Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/35

 Nevertheless, for the weasel's endurance was greater than his, the Homeless One's career would have come to an end in this last desperate adventure, but for the fact that the Unseen Powers once more woke up and took a whimsical hand in the affair. Just as he was darting, stretched out to his limit, beneath the shelter of a snowy bush, a great owl swooped and made a clutch at him. But the owl had miscalculated the speed which the Homeless One was displaying. She missed him; and she was just in time to seize his pursuer instead. Infuriated at this disappointment—for she would have greatly preferred tender rabbit to tough weasel—her talons closed like steel jaws upon the weasel's neck and loins. Rising noiselessly into the air she swept away into the shadows with her writhing victim. And the Homeless One, presently realizing that he was no longer pursued, hid himself in the deepest thicket he could find, with his heart nearly bursting between his ribs.

When winter had finally closed down upon the Ottanoonsis Valley, with snow four and five feet deep on the levels and a cold that made the trees snap like gunshots in the stillness, the Homeless One, though with no lair to hide in, was in reality less uncomfortable than he had been in the variable weather. The cold, though so intense,