The Southern California lynx, Lynx rufus, is a handsome spotted animal, weighing sometimes fifty pounds; there are two distinct forms here recognised by hunters. I have seen a large lynx, a tall, long-legged, scrawny creature, that could run like a deer and was treed with difficulty. It had tassels to its ears, and the fur on its cheeks was very long or pronounced, while another has more the appearance of a large, overgrown domestic cat, yet with tassels and beard.
The red lynx, Lynx rufus , is found across the continent to California and into Texas. It has short reddish hair, while the spotted lynx, a larger form, has a striking spotted coat, and ranges all through Southern California and down into Mexico. This lynx is a powerful and savage animal. I have seen one for a few moments fight off a pack of hounds, lacerating them badly; and when I saw one coming from a tree in my direction I always gave it the right of way. They are very uncertain game; no rule can be applied to them. Some tree repeatedly, and I have worked nearly half a day on a lynx in an oak grove, the animal repeatedly ascending trees and refusing to run. Again in the same Cañada Valley I have seen a large lynx leap from an oak and deliberately take to the open in a long run of marvellous speed.
Several times, in wading down the stream, looking through some leafy covert, I came upon a deer, and sometimes in the fall, along the unfrequented slopes, one would be seen in the blue haze of early morning. During the hot day he has been lying on the summit of the range in some little clearing, or on the north and cool slopes; but in the cool evening or morning he is abroad, pushing through the chaparral, showering himself with crystal drops, sniffing at the perfumed panicles of the wild lilac, and nipping the green tips of the Adenostoma.
Down he comes, crossing the divide, looking out into the valley filled with silvery fog, through which the tops of hills emerge like islands. He brushes aside the trumpets of the mountain mimulus, starts at the murmur of the deep-toned pines, stands and listens until the mimic echo of the sea dies away, then pushes out into the stream and takes the trail along whose sides grow the viands of his choice. He nibbles at the wild honey-suckle as it falls over the scrub oak, stops at the tall arrow grasses, thrusts aside the wild sunflowers, and leaps from the rocky pass into the open where the arroyo ends. He may wander down the stream, or perhaps climb up the sides and stroll out on to the west mesa, hiding in the little washes where the wild rose fills the air with perfume, feeding here and there as his fancy dictates.
At such times I have seen him, when the eastern sky was ablush with vivid tints, the snow-caps of San Antonio suffused with the golden light of the coming day. You look twice and again, so well does he match the chaparral, so harmonious the tint; indeed no one would suspect that this placid-faced, large-eyed creature standing like a statue, big in the haze, was a grape-eater, that he had pillaged the ranch below Las Cacitas the night before, and the one before that had played havoc in a Cañada ranch. But it is the same, and you have laid in the chaparral waiting for him night after night, and now he is gone, and off somewhere with lowered head he creeps through the bush and makes good his escape.
All the ranges of the southern Sierras abound in the black-tailed deer; an attractive creature, at the present time difficult to shoot if fair play is given. Indeed, I can conceive no more difficult sport than to hunt the deer in the Sierra Madre without dogs. The extraordinary character of the mountains, the steepness and depth of the caons soon tire out the hunter. I had hunted deer in the Adirondacks, in Virginia and Florida, following them over the country, and my first effort along this line in Southern California demonstrated that for me at least, where deer were not very common, the sport merged into work of the most arduous nature, and after that I hunted deer with hounds, skirting the slopes of mountains, using the dogs to start them in the lower cañons but not to run them down.
The game was hardly half as large as the ordinary fox of the East, and known as the coast fox; found all along the Californian shores and on all the islands ranging from Costa Rica to the north-west, varying in appearance in seasons and in localities. The tail is about the length of the body in the average animal. I have seen a specimen in the mountains of Santa Catalina where it was a splendid ornament. The tail has a black stripe above, and the fur of the body is dark, even almost black above and reddish below, with variations in colour. The sides of the muzzle and the chin are black, which gives the fox the appearance of a raccoon and withal a very pleasant face. It has a large head, quite as large in some instances as that of the gray fox, but in habit the California fox is entirely different. The gray and the red fox are runners, while Reynard of California rarely makes a very long run, and always takes to trees when hard pressed, leaping into them when it can, "shinning" up when it cannot. I have watched these foxes at night by the light of the moon, when they thought they were chased by a coyote. They went up the straight trunk of an orange tree by this process, "hitching along," embracing the tree like a cat, and once on a limb reaching the others and the top of the tree in a marvellously short space of time.
