Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/59

 Leaving the white oak, he spiraled upward, mounting higher and higher above the deep narrow valley, until he looked down upon the peak of Devilhead itself. Still higher he rose, so high that the flutelike tones of wood thrushes singing on the wooded mountain slopes no longer came to him; so high that he could view from end to end the whole summit of the long irregular ridge of which Devilhead peak was the loftiest eminence. Here and there, on saddles of this high ridge, the hardwood forest which clothed the slopes and most of the summit fell away, giving place to small natural meadows embosomed like lakes of vivid green in the darker green of the surrounding woods. Suddenly a small dark object in one of these meadows almost directly beneath him arrested Cloud King's attention.

A man looking down from that vast height would have distinguished nothing worthy of special note. The tiny object upon which the hawk's eyes were fixed would have appeared no different from a hundred other dark spots on the green grass carpet—spots which were merely rocks and bowlders, from the abundance of which Rocky Meadow got its name. Nor would a human eye have perceived that this particular dark spot was moving—moving gradually and intermittently, inch by inch and foot by foot, out toward the center of the grassy space.