lowering it again so that he would be out of sight. Sometimes he
crawled on his belly a few feet further from me, evidently trying to
put himself directly in the path of the antelope; and this he seemed
to have succeeded in doing. As she drew near him I could see that
she was staggering, she was so tired, and the wolf behind could at
any moment have knocked her down, if he had wanted to, but he seemed
to be waiting for something. The wolf that was following him was now
running faster and catching up.
"When the antelope reached the place where the first wolf was lying
hidden, he sprang up and in a jump or two caught her neck and threw
her down. At the same moment, the two wolves from behind came up, and
for a moment there was a scuffle in which yellow and white and grey
and waving tails were all mixed up, and then the three wolves were
seen standing there, tearing away at their breakfast.
"Great Scott! that must have been exciting," said Jack.
"It was," said his uncle; "I had been so interested in watching this
thing, which after all had not taken more than ten or fifteen minutes
of time, that I had forgotten all about the horses. It only needed
a moment's looking to see them, a short distance down the stream,
and before I had got to them and brought them back to camp, I heard
Bill's voice singing out breakfast."
"I always thought," said Jack, "that the antelope could run so fast
that they could get away from all their enemies except hunters that
carried rifles. Is there any other wild animal besides the coyote
that catches them?"
"Yes, the golden eagles often kill them when they are quite young,
though if any old ones are near they will fight the birds and keep
them from catching the kids. Once in winter I saw an eagle attack
two kids that were feeding at a little distance from a big bunch of
perhaps a thousand antelope. At this time the young ones were seven
or eight months old, and so quite large and strong. The eagle had
been sitting somewhere on the hillside and flew down over the kids
to pounce on one of them. They immediately began to run to the herd,
and when the eagle made a dart at them, they both stopped, reared on
their hind legs, a good deal in the position of the unicorn that we
sometimes see fighting for the crown, and struck at the bird with
their forefeet. Perhaps the eagle was not very hungry, but at all
events this turned him and the kids ran on. He made two more swoops
at them before they reached the herd, but each time they fought him
off in the same way by rearing up and striking at him. Of course when
they got in among the other antelope the eagles left them and flew
away.
"You know that in old times, before they had horses or fire-arms, the
Indians used to catch antelope in traps."
"No, I didn't know that," said Jack, "how did they do it? I should
think it would have needed a pretty big trap to hold an antelope."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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