I once kept two foxes as pets. A paisano brought them to me and said that they were tame, but I learned later that one bit him eight or ten times on the way down from the mountain. I fastened them to a tree as I would dogs, and invariably found them in the tree-top in the morning. In the arroyo the fox lives in the thick masses of vine during the day, makes his den in some hole in a cliff, coming out mainly at night, though I have often met them in the daytime in the chaparral that covers the lower hills. Any caon that comes down from the Sierras is the home of this little red and gray fox. You may find him at Santa Barbara, in the beautiful glens and defiles of the Santa Ynez, or along and around Bear Mountain, back of Santa Paula. He looks down upon the mountains from the Strawberry Valley, around Idlewild, and the great slopes of San Antonio and the clefts of Mount Wilson are his home; or you may find him in the Santiago mountains, where he forms the game par excellence for the Santiago Hunt Club, and doubtless helps himself to the chickens of the master of the hounds when the pack is away on a hunt; indeed you may find this little fox on San Nicolas Island, and on San Clemente, where he is smaller than ever. Everywhere he preys upon quail, or small birds, varying this diet with tuna, wild grape, or chilocothe.
They are particularly common at Santa Catalina. On the summit of this island is a range of mountains, named for Cabrillo, the discoverer of the island, which have several isolated peaks, twenty-two hundred feet in height, surrounded by a maze of caons. In between these, running directly across the island, is a long and well-wooded caon, in its lower range called Middle Ranch, the Cabrillo range forming the south wall of green. In camp here one is never away from the melodious note of the quail, while the foxes make a runway down every caon and along the tops of the range where great reaches of low chaparral sweep away to the sea. At San Clemente they stole from my camp and came around every night.
Fox-hunting is indulged in all over California, but it is a failure in the open. The fox will make a long run in the chaparral, but in the open country he will run for the trees in sight and leap up their sides with great abandon. I remember well a "fox hunt" on the mesa in my early days in California. A fox having been located in a little woodland on a wide mesa that afforded a splendid running country, a hunt was organised and in due time the fox started. I was the Master of Fox-Hounds that day, as well as the President of the Club, and the hunt was looking to me to carry out the plan of an old-fashioned Virginia fox hunt. The hounds took the trail, and the fox responded. He dashed across the mesa, stood a second surveying the landscape, then selecting the only tree in sight--an oak--he ran for it, and the hunt and pack in full cry followed--for perhaps three hundred yards; then Reynard reached the tree, gaily bounded into it, and was placidly sitting out of the dogs' reach washing his face when the hunt rounded up.
The coyote, as game, still holds its own in Southern California and the south-west in general. It is supposed to be a menace to the rancher, hence there is an excuse for the quest aside from sport; but accepting the latter as legitimate I can conceive of no pastime more exhilarating than this. An essential, at least to my mind, to true sport for large game is a sharing of chances with it. To go out with a rifle and shoot the coyote would be to descend to the level of the pot-hunter, but to hunt one of the swiftest of wild animals in the open, follow it on horseback, taking the country as it comes, is fair and honest sport to be commended; a sport in which the rider takes greater chances than the game which often escapes and leaves a worn-out hunt and pack to file home, while he, Don Coyote, watches from some elevated point with grim satisfaction, as some one in that cavalcade keeps turkeys, or chickens, and turn about is fair play.
