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 the following evening the vultures and buzzards, marvelously efficient watchers of the sands, would forestall him and take for themselves whatever savory morsels the gale had brought to his island. So the old lynx had compromised with caution, the caution which forbade him to patrol the open beach by day.

All morning he had been slinking like a ghost along the fringe of the jungle, keeping carefully under cover, pausing often to peer out from his leafy shelter and search the bare white strand above high-water mark. The wind had driven the tide much higher than usual, though by no means as high as in the great hurricanes that came now and then in late summer and fall. It was scarcely ten yards from the jungle's margin to the strip of soft sand where the waves had deposited whatever storm victims they had brought; and three times the lynx, after making sure that no foeman was in sight, had made a quick dash out into the open, picked up something in his jaws and slunk back to the green covert of the thicket's edge.

His first find was a least tern, a bird so small that it had merely whetted his appetite. Next, the sharply contrasting black-and-white plumage and crimson bill of a dead oyster-catcher caught his eye. This was a more satisfying meal; and after he had also found and devoured a turnstone and