The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [380]
The wolf hunt, led by Abernathy, began in earnest on Monday, April 10. The sun was now hot—a fireball low to the ground, causing all the men to change shirts three or four times during the course of the afternoon. The wind was seldom stiff. All the soldiers from Fort Sill and the Texas Rangers assigned to protect the president were surprised that Roosevelt could ride at such breakneck speeds up hills and down gullies. They hadn’t expected such equestrian skill from a man in his forties. By high noon the Roosevelt party had caught three wolves. After a lunch of cooked calf, the president finally asked Abernathy to show off his wolf catching. The appointed hour had arrived for Catch ’Em Alive Jack to put up or shut up.
To Roosevelt, watching Abernathy ride a horse was exhilarating: he was an athlete in top form, and there wasn’t the faintest hesitation about him. Roosevelt had never before seen such an able rider, even in the Dakotas. Riding beside Abernathy invariably meant falling behind, pulling up the reins breathless. But Roosevelt did pretty well at keeping up. In the East, everybody was obsessed with money and power. Abernathy, although not opposed to either of these, nevertheless seemed organically a part of nature. He had a homegrown quality that Roosevelt associated with authenticity.
Dispatches from Oklahoma about President Roosevelt’s grand hunting tour with forty dogs were so colorful that readers might be forgiven for questioning their veracity. Readers were exhilarated. Realizing he had a huge audience for his antics, Roosevelt banged the kettledrum so loudly for Oklahoma’s statehood that his congressional enemies said he was pretending to have been born on a carpet of grassland. Roosevelt, it seemed, was acting like an Oklahoman high-plains drifter who understood the bioregional history of the territory from dinosaur fossils to modern dust storms. For its residents—who had an inferiority complex with regard to Kansas and Texas—this presidential gesture was greatly appreciated. When the New York Times ran a front-page headline, “President in Foot Races: Also Chases a Wolf Ten Miles and Is In at the Death,”49 Oklahomans welcomed the national publicity. Roosevelt’s animated hunt was far better than grim stories of blasphemy, land steals, and droughts.
What the Times didn’t tell its readers was that these prairie wolves (unlike the timber wolves of Minnesota) were quite small. Still, they were ferocious when attacking Oklahoman cattle or deer, they had long teeth, their bite was feared (though erroneously) to be poisonous, and a wolf bite did cause throbbing pain, suppuration, and high fever. On the other hand, these wolves were very scared of humans and would slink off and disappear into the brush when humans came into sight. The Kiowa thought these wolves were a trickster spirit because of the way they appeared and then disappeared, like a mirage. Too cunning to be trapped, gray wolves could, however, easily be chased down by fast dogs and fast horses; this is where Abernathy’s skill came in.
Secretly, Roosevelt admired coyotes because they were an enemy of the sheep industry. The cowboy in him just couldn’t stand sheep. George Bird Grinnell used to say that wolf-coyotes were the smartest animals of all, the only ones who could creep up close to men and not be detected.50 Whenever camps were abandoned, prairie wolves would soon scavenge around the dying fires and devour the refuse. They wouldn’t, however, eat meat if it stank (as a human carcass