But he kills sheep and calves every chance he gets, and Uncle Sam asks his Forest Rangers to kill every lion they find.
The Ranger took his gun and started following the footprints the giant cat had left in the dust of the trail as it led up the mountain side. Soon the animal had leapt aside where only a scratch of its claws on a rock here and there told the tale.
By and by the slim, pointed hoof prints of a doe crossed the trail. The Ranger hurried even faster now, for he did not want another deer killed.
A gentle-eyed young doe had sought hiding that morning in a leafy clump of deer brush,—for in the evergreen forests of the Sierras there is little of the thick under-growth that one finds among the oaks and elms and maples of the Eastern woodlands.
This doe had a reason for selecting a good hiding-place, for that very morning twin fawns were born to her, and she had known they must be hidden away where neither lions nor coyotes could find the helpless things.
The fawns had dappled coats, with milk-white spots on their soft, rusty-colored fur; and the doe found a place where the sunlight danced in patches on the rusty-colored earth, and the fawns would not have been noticed had one looked at the very spot,—unless they moved.
Such innocent, soft-eyed babies as they were, these firstlings of the rust-red doe! Like their mother, they had long ears and white tails with black tips. Their long, slender legs were at first too fragile for them to stand, and they lay on the soft moss as she licked their fur, with her wild mother love in her great eyes.
Off on the mountain peak their father, a great, handsome buck with branching antlers, was in retreat, with half-a-dozen other deer, while their horns were in velvet, for this velvety fur that covers the new growth of horn is tender, and the deer brush of the lower slopes would hurt it.
But alas for the wild mother, who would willingly die fighting for her little ones! At the very moment that she lay nuzzling them so happily, the giant cat was crouched along the limb of a fir tree watching, with yellow eyes blinking hungrily. The way the wind blew, no taint of the lion reached her nostrils, and she had no warning.
The mountain lion had been unsuccessful in his last night’s hunt; he had wandered miles in search of prey. Suddenly gathering all fours beneath him, he had made one powerful leap at the doe. At this moment the Ranger, hurrying along his trail, sighted the tawny form and sent a bullet through its heart.