The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray
wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags
down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive
and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and
exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote
is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is _always_ hungry. He is
always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise
him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so
spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending
a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is _so_
homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he
sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then
turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a
bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sagebrush,
glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about
out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate
survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again—another fifty and
stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the
gray of the sagebrush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no
demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier
interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts
such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the
time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and
by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by
the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing
but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where
he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy
it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of
himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about
speed. The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of
his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his
shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and
worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground,
and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and
stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a
yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and
denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake
across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty
feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand
why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get
aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the
cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he
grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been
taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long,
calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting
fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to
keep from running away from him—and _then_ that town-dog is mad in
earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand
higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and
desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding
enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a
wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles
blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to
say, “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bud—business is
business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all
day”—and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of
a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and
alone in the midst of a vast solitude!