Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/37

 of his shoulders showing, he began his long journey across the flooded marshes.

Lotor the Lucky, being much smaller than most raccoons, was also weaker and less enduring. Pitifully small he seemed on the face of those wide waters under the moon. The eyes of a careless or unpracticed man would not have recognized him as a raccoon, for at a little distance in that dim deceptive light he resembled a floating fragment of water-soaked driftwood; but if a man had watched closely he would have perceived that this driftwood fragment was moving not with the tide but against it or across it, and that twice within the space of a few minutes it changed its course.

Presently it changed its direction for a third time. Lotor, far from land now, was not his normal, cool, calculating self. In this test which confronted him, his cunning, upon which he always relied, was of no avail. It was muscle that he needed—strength and endurance for a long unremitting effort which was proving much more severe than he had expected, because he had not taken into account the slow current setting across the inundated marshes. If he yielded to that current it would bear him he knew not whither, and he battled against it desperately, spending his small strength. He gained, but very slowly, and he knew that his goal was still far away.

In his long life Lotor had encountered most of the