Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/286

 This was the best meal that she had enjoyed since becoming a prisoner on Half-Acre, and it gave her new energy and strength. Her torn muscles were healing, though her hind legs were as yet incapable of bearing her weight; and that night she contrived to capture another rail. The following day, too, brought a stroke of good fortune in the shape of a full-grown rat so badly wounded by another of its combative race that it could hardly move; and some hours later she managed to ambush a wandering marsh rabbit. For a while the gray fox, except that her hind legs were still pitifully weak and stiff, was almost herself again, still hungry, but no longer mad with hunger—a cool, keen, careful schemer, sharper of wit than any other wild thing of the woods.

It was then that her wits, endowed once more with all their native cunning, began to plan the destruction of the other captives of Half-Acre, the wounded eagle and the wing-broken heron which were her fellow prisoners on the hummock and which would help to keep her alive if she could contrive to kill them.

The heron's plight she understood the moment she saw the bird. His left wing, matted with mud, dangled at his side; and she knew that he could not fly, though he could walk on his long legs much faster than she could drag her maimed body. But