The true way to kill wolves, however, is to hunt them with greyhounds on the great plains.  Nothing more exciting than this sport can possibly be imagined.  It is not always necessary that the greyhounds should be of absolutely pure blood.  Prize-winning dogs of high pedigree often prove useless for the purposes.  If by careful choice, however, a ranchman can get together a pack composed both of the smooth-haired greyhound and the rough-haired Scotch deer-hound, he can have excellent sport.  The greyhounds sometimes do best if they have a slight cross of bulldog in their veins; but this is not necessary.  If once a greyhound can be fairly entered to the sport and acquires confidence, then its wonderful agility, its sinewy strength and speed, and the terrible snap with which its jaws come together, render it a most formidable assailant.  Nothing can possibly exceed the gallantry with which good greyhounds, when their blood is up, fling themselves on a wolf or any other foe.  There does not exist, and there never has existed on the wide earth, a more perfect type of dauntless courage than such a hound.  Not Cushing when he steered his little launch through the black night against the great ram Albemarle, not Custer dashing into the valley of the Rosebud to die with all his men, not Farragut himself lashed in the rigging of the Hartford as she forged past the forts to encounter her iron-clad foe, can stand as a more perfect type of dauntless valor.

Once I had the good fortune to witness a very exciting hunt of this character among the foot-hills of the northern Rockies.  I was staying at the house of a friendly cowman, whom I will call Judge Yancy Stump.  Judge Yancy Stump was a Democrat who, as he phrased it, had fought for his Democracy; that is, he had been in the Confederate Army.  He was at daggers drawn with his nearest neighbor, a cross-grained mountain farmer, who may be known as old man Prindle.  Old man Prindle had been in the Union Army, and his Republicanism was of the blackest and most uncompromising type.  There was one point, however, on which the two came together.  They were exceedingly fond of hunting with hounds.  The Judge had three or four track-hounds, and four of which he called swift-hounds, the latter including one pure-bred greyhound bitch of wonderful speed and temper, a dun-colored yelping animal which was a cross between a greyhound and a fox-hound, and two others that were crosses between a greyhound and a wire-haired Scotch deer-hound.  Old man Prindle’s contribution to the pack consisted of two immense brindled mongrels of great strength and ferocious temper.  They were unlike any dogs I have ever seen in this country.  Their mother herself was a cross between a bull mastiff and a Newfoundland, while the father was descried as being a big dog that belonged to a “Dutch Count.”  The “Dutch Count” was an outcast German noble, who had drifted to the West, and, after failing in the mines and failing in the cattle country, had died in a squalid log shanty while striving to eke out an existence as a hunter among the foot-hills.  His dog, I presume, from the description given me, must have been a boar-hound or Ulm dog.