Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/301



ROM time to time during the night there al had been both sound and movement in the wood; but now, in the grayness of the November dawn, there was not even the flutter or the rustle of a leaf. The watcher behind the big pine log shivered. This, and not midnight, was the hour for ghosts and goblins in the swamp country—this pallid unearthly interval when the wild creatures of the night seemed to have withdrawn to their secret refuges and the wild creatures of the day had not yet ventured forth from their retreats. The lone watcher, long unused to the grim witchery of utter solitude, strained to catch the first reassuring sound which would announce the awakening of the daytime folk of the woods and prove that all life had not suddenly and mysteriously perished.

At last this sound came—a sharp metallic note from some small throat, slitting the silence like a miniature javelin. The watcher turned his head. Across the little glade at the edge of which his pine log lay, a narrow trail, hedged on each side by a dense growth of young pines, opened into the clear ing. He had selected his station behind the log so