Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/38

 perils of the woods. The marshes were not strange to him, for he roamed over them often, generally by night, and hundreds of times he had swum the salt creeks which wound everywhere through the level plains of waving grass. But never before had he found himself in such surroundings as those which now encompassed him; never before had he struggled for his life in waters which seemed illimitable, waters which seemed to have covered all the world.

Lotor was afraid—afraid of the gurgling unending waters, of the current which clutched and pulled him, of the shadowy forms which swept over him now and then in the moonlight, of other vague sinister shapes which he could not see or hear but which he somehow knew to be near at hand. And suddenly the fear that gripped him flamed into mad terror.

Close beside him, so close that it seemed almost at his ear, sounded a loud, deep sigh, long-drawn and melancholy, yet sibilant and therefore menacing like the hiss of some huge snake. Startled half out of his wits, Lotor saw a great plated head thrust up out of the water—a hideous, yellow-brown head, many times larger than his own, naked, big-eyed and reptilelike, yet beaked like a bird of prey. Often Lotor, roaming the barrier beaches at night, had found the trails or crawls of sea turtles and occasionally he had unearthed their eggs buried deep