mouthed and vocal. Not being used to such diabolical music, we allow we were badly scared. For the first time we knew what it meant to have our hair stand on end. Our horses broke loose, and crowded into the camp for protection, and the dogs ran between our legs. Our compan1on, who was used to this sort of thing, replied to the howl with another nearly as long-drawn and as devilish as that of the wolves themselves, which produced a rejoinder from the hairy outsiders. This lasted for about five minutes, when our friend seized his rifle and fired it at random into the howling circle. Instantly all was still, and we heard no more of them that night, though they continued to prowl about our camp for some days.

The black wolf is by some naturalists supposed to be only a variety of the gray species, but we think there is good reason to mark him as a distinct sort. The hunters who are familiar with this wolf, consider him as a more formidable animal than the gray. They roam singly, and are rarely met with anywhere. The last black wolf that we have heard of was killed near the head of Lake Michigan, about five years ago. He had the boldness to take a calf out of a farm yard at midday, which raised the neighborhood upon him.

The prairie wolf is about the size of a setter dog, though more powerfully made, aud resembling a good deal, in appearance and habits, the European jackall He is exclusively a native American species. His range formerly extended to Lake Michigan, on the East, but in the settled parts of Illinois he has become rare. They are swift of foot, live in burrows like the fox, hunt in packs, and are much less afraid of man than the other wolves. We have never heard of any well-authenticated instance of an attack by prairie wolves upon the human family or the larger domestic animals, though they are very destructive to hogs and sheep, as well as to the smaller kinds of game. Before the settlement of Illinois by the whites, the prairie wolves made great havoc among the grouse, trailing the hens to the nest with the unerring nose of the pointer, when mother and eggs would disappear in the capacious maw of the destroyer. The birds were observed to increase rapidly wherever the wolves were driven

out.

On the extensive prairies about Chicago, where, twenty years ago, these animals abounded, great sport was had in hunting them with hounds and mounted men. Thirty or forty riders, armed, with guns, pistols, or clubs, attended by all the dogs in town, a motley collection of greyhounds, fox-hounds, terriers, bulldogs, and curs, anything, in short, that could fight or run, would sally forth over the frozen prairie. Some wolves would be started from the long grass and weeds, and a dozen separate runs would be going on at once. The only dogs which could outrun the wolves were the greyhounds, but these, and, if of pure blood, were not sufficiently powerful to kill them. Their game was to run against the wolf, at full speed, generally giving him a fall, and so retarding his progress till the slower and stronger dogs could come up. wolf fights desperately when at bay, and few dogs like to attack him single handed.

This

A bulldog or bull-terrier, which grapples them at once, regardless of their

terrible snap, kills them easily. A large and powerful dog, bred between the greyhound and some large and courageous breed, proved very useful, having speed enough to run the wolf down, and strength and courage to finish him. One in particular we remember, as the hero of these hunts. He was a magnificent fellow, standing twenty-eight to thirty inches at the shoulder, tawny colored, like a lion, with a black muzzle, and a set of legs which would carry him up to wolf or deer in a mile's run. He would sieze the wolf by the back, and throw him clear from the ground, and such was his strength and activity, that, though he has killed five or six wolves in a day, he was rarely hurt. A deer he would seize by the nose or the haunch, and throw him then instantly grapple him by the throat, and at these times it was very unsafe for any one but his master to come between him and his prey, for he neither feared man nor beast. John Palliser, by birth an Irishman, by education an Oxford man six feet Tour in hight, with inexhaustible spirits and humor, a taste for the polka, a talent for singing and making himself agreeable in all company, a fearless horseman, a tolerable cook, and a dead shot, having exhausted the excitement of European game, panting for fresh fields and pastures new-determined to take himself to the prairies, and have a shot at the buffalo and the grizzly bear. In his voyage out to America he had for one fellow-traveler General Tom Thumb, whose great amusement was climbing to the shoulders of the tall Irishman, and then making a peril ous descent at one leap to the bottom of his shooting-jacket, until by repeated droppings the bottom of the garment gave way. At New Orleans, he commenced operations in the marshes by waging war on snipe to the extent of twenty-one brace, and the following day took the solo parts, first of Goliah, and then of Saul, in the oratorio of David, performed by amateurs to purchase a new organ for an Episcopalian church.

In Arkansas Mr. Palliser shot deer by night, with a fire-pan, and carried off seven deer-skins for buck-skin clothes, as trophies. Here, too, he met his first experience of the hospitality of American sportsmen, and tried his first experiment in camping out. He remarks, "It is only when left to our own resources that we sportsmen feel how very helpless we are rendered by our civilization. Very delightful is the refinement of sport in England, rising not too early, shaving with hot water, and tea creamsoftened waiting for you in the breakfast-room, guns clean as if not used the day before, the game-keeper following with the load of shot, and an excellent dinner awaiting, without any stint in consequence of the birds being wild, or your shooting nervous. Such were my thoughts as, for the first time, I sat solitary by my fire; but they presented themselves much more forcibly on subsequent occasions, when, tired, cold, and hungry, I encamped after a day's unsuccessful hunting on one of the wild plains of the Rocky Mountains." His first night's lonely camp was marked by the stealthy approach of something in the dark; which something turned out to be a panther. He became tired of tame life in Arkansas, and joined a fur party traveling across the prairies from Independence to Yellow Stone river. On this journey, daily, before sunset, they unsaddled and unpacked the horses; formed with the pack a circular inclosure about ten feet in diameter, and hobbled out the horses with straps and

chains, to prevent their straying; then cut and gathered wood, kindled fires, fetched water in kettles, put meat on to cook, roasted coffee-berries pounded them in deer-skins on the stump of a tree with the back of hatchet, put them in the coffee-pot and boiled them; then, the meat being cooked, set to work to eat, made beds of saddle-cloths, and buffalo robes then smoked their pipes, and so to sleep, as only travelers on the prairie. can sleep.

