Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/259

 With long noiseless strokes of the paddle he drove the punt forward, heading down the upper backwater toward the dike at its lower end. Myrtles and young cedars bordered the dike for the greater part of its length, but there was one clear stretch of fully twenty yards where the deer must pass in full view; and Sandy Jim remembered a bushy willow, growing out of the butt of a great rotting log in the backwater, which would make an ideal ambush. Presently he wedged the punt's bow between two low branches of this willow and waited, rifle in hand, listening to the music of the oncoming pack.

Other ears hearkened to that music. The king of the river lay in the lower backwater fifty yards from the dike, his eyes and nostrils projecting above the glassy surface. That morning he had emerged from his winter den under the river bank; but the river water was still too cool to suit him, and he had cruised up the creek and had passed through a hidden tunnel under a ricefield dam into the backwater's lower sunny reaches where no currents stirred the slender water weeds. He had scarcely reached the place that he had in mind when the dogs' voices came to him; and instantly he was aware of a fierce, terrible hunger, the sequel of his long winter fast—hunger which would brook no delay.

The sudden craving for meat took possession of