Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/279

 crippled fox's gnawing insistent hunger—hunger so terrible that to assuage it she would have faced almost any odds.

Two weeks before, at the edge of a broom-grass field on the mainland, a charge of turkey shot from Jen Murray's gun had ripped the muscles of her back above the haunches. Hard pressed by Jen's dog, she had been forced to take to the salt marshes and plunge into a marsh creek. In the ice-cold water the torn muscles of her back had stiffened suddenly and her hind legs had grown numb. She had become almost helpless, and the ebbing tide had carried her downstream far out into the marshlands. The creek swung close to Half-Acre Island, and by a desperate effort she had dragged herself out of the water and had reached the hummock.

There she had eked out a precarious existence, a prisoner on Half-Acre, because, with her hind legs useless to her, she could not cross the surrounding waste of boggy, treacherous marsh. Crippled though she was, she had managed to find food from time to time, while a small sink-hole near the island's center, deepened some years previously by plume hunters who had camped on the hummock, provided enough water to relieve her thirst. But the problem of existence had grown more and more difficult. She had fasted for nearly two days when she saw a great white-headed bird sail in from the