Ben Lilly of the Mountains

BEN LILLY of the MOUNTAIN

BEN LILLY was born in Alabama in 1856, spent his boyhood in Mississippi, came to maturity in Louisiana. By the time he was fifty years old he had the deserved reputation of being the mightiest hunter of bears and panthers in the South. He had killed hundreds. He lived to hunt. He thought that God had created him to hunt. In order to hunt he forsook a good farm he had inherited, forsook a wife, then, after a divorce, another wife and three children. He was not wild. He just had to be out in wild country with the wild animals, and no wild animal could reduce nature to starker and more elemental existence than he habitually reduced it. In 1906 he came into the Big Thicket of Texas to hunt. The next year he went back to Louisiana to guide Teddy Roosevelt after bears in the canebrakes. In 1908 he entered old Mexico, where for three years he hunted bears and supplied venison and bear grease to mining camps. In 1911, aged fifty-five, he crossed the line into New Mexico and began the career that made him as noted a character and hunter of the West as he already was in the Mississippi Valley. In 1912, with five hounds and five burros,Ben Lilly moved north to Clifton (in eastern Arizona) and surrounding territory. He killed six bears and four lions in one week, and had the idea of making good money by collecting bounties. Ranchers, however, appeared to him unaware of how much damage predatory animals were doing their stock; men on horseback did not climb into the rough places penetrated by "pioneer cattle," by killers of these cattle, and by Ben Lilly on the trails of the killers. The United States Biological Survey had not yet undertaken a thorough "control" of wild life principally by exterminating predatory elements. The national Forest Service was doing a limited amount of this work, however, and Ben Lilly got a job in the Apache National Forest as guard-trapper at $75 a month. Mostly, he hunted and trapped. The job was seasonal only, and he did not stay with it very long. Stockmen organized to pay him bounties on the stock-killers he exterminated. Although there was, and is, a law protecting bears as game animals, to him all bears looked like proven stock-killers. A bear might start out eating beef from the kill of another bear or a lion, he said, but after that First taste he became like a man who has once eaten oysters. After the first bait, he hunts for the choice food. Why wait till a bear has killed before killing him? Although he conformed somewhat to protective laws and regulations, Ben Lilly was never really convinced. He enjoyed the mental exercise of arguing with other men on such subjects, but he never argued with God and God, he was convinced, had created him to kill the killers. For six or eight years he hunted back and forth across the Arizona-New Mexico line, up and down the San Francisco and Blue Rivers, extending his range into more distant mountains as he cleaned out the lions and bears. He made trips back into Mexico. During these years he averaged perhaps fifty lions and bears a year, collecting sometimes as much as fifty dollars a scalp, often less. He found the Mormon ranchers hard to collect from. Some ranchers, anxious to clear their ranges, supplemented organization bounties with private bonuses. In 1916 he began interspersing broken spells of work for the Biological Survey with bounty hunting. The Survey paid him $100a month, a salary above that paid to regular trappers. He worked off and on for the Survey for four years, but always preferred to be his own boss. He thought he could make more money independently, and he had become proud of his financial success. He did not approve of the Survey's strict prohibition against killing deer out of season, though he obeyed it -except for times like that when a game warden arrested him and found all the ranchers agreeing with Ben Lilly that one lion he had killed would destroy more deer in a year than hunter and dogs would eat up while tracking down many lions.He liked the Biological Survey men that he met in the field, but had doubts about some of them in Washington. One time he sent iu a report in which he noted only that he had spent this day and that day and another day "cold trailing." The return word from Wash ington was, "Quit cold-trailing and hunt hot trails." Ed Steele saw Mr. Lilly just after he got the letter. He says, "I guess I know as much about hunting lion as they do in Washington." He resigned right there. The Survey people were not satisfied, either, with his discrimination as respects bears.By 1918 he was hunting far to the east in the Black Range overlooking the Rio Grande. He hunted in the great Sangre del Cristo range above Santa Fe and above Taos clear into Colorado. "The last time I saw Ben Lilly," an old trapper named Pete Gimson told me, "we met in Taos Pass. It was late fall. He had three dogs and was walking behind a burro. After congratulating me on a noted lobo I had trapped, he said, 'I'm headed for the Rio Grande, and I'll hunt every step of the way.'"