One day they arrived at a lake, and camped when their meat was exhausted and they had nothing but beans to eat; so our sportsman was set to work to kill ducks for dinner, and Mr. Palliser naïvely observes : "I had to work hard for my ducks that evening. They all fell into the water, and I had to swim for them, but they formed a great addition to the boiled beans we had been reduced to."

After a long journey, sometimes "struggling through immense wastes where, feeling my own insignificance, I seemed carried back to some long past age, and as though encroaching on the territories of the mammoth and the mastodon," Mr. Palliser reached Fort Vermilion, and found it surrounded by a camp of six hundred Sioux Indians, just returned from a successful foray; so he witnessed a scalp dance, and then bought the scalp and the "poor devil's head-dress, made of the scalp of a black bear, for fifteen rounds of ammunition." He also got up a subscription and purchased a poor woman-prisoner, whom the Indians were about to put to death with great solemnity, and set her free at night. She finally escaped running all night, guiding her course by the stars, and concealed all day; so that in two days and nights she reached her husband and children, "half-starved, but very happy."

In spite of savage Indians, who sometimes shot at him by mistake, and nights in the prairie - where he woke in the morning and found himself lying in a pool of water-on he went, now starving, now feasting on the spoils of his gun, until, as the winter set in, he reached Fort Union. There the inhabitants of the fort were one after another laid up with the mumps; until the supply of fresh meat depended entirely on the traveler. One day he set out covered with a white blanket, and "stalked " a herd of buffalo in the snow so successfully, that he crept about undetected for an hour and laid five of the fattest low; "then the herd bolted in a body, tossing their shaggy heads and plowing up the snow." He cut out the tongues of those he had killed; and, leaving a blanket on one animal, a cap on another, a pocket-handkerchief floating from the head of a third, to scare the wolves, "set off at full speed for the fort; for it was pudding day, and worth while to make haste." He entered just as the clock struck twelve, and feasted on buffalo and venison of his own providing, "dressed in delicious bear's grease and buffalo marrow, by a capital cook."

Listen to that, ye Norfolk pheasant-slaughterers, and bide your humbled heads! Practice makes perfect. After a time Mr. Palliser flayed, cut up, and disposed of his game as neatly as any Indian hunter, and congratulates himself on driving a good trade as a dead shot, by earning white wolf-skins worth two-and-a-half dollars each. But he was not destined to slay buffaloes scathless. After firing four times at an old buffalo,

"

our hunter walked up and lodged a final shot, when the old brute charged, pursued, and overtook him. I swerved suddenly on one side to escape the shock, but to my horror, I failed in dodging him; he bolted round quicker than I did, affording me barely time to protect my stomach with the butt of my rifle, and to turn sideways in hopes of getting between his horns, when he came plump upon me with a shock like an earthquake; one horn shivered my rifle stock, the other tore my clothes. I flew in mid air, scattering the prairie hens that hung from my belt in all directions, and fell unhurt in the snow, while my dying victim subsided not quite over me in a snow-drift.”

Some time after this adventure, Mr. Palliser purchased from an Indian woman a magnificent dog. When purchased it took time and trouble to reconcile the animal to its white owner; but eventually Ismah became a faithful, efficient servant, drawing a small sledge called a "travail," during the day, and sleeping on his master's bosom, saving him from being frozen to death at night. With Ismah as sole companion, he set out on a solitary winter's journey along the shores of the Upper Missouri.

Ismah dragged all the spare clothing, dry food, and the flesh of the deer last shot, as they traveled along the ice. "When I stood and looked about to choose a convenient spot to camp, Ismah used to gaze into my face, and whine, as much as to say, 'I am tired too.' When I trampled down the snow, cut and strewed the willows, and proceeded to collect wood, he used to watch me eagerly, and prick up his ears when he saw me take the flint and steel from my pouch, and the dry inner bark of the cottonwood tree from my chest, in order to kindle a spark. The fire secure, I turned my attention to him, unpacked his travail, and placed it aloft against the side of a tree to protect the leather straps from the voracity of wolves. This done, I spread my bed and filled my kettle, took a handful of coffee berries from my bag, washed them in the cover of the kettle, then, pounding them, put them in the smaller kettle, and the meat in the larger, to boil. These operations Ismah used to regard with intense interest. When supper was over-and his share was often very scanty-he sat up close beside me as I smoked my pipe and sipped my coffee. When at last I got into bed, he used to lie down with his back close to my shoulders, and so we slept until morning. As soon as it was daylight we rose; Ismah submitted patiently to be harnessed, and we resumed our march.

"Ismah's relationship to the Lupus [he was of the wolf-dog breed] family was often inconvenient to me, as he used to run off and play with the young Luperkins. One day, after a long march, while looking out for a camping place, a she wolf crossed the ice, and in spite of coaxing and threats, Ismah set off to join her. I shouted to the wolf, the wolf ran off, and away ran Ismash after her, with his travail behind him loaded with every thing I possessed in the world. I followed, shouting, until he disappeared, and then followed the tracks on the snow, until darkness obliged me to abandon the pursuit, and I found myself alone on a vast waste of snow, stretching around me on every side, a hundred miles from any human habitation, without warm covering for the night, with very little powder in my horn, and only two bullets in my pouch! I turned