I can frequently find the tracks of coyotes in the hills within rifle-shot of my house in a city of twenty thousand inhabitants; hear their insane laughing, yelping cry across the arroyo, and one coyote has so penetrating, so ventriloquistic a laugh that innocent people have been terrified, believing they were menaced by a pack of wolves; but investigation would have shown that all the noise came from one small, undersized coyote which sat on a rock baying after his fashion at the moon. The coyote is a wild dog that breeds with domestic dogs, and the big-eared issue is often seen in Mexican camps in the outlying districts. Hounds will often refuse to attack a female coyote. I once chased one several miles and after a long run worked my hounds to within twenty feet of the game and then called on them to go in. They closed in, and my best hound ran alongside the coyote--which snapped at him--refusing to attack. This was entente cordiale with a vengeance. I whipped the dogs aside and finally ran the animal down to discover the cause: the coyote was a female. There was but one thing to do; I could not be outdone in courtesy by my dog, so Donna Coyote and I parted company.
Southern California, or the best part of it, consists of small valleys and foothill mesas, intersected everywhere or surrounded by hills and mountains, down the sides of which lead washes and runways from a foot to twenty feet deep. The coyote lives in the foothills and on the slopes. Here he has a den weathered out perhaps by the wind; here he lives during the day, looking down into the rich valleys and the haunts of men. As night comes on, and the shadows deepen and take on purple hues, when the heavy sea fog comes in along the Santa Monica range, or up the bed of the Santa Ana, he steals down the caon and follows the shining sands out into the valley, where he takes up the scent of hares, and with his mate or mates runs them down; even a melon patch is game for him. He stands not on the order of going, but slinks about like a ghost; now sending out peals of demoniac yelping laughter from an orange grove, then heard half a mile away, setting the dogs of towns and villages barking and the cocks to crowing. In the morning I have visited the runs, the little and big washes that were smooth the night before, and in the round dog-like footprints have read the story of the night, the coming and going of not only coyotes, but wildcats and raccoons. The coyotes come out into the open at night, in cultivated places, returning at or before sunrise, and in hunting them it is well to begin at some foothill country, line up the hunt, and sweep out into the valley where some belated foraging coyote may be met trotting up the white sandy wash toward home....
The coyote has a wide geographical range, from Costa Rica to Athabasca, and from the central Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast, not being found on the islands.
In the cañon I have in mind I knew several men who preferred its solitudes. One day one came up to our camp, which was on a spur of the range, and said that a mountain lion had killed his burro and eaten part of it during the night, and he was afraid that it would return. A trip to the cañon camp, a rifle-shot away, showed the evidence of guilt: a small burro had been stricken down and torn and lacerated. Several hunters agreed to stay at the camp and see if the lion returned, but it did not, though its track was seen in various places, up and down the stream, testifying to its size. Not long after I was notified that a lion had been seen near the old Mission of San Gabriel, and one morning I joined the hounds in the shadow of the old pile and followed them over ten or fifteen miles of territory.
Some Mexicans reported that they had seen the lion creeping along at dusk. The next morning its tracks were found and the hounds readily picked them up near the old Mission tuna hedge, a mile to the east, but it was a forlorn hope. The country here was a mesa, without trees, overlooking a large vineyard some five feet lower, and every object could b seen for miles. The dogs took the trail and followed it down across country in the direction of Puente, where they lost it in the lowlands; and it was believed that the lion had made its way into the Puente Hills, crossing the entire San Gabriel Valley diagonally, so reaching the wild country about Mount Santiago.
In many of the mountain towns or those near the caons, stories are current relating to the mountain lion, but the animal is rarely seen. One was killed near the Raymond Hotel in 1898, and another was seen by a hunter on the old Mount Wilson trail, the animal slinking off into the chaparral. Doubtless a good pack of hounds taken up into the mountains near Barley Flats, or at the extreme head of the San Gabriel, would result in the finding of lions, but there are so few seen or heard of that hunting is rarely attempted. In the less frequented parts of the country, in the region back of the Santa Ynez, and between San Jacinto and the Mexican line, the deep caons doubtless afford a home for many lions that are only occasionally heard of or seen.
