Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/139

 by that one sudden yelp of the falcon and by the prolonged and violent buffeting of wings, had turned back to see what was going on. Pausing at the foot of Mustela's tree he peered upward with narrowed eyes. A slow smile wrinkled his weather-beaten face. He did not like hawks. For a moment or two he stood wondering what it was in the hole that could hold so powerful a bird. Whatever it was, he stood for it.

Being a dead shot with the revolver, he seldom troubled to carry a rifle in his "cruisings." Drawing his long barreled "Smith and Wesson" from his belt he took careful aim, and fired. At the sound of the shot the thing in the hole was startled, and let go; and the great bird, turning once over slowly in the air, dropped to his feet with a feathery thud, its talons still contracting shudderingly. The woodsman glanced up—and there, framed in the dark of the hole, was the little, yellow face of Mustela, insatiably curious, snarling down upon him viciously.

"Gee," muttered the woodsman, "I might hev' knowed it was one o' them bloody martens! Nobody else o' that size 'ud hev' the gall to tackle a duck hawk!"

Now the fur of Mustela, the pine marten or American sable, is a fur of price. But the woodsman—subject, like most of his kind, to unexpected