Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/237

 The first and most dangerous season of his babyhood was also the shortest. A few weeks after he had emerged from the egg came the cool weather of fall; and, burying himself in the mud near the edge of the lagoon, he slept through the winter in peace. When he reappeared in early March he entered upon a period of still swifter growth. By the end of that summer he had more than doubled his length, and as he grew longer and bulkier the number of his enemies decreased. When he emerged from his second winter sleep the tall birds of the lagoon margins no longer terrified him; and that same summer he turned the tables on his feathered foes.

His warfare against the feathered water folk began on a modest scale. Many gallinules nested in wampee beds along the sunny margins and on floating islands of aquatic plarits in the open spaces, while at least half a dozen wood duck mothers had laid their eggs in deep holes dug in dead pines by big red-crested pileated woodpeckers or logcocks, giants of the woodpecker tribe. The saurian inhabitants of the lagoon, both large and small, took toll of the downy ducklings and the little gallinules; and now and again the yawning jaws of a big gator, rising suddenly from the depths, engulfed a parent bird.

It was late summer before the future king of the