On April 3, 1913, in the White Mountains of Arizona, he made what he considered the narrowest escape of his life. The narrative is in his own words.

"I struck this grizzly on Blue River and fol-lowed him for three days in snow from knee-deep to waist-deep. In places the snow had frozen and glazed over so that the bear did not make a visible track. During the three days I did not have one mouthful to eat. I was wearing over my underclothes only a pair of blue cotton pants, a blue shirt and a light cotton sweater. I kept from freezing at night by building fires and sitting up by them.

deep to waist-deep. In places the snow had frozen and glazed over so that the bear did not make a visible track. During the three days I did not have one mouthful to eat. I was wearing over my underclothes only a pair of blue cotton pants, a blue shirt and a light cotton sweater. I kept from freezing at night by building fires and sitting up by them.

"Three times at very long ranges I shot this bear in the same hip while he was running from me. I had a slow-track dog tied to my waist. Once we came to a cave the bear had denned in the winter preceding. It was six or eight feet wide and about sixteen feet back. The mouth of the cave showed that during the winter he had dragged out earth during six stages of the snow. This is just one instance of evidence that hibernating bears come out for short whiles during the winter. They will drink water while out but will not take a mouthful of food. Another grizzly I trailed in the Escalder (Escudilla) Mountains in Arizona had made twelve trips in and out of his cave during his lay-up.

"The wounded grizzly had left lots of fresh blood at his old den, but I knew it was not from any vital part. About three hundred yards east of the den I saw blood again, where the grizzly had scratched snow out of one of his summer beds and laid down. The trail worked on into thick spruce undergrowth. Then I heard a kind of squeak among dead pine saplings. I looked to one side, getting ready to fire. Then right in front of my body, fifteen feet away, the bear popped out, charging me. My first shot hit him center in the breast; that checked him. My second shot was under the eye, about three feet away. He fell against my side. I was bogged in snow waist deep. I couldn't see the bear's head. He seemed to be drawing deep breaths. I fired another shot for his heart. I was wearing a knife eighteen inches long. I drove it for the heart. That finished him. It had been a test of endurance as well as a narrow escape.

"I took careful measurements of this bear, according to government standards. He measured nine feet from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail; eight feet around the body. He stood five feet, eight inches high. His hind foot was twelve inches long and seven inches wide across the pad. On the top side, his claws were five inches long and at the base each of them was as wide as a man's finger. His ankles, both front and rear, measured fourteen inches around. His skull was eighteen inches long. There wasn't any way of weighing him. He was the largest bear and made the largest track of any I know of having been killed in the Rocky Mountain district. I sent the skull and the hide to Washington. The hide still [1928] belongs to me. I want one thousand dollars for it.

"After this bear died, I felt weak. My dogs and I both needed water. There was some under ice not far away, and we started to it. On the way we struck a lion track very fresh. I felt like a new man and took out in a run. The lion was soon treed and killed. We got water and went back to the grizzly bear. After I skinned him, the dogs and I had a good meal -the first in three days. I wrapped up in the skin by the carcass and slept as warm as if I were in a stove.

"I have read J. C. Adams experiences with grizzlies (The Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California, by Theodore H. Hittell). When the subject of grizzlies' fighting comes up, I like to be able to call attention to what another man has seen. I have read Wright's book on grizzlies [The Grizzly Bear, by Wil-liam H. Wright, generally regarded as the supreme work on the subject]. He likes to leave the impression that grizzlies are not fighters. I find a wounded grizzly of mature age more than willing to keep up his or her end of the mix-up. They are not cowards when it comes to defending themselves. They fight fast and have nothing but fighting in view. Man is their choice opponent. They make for his skull. Grizzlies under two years old fight only for liberty. Up to six years old they fight only as a matter of protection. When they get older, they fight to destroy an enemy they can't run away. I mean when they are wounded or harried."

liam H. Wright, generally regarded as the supreme work on the subject]. He likes to leave the impression that grizzlies are not fighters. I find a wounded grizzly of mature age more than willing to keep up his or her end of the mix-up. They are not cowards when it comes to defending themselves. They fight fast and have nothing but fighting in view. Man is their choice opponent. They make for his skull. Grizzlies under two years old fight only for liberty. Up to six years old they fight only as a matter of protection. When they get older, they fight to destroy an enemy they can't run away. I mean when they are wounded or harried."

