Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/252

 open spaces alike until he arrived at the border of the hunting ground whither he had all this time been traveling—an extensive clearing on the edge of the woods which years before had been a cornfield, and where countless meadow-mice scurried night and day along their winding, tunnel-like runways through the wilderness of tall broom grass that now covered its furrowed surface.

These foolish and incessantly busy little people of the broom grass were easy and succulent game; and it was for the purpose of hunting them that the rattlesnake had journeyed from the reed-bordered pool a mile back in the woods—an unusual proceeding, since he seldom traveled far at any time and his wanderings, such as they were, generally took place at night.

Along the fringe of the wood, separated from the broom grass field by a dry, shallow ditch and a low bank clothed with a dense tangle of wild-rose vines, ran a shady, grass-carpeted road, apparently seldom used by man since here and there it was almost obliterated by clumps of tall, prickly-stemmed weeds. A fox, coming upon the road, would have tested the wind carefully and looked keenly to right and left before venturing to cross it; but the rattlesnake, of too crude a cunning to recognize the road as different in any important particular from one of the open forest spaces where he was accustomed to show