"You would hardly believe, now," Peter said, one day when he and Frank had brought down two fine antelopes by this manoeuvre, "that the coyotes are just as much up to that trick as we are. They haven't got a chance with the deer when they are once moving, although sometimes they may pick up a fawn a few days old, or a stag that has got injured; but when they want deer-meat they just act the same game as we have been doing. Over and over again have I seen them at their tricks; two of them will play them together. They will creep up through the grass till they can get to a spot where the antelope can see them, and then they will just act as if they were mad, rolling over on their backs, waving their legs about, twisting and rolling like balls, and playing the fool, till the antelope comes up to see what is the matter. They let them come on till they are only a few yards away, and then they are on one like a flash, before he has time to turn and get up his speed. One will catch him by a leg, and the other will get at his throat, and between them they soon pull him down. They will sham dead too. Wonderful 'cute beasts is them coyotes; they are just about the sharpest beasts as live." "Do they live entirely upon deer?" "Bless you, no; they will eat anything. They hang about behind the great buffalo herds, and eat them as drops; where there are such tens of thousands there is always some as is old or injured and can't keep up; besides, sometimes they get scared, and then they will run over a bluff and get piled up there dead by hundreds. The coyotes pick the bones of every beast as dies in the plains. The badgers helps them a bit; there are lots of those about in some places." [Illustration] CHAPTER X. A BUFFALO STORY. SOMETIMES, instead of taking his rifle and accompanying the other hunters, Frank would borrow a shot-gun, and go out on foot and return with a good bag of prairie-fowl, birds resembling grouse. Occasionally, in the canyons, or wooded valleys, far away from the track, the hunters came across the trail of wild turkeys; then two of them would camp out for the night, and search under the trees until they saw the birds perched on the boughs above them, and would bring into camp in the morning half a dozen dangling from each of their saddles. Frequently, in their rides, they came across skunks, pretty black and white little animals. Frank was about to shoot the first he saw, but Peter, who was with him, shouted to him not to fire.