His last important hunting was in the big National Forest country all mountainousnorth and east of Silver City. For about fifteen years following his move to Arizona in 1912. Ben Lilly lived the richest and most satisfying period of his life. In these times he never "came down" and holed up for the winter. He was out when the bears were inand lions stay out the year round. After he had located a hunting range, he would establish a series of camps in natural shelters handy to water. The sign of these camps was wood he had dragged up. An empty tin can, some jerked lion meat, and bag of meal were likely to comprise their stock of provisions. The dogs required a far larger volume of food than he did. Sometimes he would hire a man to pack supplies out by mule; more often he carried them on his own back, sometimes on a burro.

One of the ranches he hunted on soon after locating in Arizona was the N O Bar, owned by Will Laney. Will Laney told me that Mr. Lilly would wear out a pair of shoe soles in two weeks. He generally resoled his own shoes, but before long the uppers would be snagged and worn away. Anybody he saw going to town could be sure of a commission to bring him a pair or two of hobnails. He would double-sole them, often plate the heels with burro shoes. After automobiles became common, he used cast-off tires for soling. Once after he had nailed two extra pairs of heavy soles on his shoes and reinforced the heels, Mrs. H. B. Birmingham weighed them, and they weighed a little less than twelve pounds. Yet wearing such shoes and carrying gun, dog chains and pack of 30 to 50 pounds, he could go up a mountain faster than a good horse and keep going all day. When he was around the Laney ranch, he ate and slept inside like anybody else, conforming with natural courtesy. Gradually, however, houses became almost impossible to him, and he got the idea of paying for every meal he ate at another person's expense, whether in camp or at a house. Fifty cents was the price he insisted on paying in a country where nobody else ever thought of paying or collecting for a meal. He never spent anything for himself beyond simple food and rough clothes. He deposited money in various banks, seldom wrote a check on regular blanks. A strip of aspen bark was better. Sometimes he sent a check home.

His equipment, typical of these Arizona-New Mexico years, consisted of a blowing horn, often used as a drinking cup at spring water; sometimes an old gramophone horn to aid his good ear in hearing the dogs bark; some light dog chains; the big Lilly knife for sticking and a smaller skinning knife, both of which he had made; matches in waterproof tin; a sack of meal and a little sack of sugar; maybe some candy, too, for "the chillun" at a ranch that the signs might or might not point to; sometimes rice; salt, though it could be dispensed with; a frying pan; a tin bucket or can for boiling meat and meal in, though on any range he had worked over he had old lard buckets put away in scattered shelters; a stout axe with a full length handle; extra cartridges in a tobacco sack, for he never wore a cartridge belt and did not load himself with much ammunition; a .30-.30 rifle for lions and game meat; a .33 caliber rifle if the quest was bear; in cold weather, sometimes a blanket and a piece of ducking. He never carried or used field glasses. Expecting to make only a short round or to go to a place where supplies were stored, he might leave camp with almost no supplies and strike a hard-to-work trail that would lead him farther and farther away and eventually to another trail that led still farther away. From one of these hunts he and his dogs would come in utterly spent. Then they would gorge and sleep and lie around until rested.

Ben Lilly preferred boiling his food to frying it. He always tried to get freshly ground meal. His choice of frying fat was lion grease. Sometimes he cooked ash cakes. At his long established camp at GOS headquarters, he would boil garden squash in season, make a custard of eggs and milk. He was a great milk drinker when milk was available. Occasionally he brewed imported Oriental tea; more often his tea was from piñon leaves or from some other native plant.

He had various ways of sleeping more or less warm. One way was to gather pine needles into a sheltered place and to huddle down in them with his dogs. Another was to fire two parallel logs and lie between them; still another, to set a big log afire and sleep on it until it got too hot. "But a log is an awful hard bed, Mr. Lilly," one man said to him. "No harder'n me," was his reply. That stout axe was to cut wood with. "The Lilly fire," as he called it, was small, Indian style. Built in front of the right kind of rock shelter -and he knew all the laws of heating-it would, even in zero weather, warm the rocks and, by reflection, the man. One very cold night he was in camp with James K. Blair. Blair had a big bed-roll and suggested that Lilly share it. "Lots of covering," Lilly observed. "Yes, I believe in a warm bed." "All right, but I believe I'll take off one pair of pants and one shirt," Lilly said, and took them off. When warm weather came, he shed outer clothes wherever he happened to be. Like the lard buckets, old clothes and shoes in numerous caves of the mountains still tell that Ben Lilly passed that way. He simply would not be impeded by baggage. In his camp headquarters he kept the Bible and a green-painted bread-box for holding his papers. A good part of the Bible was in his head, and he could quote it like the Levites themselves. Generally he carried a pencil tablet and pencil for diary entries.

