breathing in our faces. Bob hadn’t made the black-tail’s blunder of giving the lion the better of the breeze. Bob took the lead after he pointed out the yellow pine. Perhaps it was 150 yards away when he identified it. We didn’t cover five yards in a minute. Bob was resolutely deliberate. Still, I had no thought of complaint. I would have managed the case the same way had I been in the lead.
Every ten feet Bob would pause and listen. There was now and then the sound of a clot of snow falling in the tops of the pines, as some bough surrendered its burden to the influence of the slight breeze. That was all my ears could detect of voices in the woods.
We were within forty yards of the yellow pine, when Bob, after lingering a moment, turned his face toward me and made a motion of caution. I bent my ear to a profound effort. At last I heard it; the unctuous sound of feeding jaws!
The oak bushes grew thick in among the pine trees. It did not seem possible to make out our game on account of this shrub-screen. At this point, instead of going any nearer the yellow pine, Bob bore off to the left. This flank movement not only held our title to the wind, but brought the moon behind us. After each fresh step Bob turned for a further survey of that region at the base of the yellow pine, where our lion, or some one of his relatives, was busy at his new repast.
Then the climax of search arrived. To give myself due credit, I saw the panther as soon as did Bob. A fallen pine tree opened a lane in the bushes. Along this aisle I could dimly make out the body of the beast. His head and shoulders were protected by the trunk of the yellow pine, from the limb of which he had ambuscaded the black-tail. A cat’s mouth serves vilely as a knife; the teeth are not arranged to cut well. His inability to sever a morsel left nothing for our lion to do, but gnaw at the carcass much as a dog might at a bone. This managed to keep his head out of harm’s way behind the tree.
Nothing better was likely to offer, and I concluded to try what a bullet would bring, on that part of the panther we could see. I found as I raised my Winchester that there was to be a strong element of faith in the shot. It was dim and shadowy in the woods, conditions which