Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/55

 looked out over his blue-and-purple kingdom of mountain and valley. Once, for a moment, his gaze rested on Dan Alexander's cabin nestling in the oak and chestnut woods clothing the gorgelike valley far below. As though the sight of that cabin were a challenge, he barked three times, each bark a clear thin note, less querulous than usual, with something of joy and something of confident defiance in the ring of it. Then jauntily, with mincing steps and elevated brush, he trotted along the shelf and, lightly leaping a gap in the narrow way, passed around a jutting shoulder of the cliff with never a glance at the abysmal chasm yawning under him.

Indifferently, with no change of expression in his grim dark eyes, Cloud King, the peregrine falcon, watched him go. The big duck hawk took little interest in the old red fox who shared with him the craggy summit of Devilhead; but because it was his business to watch every moving thing within range of his vision, his eyes followed Red Rogue as he picked his sure-footed way around the precipitous face of the cliff, until he vanished in a dense kalmia thicket fringing the rocky forehead of the mountain. Yet, except that the nature of wild things forbade it, there might have existed a certain fellow feeling between these two dwellers on Devilhead's loftiest peak.

Not only were they near neighbors, sharing the