His rule for walking was: "Take it slow and steady. Put all your foot down, like a bear. Don't walk on your toes."

Most hunters belonging to the mountains prospect on the side. Nat Straw was always looking for the Lost Adams Diggings, Bear Moore for the silver ledge under a waterfall. It is the nature of a mountain man to hope to make a strike. He watches for this and that sign of mineral. The only sign Ben Lilly ever looked for was the sign of the hunted, and he never quit looking for that.

John D. Gutherie of the Forest Service, who gave Ben Lilly his first government job, re-members him as being, "like most prospectors, sheep herders and other men who live alone, most talkative upon meeting another person. A rancher on Blue River named Ulace Casto was guard at the same time Lilly was. One day I asked Ulace if he knew where Lilly was trapping, had seen him, or talked with him. Ulace spoke very slowly and had a drawling speech. 'Yes,' he replied, 'I seen him over on Bear Wallow last week. I didn't exactly talk to him, but I listened at him."

That talkativeness would peter out after the dammed-up reserve from months of solitude had been drained off. Fred Winn, who camped with him many times, says that after talking a blue streak for a while at a fresh encounter, he might lapse into silence and not say a word for hours.

If he took a dislike to a man, or had an instinctive dislike for him at first sight, he would close up like a clam. A cold and indifferent "Yas suh, yas suh," would be all the unliked man's talk drew out of him. He did not mind drawing the long bow for the benefit of a proper audience. His spirits rose at the prospect of consorting with friends, but it is to be doubted if he ever hungered for human association poignantly enough to turn aside from a hunting trail to seek it. His talking was mostly with men who came into his hunting range and with ranch people scattered over it.

After his passion for sleeping in the open reached its zenith, he would not even forsake the outdoors for a night in a cabin with a friend. "One November," Fred Winn recalls, "I got snowed up on a deer hunt and holed up, alone, in an abandoned cabin. About dark Ben Lilly and his dogs came along. He hadn't seen anybody in a long time. I was sure glad to see him, but, in spite of the violent snow storm, he persisted in sleeping outside with one blanket and his old piece of canvas." Sleeping indoors would be sure to give him pneumonia, he said. As the old cowboy song goes, "You'll never catch consumption with sleeping on the ground." "There are life-giving forces in the earth," he asserted.

Consistency could not always be counted on in his conduct. In 1920 he went to visit his brother Joe and Mrs. Lilly at Mineral Wells, Texas, where Joe was "taking the waters." Out of consideration of Brother Ben's fanatic zeal for sleeping in open air, they engaged a hotel room with windows on three sides. Before he went to bed in the room, he fastened down every window and cut off all circulation of air. Victor Culbertson, who was a character himself and kept Ben Lilly on the GOS Ranch not only to hunt predatory animals but to add to the Culbertson picturesqueness, used to say that one could never count on what the old hunter would come out with in the way of talk.

Curiosity about what was going on in the world of men never piqued him. He might read a magazine that somebody brought him. Again, he might not. He never requested a newspaper; the news that the first southwardflying V of sandhill cranes brought in the fall was far more interesting to him than any dispatch from Washington or Detroit. He preserved and read many times the account that Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the Louisiana hunt for which he was guide. In the course of years, reading men introduced him to a few books on bears and other wild animals. Essentially, he was a man of one book. "Once he ventured the remark to me that he had 'little book larning,' in just those words," says Fred Winn. "Yet he frequently talked like a man of education; he was not given to picturesque expressions of the soil."

