Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/258

 They told him that a deer had been jumped on the low myrtle-grown peninsula between the house and the backwater. That peninsula was both a haven and a trap. If the hunters guarded its upper end, the deer must run down the length of it toward the backwater and the flooded rice lands. With the pack pressing him hard, and with the whoops of the hunters sounding near at hand, he would hardly take to the open water on either side, but would run on and swim the deep break at the peninsula's lower end to reach the remnant of a low, narrow, marshy dike which, in the old rice-planting days, had divided the upper backwater from the lower. There he would be safe if hounds and hunters halted at 'the break. But if hounds or hunters swam the break and followed along the dike he would be doomed; for a dense mat of telanthera, a floating water growth through which no deer could swim, bordered the dike on both sides and inclosed its lower end. Thus the place was a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape.

Sandy Jim reviewed the situation swiftly. Then a grim smile twisted his hawklike face. His boys had chosen to hunt without him. He would show them something little to their liking. Knowing his sons, his dogs and every inch of the ground, he needed no clairvoyant powers to foretell the outcome of that hunt.