Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/81

Rh been caught to appease the gnawing hunger within him.

He wouldn't have liked to admit the true explanation: that he had seen his best days. The cougar shares with all living things a resistless propensity to grow old, and already his years were many. He had had his day. The deer that had died in his talons, even the elk that he had laid low with one lightning, terrible bite to the throat would make a number not pleasing to contemplate by lovers of the wild game. It is to be remembered that an ordinary cougar will kill two deer a week, year on year, until the buzzards come to feed upon him. Broken Fang was no ordinary cougar: for more years than the swan could remember he had ranged through Smoky Land, killing as he went. He had felled the horned cattle; in one starving winter he had fought Cry-in-the-night, the wolf, and had mastered him; he had taken the old tusked boar gone wild in the underbrush. He knew the hunting craft to the last wile, and time had been when a cat-tail plume, falling on the reeds, made more noise than his own step. But he was old: his unusual size proved that fact. By the same token was revealed his past prowess: only an animal that had surpassed in all the wiles of hunting and self-preservation could live to attain such a growth. But to-night—the deer had fled from him before he ever got within leaping range.

The wind had been right, the thickets had