Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/236

 he done so, he would have been spotted instantly by the fox, which would have had baby gator as an appetizer. Instead, he crawled very slowly under the log at a point where it was raised a little from the ground and buried himself in the muck, lying there utterly motionless until the gray-and-russet killer had feasted and had gone on his way. If the fox's nose told him that there was a little gator under the log, he was well fed by that time and did not think it worth while to dig the youngster out.

Thenceforward the baby saurian knew that danger lurked in the shallows along the margins of the lagoon. Whether this knowledge was merely instinct awakened by his encounter with the ibis, or whether it was the beginning of the wisdom that developed in his small brain as the months passed, it was a decisive factor in carrying him through his perilous babyhood. He still kept mainly to the shallows, for somehow he knew that there were even greater dangers in the brown translucent depths; but always he had a sharp eye open for tall birds which frequented the lagoon margins—for wood ibises, which he saw only occasionally, and for herons, which he saw in great numbers every day. The small life of the warm teeming waters afforded him abundant food; and all the while he was growing, not slowly, as most people suppose that alligators grow, but very fast.