Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/42

 was aware of the hunter. Almayne chose the elk as his target. Crouching behind a boulder at the meadow's upper end, he gazed along his rifle barrel at the superb stately figure sharply outlined against the sky. He had seen hundreds of elk, thousands of buffalo, perhaps tens of thousands of deer; but in five years in the wilderness he had seen nothing so magnificent as this huge, perfectly proportioned, nobly antlered elk bull posed like a majestic statue of golden-bronze on the brink of the abyss.

A sudden repugnance surged up in him. It seemed to him that the thing which he was about to do would be murder or worse. He did not stop to analyze the impulse or to argue against it. He swung the long rifle slowly to the right until his gray-blue eyes, sighting along the barrel, saw not the elk but the tawny shoulder of the puma. His finger touched the trigger gently. The puma bounded forward, stood rigid, toppled sideways and lay still.

Almayne scarcely glanced at the sprawling body of the big lion-like cat. At the roar of the long heavy rifle the elk whirled in his tracks so that he faced the hunter, head high, antlers laid back along his shaggy neck. For half a minute he stood motionless. Then he saw Almayne's head and shoulders thrust up above the boulder. Instantly the great bull whirled again, raced in a plunging gallop across the open and vanished amid the trees beyond.