This main pond is off the stream, connecting with it by a ditch through the side of another pond, and will thus receive but little sediment. But each year a layer of fine material will sift in and settle on the bottom, making the pond shallower. Although this pond will live longer than most ponds it, too, will meet the common fate--be filled in with rich soil, be buried and forgotten beneath grass, wild flowers, willows, and groves of trees.
Several times through the ice I saw the beavers in the pond. A number of times I watched them by the food pile cutting off sticks of rations. Other times they were swimming about as though just having their daily cold bath.
While the glassy ice covering of the pond was still clear I once saw them at play in the water beneath the ice; all nine. They wrestled in pairs, they mixed in masses, they raced two and three, they followed the leader circling and criss-crossing. Now and then one dropped out, rose against the under surface of the ice where there was an air pocket, and here I suppose had a few breaths and then resumed the play.
One day in western Wyoming an elk was killed by hunters. It was left lying on the ground all night. Its only protection was a handkerchief tied to one of the horns. Tracks in the snow showed that wolves were about and that they had circled the carcass, but without going close enough to touch it.
In another instance a deer was left out all night in the wolf country.
“How did you protect it?” someone asked the hunter.
“By simply rubbing my hands over it,” he answered.
A mature wolf will not eat or touch anything that has human scent upon it, or that carries the scent of iron or steel, which he evidently associates with the deadly scent of man.
A cowboy shot his injured pony and left it lying on the plains. The pony was shod. Wolves did not touch the carcass. On another occasion and in the same locality a pony was killed by lightning. It was not shod and carried no human scent. Upon this pony the wolves were feasting within a few hours.
The wolf in his struggles with man has become an extremely cautious animal. He is hunted and pursued with deadly ingenuity and persistence. Guns, traps, poison, and dogs are used for his destruction. There is no quarter for him--always a price on his head; and the sum is large. Survivors must be exceptionally wide-awake and wary. The numbers that still survive show that this exacting price of existence has been met. They have not been beaten. Altogether, the wolves now alive probably are much more destructive than their ancestors were, and far more capable of saving themselves from extermination by man.