Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/30

 closed over him, a great dim shape, wide-winged and savage-eyed, hammered with mighty pinions at the leafy gates of his refuge and struck long trenchant talons deep into the barricade of twigs.

Lotor the Lucky, somewhat disheveled and rather breathless, felt the needle point of one of those talons lightly scratch his hide. It was a mere pin prick and it did the coon no harm. But it was vivid proof of how narrowly he had escaped, and he sprawled motionless for a minute or two amid the inner branches of the cassena before recovering his equanimity. Then he jumped lightly to the ground and stood for an instant considering, the mink still hanging from his jaws. Above and around him the stiff interlacing twigs and branches formed a barrier which Eyes o' Flame could never penetrate; but Lotor the Lucky, now that he had the solid ground under him again, no longer feared the owl, and for a moment he was on the point of stepping boldly out into the open.

The impulse passed quickly. Always, Lotor had found discretion the better part of valor. It had been his settled rule to avoid fights of all kinds, and he had won through to old age because Nature, as if to make amends for giving him so small a body, had endowed him with cunning beyond the cunning of his kind and senses sharper than those of most raccoons—senses so sharp that somehow his ears had