Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/216

 presently, like a dim, dreadful, pale-eyed ghost, to the edge of the thicket whence he could look out upon the spot which he had often utilized as a turkey ambush.

The path had brought him back again to the river; but the character of the stream had changed. At this point Crystal Run was no longer a narrow brawling mountain torrent, rushing swiftly amid great tumbled masses of rock, foaming in white waterfalls over sharp ledges under which lay dark, still, seemingly bottomless pools.

Here, where the valley was wider and flatter, the river had widened also and had become a placid shallow stream scarcely more than a foot in depth and perhaps fifty feet from shore to shore, flowing slowly over a flat bed of smooth rock and yellow sand. On the further bank the forest came down close to the water; but on the bank where the rhododendron thicket stood a clear space of level rock and dry sand intervened between the river margin and the edge of the thicket. Into this clear space an arm of the thicket, composed, however, not of rhododendrons but of alders, was thrust almost to the water's edge, forming a sort of hedge as straight as if some careful gardener had lined the bushes there.

Koe-Ishto, the puma, did not know why the wild turkeys of the mountain woods were in the habit