Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/213

 inscrutable eyes gleamed cold and hard like pallid, polished jewels. So soundless was his passage that even the marvelous ears of a horned owl, dozing through the daylight hours in the obscurity of the thicket, failed to record the great cat's coming.

Koe-Ishto, gliding around a bend of the path, saw the big bird perched on a bough some fifteen feet above the ground, his back turned; and for a half-second the puma paused, the tip of his tail twitching to and fro, his cold eyes measuring the distance. It would be a long, high leap, yet it might be accomplished. Koe-Ishto tightened his muscles for the mighty effort which would launch his sinewy body forward and upward; but at that moment from far away to the left a sound came to his ears.

It was the gobble of a wild turkey cock; and in a flash it sent Koe-Ishto's thoughts back to the business in hand—the mission which had brought him down from the heights of Unaka Kanoos to the rhododendron tangles bordering the bank of Crystal Run.

The big puma was a rather fastidious feeder. He would take all prey that came to him, all prey that he could capture with little effort; but in a land abounding with deer, wild turkeys and ruffed grouse, he seldom exerted himself in pursuit of smaller or less succulent game. The deer were his mainstay—his staple diet; but he had fed abundantly on veni-