Now the weasel was just on the point of giving up, seeing that here was one victim he could not hope to overtake, when the rabbit suddenly came back, saw him still pursuing, and losing heart, squatted down, paralyzed with fear, uttering a squeal for mercy.
Instantly the weasel was on the rabbit’s back, biting the cowardly beggar back of the ear, where it killed it instantly. But a taste of the hot blood and the weasel was satisfied, and ran away to chase barn rats.
“Am I in luck?” Fuzzy asked himself, licking his jaws hungrily.
The Ranger also thought himself in luck, for inside a week the weasel had rid the barn of rats, and betaken himself away to new hunting grounds.
CHAPTER XXXII
WAPITI
THE little bear felt more and more strongly the call to go exploring. So many things interested him, and he was so apt to find something new and delicious to eat. Besides, he felt it would soon be time to hibernate again, and now that he was getting so large, he wanted a home of his own,—some rocky den where he could be entirely by himself when he felt like it.
During the spring and summer the mule deer, (Dapple’s tribe,) had been the largest he had seen. But now that the larches had turned old gold, he sometimes met a herd of wapiti, or American elk, who had summered high in the mountains, in the stunted forests of timber line where they could browse on the foliage of the very tree tops and the lush grass of the high alpine meadows.
At the approach of winter they came down to seek the shelter of the valleys.
Every herd had its patriarch, a huge old bull wapiti, whose wide branching antlers would suddenly appear on the sky-line while he scanned the slopes. Then he would give the signal to the herd of cow wapiti and their calves who were under his protection, to follow to the feeding-grounds he had selected.