Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/29

 oak limb and down the tree's massive trunk. A quarter of an hour later—for more than once he had paused to listen keenly and look about him—Lotor's eager black eyes peered over the rim of the hawks' nest in the pine.

What he saw there at first pleased, then disappointed him. His prize lay where he expected to find it; but it was not the prize which he had hoped for—a young marsh rabbit. The victim that Eyes o' Flame had left in his storehouse was a creature which Lotor knew well, but upon which he was not accustomed to prey, because, in the first place, he had never succeeded in catching a mink and had learned long ago that it was waste of time to stalk or pursue them. Yet having climbed fifty feet for this supper, he was not disposed to reject it hastily. He took the brown carcass delicately in his jaws, and with another quick, apprehensive glance around him, backed over the rim of the nest.

Lotor the Lucky was halfway down the pine when a strange thing happened. As suddenly as though a rifle bullet had touched his spine, he loosed his hold on the tree and dropped, his body twisting frantically, his feet clawing the air. Into the top of a low, dense, wide-spreading cassena bush at the base of the pine he fell with a crash that shattered the silence of the island woods; and as the stiff, small-leaved twigs of the bush engulfed him and