When he came into Reserve, Clifton, Alma, Magdalena, Silver City, Taos or another of the far-apart towns of New Mexico and Arizona, he came with horn, hounds, rifle and axe. Standing, wondering and pleased in the street, dressed like old Bill Williams, who thought that when he died he would transmigrate into the body of a bull elk, and looking out of his beard like God-consulting Moses, he was an object of curiosity to the populace. The streak of showmanship imbedded in his nature was gratified. He never stayed long enough in any town to wear out the novelty for himself or others. If he belonged to any one type of American characters, that type was the Mountain Man as represented by such salty individuals as Bill Williams, Jim Bridger and Uncle Dick Wootton-all gone a long, long generation before a single sunrise in the mountains quickened Ben Lilly's breath.

He captured young lions and raised themnot because he was lonesome for pets, like Peter Ellis Bean in the dungeon feeding flies to a lizard and making a companion of it, but because he wanted to observe the habits of lions. One day he observed a pet grown lion use his hind feet to rake up those little bars of twigs and leaves popularly called "lion markers" and supposed to be made with the front feet. Here was a fact to delight him. He fed deer meat to these pet lions the year round. He believed in the rights of private property,

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

but inclined to regard the gifts of nature as common property.

In 1917, Bela Birmingham, now of Horse Springs, New Mexico, was ranching north of Reserve, near the Arizona line. Mountain lions were very numerous and destructive of live stock in that region. The superintendent of the Biological Survey had promised Birmingham that Ben Lilly would be over soon.

"Towards the first of December," Mr. Birmingham says, "my brother-in-law, Grover Mayberry, and I had made a camp on the head of Largo Canyon. We were gathering up our saddle horses to move them out of that high country for the winter. Just after we rode into camp late one Saturday evening, hobbled our horses and were preparing to cook dinner and supper combined, we heard hounds trailing something up Largo Canyon. In about half an hour the dogs crossed the canyon not more than forty yards from camp and started back down it on the other side.

"We felt certain that the dogs must be Ben Lilly's and that they were after a lion. The trail sounded so hot that we expected to hear them barking 'treed' any minute. We grabbed our bridles, saddled up as fast as we could, put rifles in scabbards and were mounting, when a man walked into view about seventy-five yards away. He was talking a blue streak. Neither of us had ever seen Mister Ben Lilly, but we had heard enough about him to know that the stranger could be nobody else. He was saying something about not wanting to disappoint us. Then as he got a little nearer, he said that as it was Saturday and already past five o'clock, he was going to call his dogs in and wait till early Monday morning to take up the lion trail. 'I never hunt on Sundays,' he said in his mild, Christianlike voice. He began blowing his horn and calling to his dogs. There were six of them, and very soon they were obediently at his feet. He had a spotted bitch tied fast to his waist. He said that he was hard of hearing and that he kept the bitch with him to do the listening and lead him after the other dogs.

"While Mayberry and I unsaddled and turned our horses loose again, I remarked to him in a low voice that this hunter Lilly might be all he was cracked up to be but that I did not think a hell of a lot of a man who would pull off a hot lion trail on Saturday afternoon to wait till Monday morning to take it up again. Throwing the hot Dutch ovens off the fire, we resumed our cooking. Mr. Lilly was chaining his dogs, each one separately, to a sapling and all the time talking. Those dog chains, aside from his gun, seemed to be the chief part of his luggage.

"We had plenty of beef, so we gave Mr. Lilly a front quarter to feed his dogs. He said that neither they nor he had eaten anything for the last forty-eight hours. He had left Reserve with the intention of coming straight to my ranch but had gotten off after lions and killed five on the way. Having fed the dogs, he said that if we didn't mind he would nibble on some sourdough biscuits left from breakfast. Nibbling, I later learned, was one of his strong points. One time at the Lou Laney ranch up at Luna, he nibbled up a big loaf of lightbread Mrs. Laney had given him, while he stood and talked.

"By the time we had fried a big steak in a sixteen-inch Dutch oven, baked the bread, made gravy out of flour and water, stewed some dried peaches and boiled a big pot of coffee, he had nibbled away six or seven of those big cold biscuits. Then he fell in with us in earnest. Seeing how things were going, I put on another big steak. Then after I finished I cooked a third one, still bigger. The facts about Lilly's being able to eat when entirely empty had not been overstated. As he admitted, he 'ate for long range.' ished I cooked a third one, still bigger. The facts about Lilly's being able to eat when entirely empty had not been overstated. As he admitted, he 'ate for long range.' "December is cold in those high mountains. About sunup Sunday morning, Mr. Lilly, barefooted and in nothing but his underwear, built up a big fire off to one side of our cooking fire. Then he walked to a pool below camp, broke ice fully half an inch thick, and plunged in. He returned to the big fire naked and rubbed himself briskly with his undershirt. I noticed lumps on his legs and back as large as hen eggs, from exertion and strain in climbing the steep mountainsides, I supposed.

