Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/127

 edge of the jungle, then lost him as he made off along an aerial pathway passing from tree to tree. Returning to the spot where the coon had been digging, the terrier took up the work of excavation and in a few minutes unearthed a store of round white eggs, more than a hundred and fifty in all, arranged in layers in a deep cavity in the sand.

He did not know that they were the eggs of a great sea turtle which had come up out of the surf earlier that night and, after lumbering across the beach and laboriously digging a hole in the sand with her flippers, had deposited her treasures therein, covered them up and waddled ponderously back to the ocean. But Rusty found that these eggs were exceedingly good to eat and, tearing open their tough skins with his teeth, he devoured more than a score of them at one sitting.

The discovery of this nest was a stroke of luck, but by using his wits Rusty improved upon it. He had noted the wide, plainly marked trail or crawl leading from the surf to the turtle nest and back to the surf again; and several times that spring and summer he found turtle nests for himself by digging in the sand where an upward trail and a downward trail came together above reach of the tides.

In these and various other ways the little red dog made his living during the first weeks of his long