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does) for more than twenty-four hours. The Comanche, who also admired coyotes, often called them “barking wolves” because their evening howls resembled those of dogs. But to Oklahoman cowboys, coyotes were four-legged vultures, varmints to be eradicated. No matter what dire measures ranchers took, however, the adaptable coyotes thickly populated the prairie. Often, ranchers in Oklahoma hung dead coyotes on fences, a grotesque warning to the others to leave the livestock alone. “After nightfall they are noisy,” Roosevelt wrote, “and their melancholy wailing and yelling are familiar sounds to all who pass over the plains.”51

Another reason cowboys in Oklahoma loathed wolf-coyotes was that some were infected with rabies and might therefore lunge at humans. The disease around Fort Sill was more feared than dysentery. The phrase “mad coyote,” in fact, was common around Fort Sill. A local told Roosevelt that one night when he slept under the stars a rabid coyote had attacked him. Roosevelt soon learned that this disease was more feared in Oklahoma than in any other place in America. Poisoned bait was set out from Beaver to Greer counties by gentle-faced farmers who felt forced to be exterminators. Strychnine was sprinkled onto rabbit and deer carcasses throughout the prairie; one taste, and the coyotes died instantly.52

The Biological Survey’s Animal Damage Control Unit assisted with the poisoning, handing out burlap bags of strychnine (a skull and bones was printed on each bag). But it still didn’t work on the coyotes, though it did kill border collies and other types of work dogs. So, just as some dirt farmers reject modern chemicals in favor of scarecrows, many Oklahomans continued festooning fences with coyotes.

Roosevelt enjoyed chasing down the wolves with Abernathy and the boys at his side. With the game dogs taking the lead, the Roosevelt party rode behind at breakneck speed over low crested hills and river bottoms, across shallow washouts and the treeless prairie. As a general rule, if the greyhounds didn’t corner or tackle a wolf after two or three miles, it would escape. Abernathy had all this down to a science. He never even seemed to perspire. Prairie dog holes were the primary obstacle to his “catch ’em alive” trade. Fortunately, the best horses in the region had acquired a sense for avoiding them. On a beautiful roan cutting horse, Roosevelt raced hard around the Big Pasture–Wichita Forest Reserve, never more than a quarter of a mile behind the greyhounds and some staghounds. For all of their self-assurance, neither Burnett nor Waggoner could keep up with Abernathy on his fast white horse Sam Bass. As a rider, Abernathy had amazing dexterity. Because Roosevelt was so impressed by Abernathy, the ranchmen’s envy increased by the hour. They began denigrating Abernathy as a professional attention-hog. Burnett, in particular, wanted to bond with the president; instead, Abernathy had stolen the show. In Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, Roosevelt wrote a virtual dissertation on Abernathy’s wolf-coursing techniques but gave barely a word to ranchmen, Lyon, or even General Young. Instead of raising his glass of grape juice (his chosen beverage) to the ranchers, he toasted Jack Abernathy, Sam Bass, and a greyhound “blue bitch” with the speed of a cheetah.53

“[Abernathy] held the reins of the horse with one hand and thrust the other, with a rapidity and precision even greater than the rapidity of the wolf’s snap, into the wolf’s mouth, jamming his hand down crosswise between the jaws, seizing the lower jaw and bending it down so that the wolf could not bite him,” Roosevelt later recounted, rather breathlessly. “He had a stout glove on his hand, but this would have been of no avail whatever had he not seized the animal just as he did; that is, behind the canines, while his hand pressed the lips against the teeth; with his knees he kept the wolf from using its forepaws to break the hold, until it gave up struggling. When he thus leaped on and captured this coyote it was entirely free, the dog having let go of it;