"Mayberry and I spent the day in camp listening to Mr. Lilly talk. He read some letters from his daughters that he had gotten in Reserve. Along in the afternoon he strolled off and was gone about an hour and a half. When he came in, he announced that the Sunday rest had really gained him time on the lion he was running. I asked how he figured that. He replied that from the lay of the country he judged the lion would be just south of camp a couple of miles early next morning. Mayberry and I looked at each other but did not say anything.

"Early Monday morning after breakfast, Mr. Lilly said he would go south to a certain saddle he had looked over on amid the breaks of Devil's Canyon and would pick up his lion's trail there. It would be fresh, he said. Mayberry and I wanted to catch three or four horses we had missed on Saturday and told him we would overtake him later in the morning. We did, and he had already bagged two big male lions. One of them, he assured us, was the lion his dogs had been trailing Saturday.

"Mr. Lilly said that before making the next move he wanted to examine a place called Needle Peak for lion sign. I told Mayberry to go to camp, pack up and take our outfit into the ranch and I would make a swing with Mr.

Lilly. When we got over Needle Peak, I reached for my watch and did not have it. I remembered that I had looked at the watch at 9:45, and so knew that I had lost it some-where between the place where I last pulled it out and Needle Peak. Mr. Lilly never car-ried a watch. We figured it was about noon. Mr. Lilly said I had no doubt lost the watch in coming through some thick oak brush and that he would backtrail me and get it. He said I had just as well go on in to the ranch. He gave me his dog chains, axe and other baggage.

"Then he called his favorite dog named Tippy. He was out of a bitch that pupped while trailing a lion. Later a bear killed him, and the old hunter buried him on top of a mountain. He talked to Tippy as though he were another person, told him what they had to do. He rubbed his hands over my horse's nostrils and then rubbed them over Tippy's nose. 'Now, Tippy,' he said, 'you are going to trail this horse back up the mountain.' He tied Tippy to his waist with a chain maybe ten feet long, gave the other dogs to understand that they were not to follow but were to stay with me. Soon Tippy had the chain stretched out, pulling straight ahead on the trail. I remained still until I saw dog and man trot out of view. My route into the ranch was roundabout, owing to the roughness of the country.

"When I got in, I found Mr. Lilly and Mayberry eating a late dinner that my wife had prepared for them. The watch was ticking away on a corner of the dining table. Mr. Lilly said he had not back-trailed me very far before he discovered it about three feet to the left of my horse's tracks. This was the beginning of an acquaintance that led us to know Ben V. Lilly for his true worth as both man and woodsman."

What drew the ranch people over an empire of country to Ben Lilly was not his odd-ness. It was his character, his likeable nature and his knowledge. There was no limit to their respect for what he knew and for his power to use that knowledge. He could tell the age and sex of any lion or bear he trailed, and he would not trail it long before he knew where it had been, what it had been doing, where it was going and with what instinctive purpose. He could tell if the lion was on its regular "beat" or just passing through, hungry or full, uneasy or at east. He noticed the pad marks and the toe marks, both, of an animal. The imprint of the folds of the pad told him whether a bear was a grizzly or a black. At maturity lions and bears have a round, plump pad. As age proceeds, the pad wears flat. The front feet of a grown female lion are a little rounder and neater than those of a male lion. She carries her young farther back in the body than any other wild animal. If she is heavy with kittens, the outside toe on each hind foot spreads out a little. These and many other minute observations made trails as clear to Ben Lilly as the printed description of a criminal to an F.B.I. agent.

Sign consists of a good deal more than tracks. It includes all bodily excretions, hairs rubbed off on logs and left in beds, the "mark-ers" made by lions, the scratches and bites on trees by bears, a log or rock turned over by an ant-hunting bear, the flattened grass where a lion has crowled on his belly to waylay a deer. To read signs right, a hunter must know the lay of the land, its waterings, passes, hiding places, seasonal foods, proximity to other ranges favored or disfavored by wild animals. Ben Lilly was the master detective of the outdoors.