Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 December 1886 — The Untamed Wolf. [ARTICLE]

The Untamed Wolf.

Probably no animal on the hemisphere, with the exception of the temperance orator, has sb much noise about it as the ordinary thirty-pound wolf that frequents the great West, where hen-coops are thickest. When it lifts up its voice and expresses its emotions, it makes the welkin ring until it can’t rest; a voice that starts out in good shape with a plaintive wail, and gradually expands until at the end it sounds like a wild-west show on payday, and you involuntarily look at the brute to see if it hasn’t blown out a lung or two.

Its voice is only equal to its appetite; in fact, it is merely an unhappy combination of noise and hunger. It can eat a supper that would give a rhinoceros the colic,and then sit out on the hill-top and howl for more, in a voice that makes the windows rattle from Dan to Bersheba and all way-stations. It can tackle a sheep that outweighs itself by thirty pounds, eat it in ten minutes, wool and all, and then howl in an agony of hunger.

The color is a soft yellow—the color of English whiskers— and it has a languid, musky smell about it that’s also quite English, ye know. It can also eat eggs with a capacity for gross at a meal, which likewise reminds me of an ancient British custom. The wolf is the most elusive oi beasts as .well, and knows more about a shot-gun than half of us know about the New Testament. You can aim at him until you know you can’t miss, and when you have fired, and the s'lhoke has cleared away, and you look around to see if the wolf is ready to attend its own funeral, you find it sitting far of! in the bright summer sun, spinning off a ten-foot installment of a derisive howl, which has such a strong under-current of sarcasm in it that you feel like taking a brace of pills to get the taste out of your mouth. A wolf can't be shot. The happiest ipoment of its long and eventful life is when somebody is wasting good powder attempting* to perforate it, for then it can look at Kim with a calm and steadfast eye and issue a holiday edition of yells. The only way to triumph over.it_and see the film of death gather in its eyes is to so.p,k some fowl in muriatic acid and leave it where the wolf will find it.

The latter, having a bad sense of taste, will eat the fowl and never know that it is adulterated, until cold,'clammy pains begin to chase each other through its system, and the perspiration gathers on its brow, and its pelvic bone sticks out of its ears, and then it sees that it’s a victim of man’s duplicity; it’s tail droop's low; it casts a" despairing glance behind it, and then seeks some shady spot, gives one farewell howl that makes the welkin tired, and dies.