The mountain lion is an interesting cat on account of its wide geographical range. My guide, years ago, entertained me with stories of the panthers lie had seen in the Adirondacks, and I heard of the animal in Vermont hills near Lincoln as the catamount. In Florida the camp of a party of acquaintances was robbed by a cougar that took a pig, and though they watched all night the animal leaped into the pen and secured another pig, making off with the game amid a fusillade from the guns of a number of frightened negro servants. This cougar swam across a narrow channel to reach the key, or island. In South America, from Patagonia to Brazil, they will tell you of the puma and its ravages. I saw it first in the Rockies of Colorado, and the same animal appears on the coast from the far north, where it is known as the cougar, down to Southern California, where it is the mountain lion, and periodically appears, preying upon small animals, but mainly upon the deer, which in all regions appears to be the game of its choice.
In appearance the lion is a tawny cat bearing some resemblance to an Asiatic lioness, but much smaller: a typical cat, big, long of limb, muscular and beautiful. But here praise ends, as rarely will a mountain lion face a man, being by nature a cowardly animal, creeping upon its prey, and often intimidated by a single dog and hunter.
The big cat kills its game by stealing upon it, generally attempting, in the case of deer, to approach from above, hurling itself from an eminence upon the black-tailed or mule deer. In Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Montana doubtless many more deer are killed by mountain lions than by hunters. In some parts of Arizona the mountain lions are so common, so much a menace to stock, that the cattlemen frequently combine and hunt them down with dogs. As a rule, the more difficult an animal is to take, the more eager hunters are to secure it, and I confess to many a ride up deep caons and over narrow trails through the chaparral hoping to meet the lion of the mountain, and what I know of the mountains, their delights and pleasures, is mainly due to these quests for mountain lion and other game. I conceive, then, that the puma, call him what you will, is as good an excuse, perhaps better than any other, to induce the sport-loving reader to enter and know the Sierra Madre. He is there, but there is a more certain and definite game to be had: the impression and memory of mountain life, the personality and individuality of the mountains, that have peculiar charms and beauties of their own.
Along the ridges I followed up the coyote trails to the summits, and looked down into a score of little valleys hoping to see a covey or hear the rich " po-ta-toe " rising from the green depths of the chaparral or see the birds in the open, but all to no purpose. As I wandered home in the cool evening I dropped over the edge of the Arroyo Seco, crossed it, and had climbed the opposite side, hardly a rifle shot from my home, when I walked into a large flock of quail; they were running across the dusty road into a field of dried burr clover, and, once there, stood and looked at me not fifty feet away, while I, returning from my quail hunt, also looked. This is what I saw--a flock of little birds, not quite so large as the bob-white, but each bearing jauntily a plume that fell over its bill to the front, giving the bird a most dbonnaire appearance. In colour they were a mass of blue ash or slate, with striped chestnut hues below, with flashes of sun gold, white, black, and tan. The throat of the male was black, and he had a white "eyebrow" and a collar of white around his black throat, a radiant little creature, a pheasant in its colour scheme, and the incident of our meeting well illustrates the habit of the little bird. I did not fire; one cannot shoot down a neighbour in cold blood, if the laws do permit. Some of these birds nest in an adjacent garden, and I can often hear the melody of their notes in the Arroyo, or the thunder of their wings as they rise from the open and plunge down into the depths of the deep abyss. So, if one must have quail without compunctions of conscience, he goes away from home, out into the country in the unsettled districts where there is sport of the finest quality. When I first came to Southern California, plumed quail could be found everywhere. They lived in all the caons and little valleys of the foothills, and held high revelry in the openings where the gravel of the wash spread out, fan-like, and merged into the low chaparral. Their flute-like notes could be heard at all times-- whit-whit-whit --when you were near, and when far away the loud, screeching clarion challenge of the male--po- t --te, po- t --toe, or ca- c -cow. But the fencing up of the country, the growth of towns, has pushed the little birds out of back yards, and to obtain good sport the outlying country must be tried, where the dainty birds are found in vast numbers, and the vibrant whi-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r often fills the air. No bird is so disconcerting. Recently, at Santa Catalina, in the off season, I was riding along when at a sudden turn my horse faced a covey of quail in the road. Did they rise? Not at all. The hens ran down the road a way, while the cock stood his ground, walking back and forth in a comical fashion, as though saying, "You know it is not the season and I am safe." These birds refused to fly and walked some distance down the road, then into the low bushes, where they watched me with many a note-- whit-whit-whit.
