Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/24

 claws as sharp as needles and almost as hard as steel clutched his nape and drove deep into his furry throat. With hardly a movement of his pinions, Eyes o' Flame sailed onward and upward. Long before the big owl had reached the ancient live oak which was his favorite feeding station, the lithe brown form trailing from his talons had ceased its struggles.

The old oak stood in the heart of dense junglelike woods and thickets covering a small island in the marshes midway between a much larger island, which was almost a part of the mainland, and a low, narrow barrier isle along the edge of the sea. The small densely wooded island in the midst of the green marsh flats had been Eyes o' Flames headquarters for months. Its almost impenetrable thickets rendered it a safe refuge so far as human enemies were concerned, while on it and all around it the great horned owl found abundance of game.

Almost in its center was a small fresh-water pool in the middle of a wet meadow covered thickly with tall olive-green rushes, growing in dense clumps and standing as high as a man's head; and everywhere through these rushes wound the trails and runways of the short-eared brown marsh rabbits which were Eyes o' Flame's staple prey. The woods and thickets swarmed with field rats; in the belt of reeds and other water growths around the island's rim