Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/136

 sign; but Longclaw the wildcat was transformed. For months he had fled from this presumptuous intruder, but that chapter was over. He had taken his enemy's measure at last and revenge was near at hand.

Perhaps Rusty, still dazed and half breathless, but steadier on his legs, his eyes freed in a measure from the blood that had blinded them, understood something of this. Possibly he was able to read the changed purpose of the lynx in those cold, steady eyes; possibly he realized, just as a man would have realized in like circumstances, the inevitable consequences of his defeat in this first encounter which was so decisive a revelation of the wildcat's overwhelming physical superiority. At all events, the dog seemed somehow aware that the headlong recklessness which had saved his life on one memorable occasion would not serve him now.

He did not charge Longclaw as he had charged him that first day on the beach. Instead, he lifted his nose high and sniffed the air. Then he began to bark, wildly, shrilly, rapidly—sharp stabs of sound, piercing, incessant, hysterical, as though a frenzy had him.

A woodsman wise in the ways of dogs might have suspected that when Rusty had tried the air with uplifted nose some strangely exciting odor, imperceptible to the lynx's duller sense, had come to him.