Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/136

 winged woodpeckers, or "yellow hammers." The big woodpeckers had long since been dispossessed—the female, probably, caught and devoured, with her eggs, upon the nest. The dispossessor, and present tenant, was Mustela.

Framed in the blackness of the round hole was a sharp-muzzled, triangular, golden-brown face with high, pointed ears, looking out upon the world below with keen eyes in which a savage wildness and an alert curiosity were incongruously mingled. Nothing that went on upon the dim ground far below, among the tangled trunks and windfalls, or in the sun-drenched tree tops, escaped that restless and piercing gaze. But Mustela had fed well and felt lazy, and this hour of noon was not his hunting hour; so the most unsuspecting red squirrel, gathering cones in a neighboring pine, was insufficient to lure him from his rest, and the plumpest hare, waving its long, suspicious ears down among ground shadows, only made him lick his lips and think what he would do later on in the afternoon, when he felt like it.

Presently, however, a figure came into view at sight of which Mustela's expression changed. His thin, black lips wrinkled back in a soundless snarl, displaying the full length of his long, snow-white, deadly sharp canines, and a red spark of hate