Laguna and vicinity is one of the best quail grounds, and there are scores of localities all down the coast as good. You find the birds, perhaps, in some little valley shut in by hills, whose sides are covered with green Adenostoma and whose edges, perhaps, are broken with cactus patches. The air is clear, with a marvellous carrying capacity, and suddenly there comes woo- wha -ho, woo- wha -ho , and from another point or caon rises o- hi -o, and many variants, possibly with a slightly different inflection. We are in the quail country, there can be no question as to that. They have not discovered you, and louder come the sweet notes, tuck- ca -cue, tuck- -hoe, of the males, who are calling for the mere pleasure of it. Perhaps you are walking down the ridge and now look over; perhaps your gun has caught a sun gleam and tossed it into the next caon, as up from the sage comes whit-whit-whit, the warning of the quail, and then perfect silence; then wook-wook , and from far away, wak- wha -who. You creep carefully over the divide to find them gone; indeed the flock is running off. The speed with which they make their way through the brush is marvellous; and by the time you reach them again they are ready to repeat the operation. After a big covey is met with, they will keep just out of range, and you gradually discover the secret, which is to throw Eastern diplomacy and strategy to the winds, and when a flock is sighted, walk, or even run, into it as fast as possible. The main body will rise ahead, but there are always three or four or more that stay behind and rise within range to afford you an excellent and often futile shot.
....Often the birds fly to the nearest hill, and you see them, with wings set, pitching over a divide and plunging into the chaparral like shots out of a rapid-firing gun. Then comes the whit-whit-whit , and if you were there you would see a few birds in the limbs watching you, while the others were walking upward with incredible speed, reaching the summit, perhaps, and leading the tyro a long and profitless climb.
Before the green has left the lowlands, and when the land is still running riot with flowers, early in April, the quail, or valley partridge, begins to nest, and the period extends far into the summer. The nest is often placed in an obscure place. It may be in your garden, or beneath a sage-brush, and I have found them in the Arroyo Seco, near water, hidden in a mass of vines, the bird darting out and trying every artifice to coax me away. From nine to twenty-three eggs have been found, but the average is from sixteen to seventeen. The young are able to run when a day or two old, and present an attractive sight, running in long lines. In a few days they fly, and later the valleys are filled with great flocks of grown and half-grown birds.
I am free to confess that I have never shot a mountain quail, as I always feel that I never could find a satisfying excuse for destroying so beautiful a creature.
I first saw them on the north slope of a peak about ten miles back of Mount Wilson, in the very heart of the Sierra Madre. I was lying under the thick branches of a wild lilac, resting after a hard climb, when through a leafy arcade, not one hundred feet away, came five or six mountain quail. I had just left a branch of the stream, and all about were brakes, giant ferns, and forests of the more delicate kinds, with here and there the tall stalk of the mountain tiger lily. A tree that had been thrown over in the long ago and covered with lichens lay half buried in the dense underbrush, and down this highway came the jaunty band, stopping every now and then, and uttering a peculiarly musical note that sounded like clo, clo, cl, cl, cl ; then coming on until they reached a point hardly thirty feet from me, when they again stopped and eyed me with idle curiosity, then came ten feet nearer. A more dainty creature with its long plumes it would be difficult to imagine.
A striking feature is the chestnut-hued throat, black banded, surrounded in turn with a pure white band and on the sides pronounced bars of black, chestnut and white.
I did not move, and they came on until within six feet of me, gazing with their gentle brown eyes, looking me over, examining my gun, and evidently deciding that I was some kind of a sportsman, but harmless. As they paused, I uttered a low whistle and they turned, each lifting its head, as though to catch the sound, and then like magic they melted away. If any one has the fancy for the hardest kind of hunting, in the hardest kind of country, I can commend this, as the birds while often seen in the foothills are found principally in the thickest chaparral of the upper ranges, and to follow them requires, at least did when I knew them, the most difficult climbing.
The nest of this quail has been found hardly a mile from my home, four miles from the base of the Sierra Madre; but the nests are not easy to find and are mostly in the heart of the great range where nature has afforded them ample protection.