Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/51

 Devilhead, to farm a little after the fashion of the mountaineers and to indulge to the utmost his passion for hunting. He knew the beasts and the birds of the upland woods as few mountain woodsmen have known them; and somewhere in him there was a romantic, imaginative strain, strengthened and developed by his schooling and by the books he had read, which caused him to give names to certain ones among the wild creatures which, for one reason or another, strongly stirred his interest.

Chief among these were the two dwellers on Devilhead peak. Many times Dan's path had crossed that of Red Rogue, the old dog fox. Day after day he had watched Cloud King, the peregrine falcon, patroling the air roads of his wide kingdom. Again and again he had seen the bloody handiwork of these two wild hunters who inhabited the inaccessible cliff at the summit of the mountain; and long ago he had declared war against them, matching his skill and woodcraft against their wiliness and swiftness, finding all the more pleasure in the contest when he learned, as he very soon did, that the two buccaneers of Devilhead were well able to take care of themselves.

For weeks he had hunted them persistently, neglecting all other game, often lying in ambush on the mountain's summit above the precipice where they had their homes, even risking his life in an