“Mountain lion!” observed Bob, sagely, as he con templated the torn deer. “The deer come sa'nterin' down the slope yere, an' the lion jest naturally jumps his game from that tree. This deer was a bigger fool than most. You wouldn't ketch many of 'em as could come walkin' down the wind where the brush and bushes is rank, and gives the cats a chance to lay for 'em and bushwhack 'em!”
It was becoming shadowy in among the pines by this time, and, having enough of Bob's defence of the dead buck and apology for its errors, I pushed on through the bushes for the camp. As we crossed a burnt strip where the fires had made a meal of the trees, the sun was reluctantly blinking his last before going to bed in the Sangre de Christo Range, which rolled upward like some tremendous billow in an ocean of milk full five scores of miles to the west.
Bob and I were smoking our pipes in our log home that evening. Perhaps it was nine o'clock. A pitch-pine fire—billets set up endwise in the fireplace—roared in one corner. Our chimney was a vast success. Out back of our log habitat the surveyors had peeled the base of a pine and made a red-paint statement to the effect that even in the bottom of our little valley we were over 8,000 feet above the sea. This rather derogated from the pride of our chimney's performance; because, as Bob with justice urged, “a chimney not to 'draw' at an altitude of 8,000 feet would have to be flat on the ground.”
I was sprawled on a blanket, softly taking in the smoke of a meerschaum. My eyes, fascinated by the glaring, pitch-pine blaze, were boring away at the fire as if it guarded a treasure. But neither the tobacco smoke nor the flames were in my thoughts; the latter were idly going back to the torn deer.
As if in deference to a fashion of telepathy, Bob would have been thinking of the deer, also. It's possible, however, he had the cat in his meditations.
Suddenly he broke into my quiet with the remark which opens this yarn. Then he proceeded.
“Because,” Bob continued, as I turned an eye on him through my tobacco smoke, “you might get it easy. He's shorely due to go back to-night an' eat up some of that black-tail, unless he's got an engagement. It's even money he's right thar now.”
I stepped to the door and looked out. The roundest of moons in the clearest of skies shone down. Then there was the snow; altogether, one might have read agate print by the light. I picked up my rifle and sent my eye through the sights.
“But how about it when we push in among the pines; it'll be darker in there?”
“Thar'll be plenty of light,” declared Bob. “You don't have to make a tack-head shot. It ain't goin' to be like splittin' a bullet on a bowie. This mountain lion will be as big as you or me. Thar'll be light enough to hit a mark the size of him.”