IRST of all Delos Conklin felt the isolation, his remoteness from the Bell Brand ranch, when he had settled down to the hard task of ridding the great range of the six outlaw wolves, to kill which he had been assigned by his employer’s influence over the cattle and sheep growers of the Tribulation court district. He had been chosen because in all the land there was no wolver. Trappers were rather scorned by the population. A few boys had a dozen or two traps. Now and again some coyote attracted attention by catching chickens or a skunk took up its abode uncomfortably near a ranch or sheep fold. Running Voice had been the only professional trapper in the country, and he was a woods fur seeker, not an open desert man.
Conklin had talked trapping wild animals on occasion at the ranch table or before the fireplace. He had some theories on the subject. He had some remarkable stories to tell about the cunning of otter, the habits of pekans, the sharp practises of red foxes, and he had taken three or four old traps that had long hung disused in the Bell Brand harness shed to catch a coyote which was coming in close at night to the annoyance of Wool Head Plack. The capture of this animal had led to Conklin’s reputation as a trapper. He rather liked the distinction. Now he was a little uneasy in his mind for fear his gesture had been a little too proud and confident. He had never caught a gray or lobo wolf and he knew his work was cut out for him. He was pretty sure that he knew more than most animals, but he had no illusions that he knew the business of Lop-Ear and his hungry pack well enough to fool the notorious beasts, beating Lop-Ear at his own game.
He had a pretty good general knowledge of the lay of the land. He went to the north end of the Needle Tops and pitched his tent in the cañon of the last spring. This he figured would be better than going to the water-hole in the Wolf Den knolls which he decided he could use to better advantage than drinking the water and having his horses there. He had learned a pretty serious lesson when he found his pack horse dead with the hobbles on the poor brute’s hocks. He cringed with pity and regret every time he thought of the helpless animal cut down by the ferocious wolves. Moreover, the grass was better up the Needle Tops than in the barren Wolf Den waste of Bad Land and crumbling or broken stone.
Having made his camp, dragged down dead cedar stumps and hung up a blacktail deer which he was lucky to kill the first day, he rode the second day over to the Wolf Dens, studying particularly the runways and signs, the numerous caves and dripping-water formations. Coyotes skulked away when he approached too near. Some of them had never seen a man before, he could tell, for they were uncertain whether to flee or just circle around keeping their eyes open.
Tracks of big wolves, heavy ones that dragged their claws when they stepped in the loose sand, puzzled him. They did not look familiar when he came to study them carefully. He set two No. 5 traps, however, where a path had been worn around a corner of rock at the entrance into a dry wash. He buried the drags in the sand, wrapped the bright gray steel in thin, soft parafined paper to keep dirt from clogging the trap, and brushed the sand over the pit, roughing it all so as to make it look as much like the paw prints as he could. He noted well the location so he could find the place again, using a pyramid rock a hundred feet high as his landmark. He called these traps No. 1 and 2 in his trap-line list.
An acre of nearly level sand out of a gulch was circled and crisscrossed by the tracks of playful wolves. The animals seemed to have come down a path through a clump of sage on a side-hill. He walked around and at the top of the knoll he found a place between two rocks which was just right for a trap set. Without touching his hands to anything around he pulled sand out to make a pit, laid in the drags and chain and rested the trap, pan-up, in the hole. He covered the jaws with soft paper and then with a cedar paddle shoveled dry sand over the engine of destruction.
And thus here and there, wherever tracks seemed promising or the looks of the country was satisfactory, he put down trap after trap until he had gone some miles along the east side of the Wolf Dens. But only when he reached the bones of his dead horse did he have the feeling about the wolf tracks that they were made by the particular outlaws he was sent to capture.