Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/245

 waste their precious buckshot shells upon so difficult a target as a gator's eyes—two knobs, scarcely bigger than a pair of walnuts, projecting from the surface of the water some sixty or seventy yards away.

One afternoon in early April, when there was a sharper nip in the air than the king of the river liked, he passed through a gap in a ricefield bank and made his way along deep canals leading from the river to the landward edge of the ricefields. Presently, when he was sure that no man was near, he drew his huge body out upon the bank, which was merely a low dyke shaded by tall moss-bannered cypresses. Following a well-marked gator crawl, for many years a pathway for numberless saurians, he crossed this dike and entered the clear brown water of a long serpentine lagoon behind it. For half a mile he swam up the middle of this lagoon, only his eyes and nostrils visible. Swinging around a willow-covered point of land, he came into a hidden cove, secluded and still, surrounded on three sides by a dense growth of young cypresses in which perched many black-crowned night herons. At the end of the cove rose a high yet gently sloping bank facing the sun; and on this bank, basking in the warmth, lay six large alligators, ranging in size from eight to eleven feet, while from the water nearby pro-