Fuzzy was afraid to come too near, for he had disliked horns and antlers ever since his experience with the range cow the year before. But his curiosity often drew him to watch these strange creatures from the safe shelter of some clump of brush.
After the first snow-fall, the wapiti would paw the ground bare with their fore hoofs till they could get at the mosses underneath. At this time the herd was joined by several others, and at night they always slept in a circle, the bulls on the outside, the cows next, and their calves in the very middle. Fuzzy wondered and wondered why they did it, till one night, when he had elected to sleep away from home.
It was starlight in the open spaces, shadowy under the trees, when he was awakened by a peculiar shiver that ran along his spine and made the fur on the back of his neck prickle. This, he knew, meant danger, though at first he could not see what it was that menaced him. Then, suddenly, he noticed a slinking, almost soundless movement along the limb of a tree between him and the wapiti on the creek bank.
Slowly, slowly the giant cat, a mere moving shadow in his tawny coat against the shadows that didn’t move, leapt to the ground and began edging, inch by inch, toward the sleeping herd. But was it sleeping? Fuzzy thought he saw the gleam of several pairs of eyes against their moveless bulk.
The cat was edging around them watching for some point where he might approach them from behind. But on every side he was faced by a barricade of pronged antlers that could have pierced him through. Finally as he came too near, the bulls arose and stood waiting—just waiting for him to come closer. But at that the lion turned and leapt into a tree, and though Fuzzy watched till he could no longer keep his eyes open, he saw no movement in that tree, nor was the lion in the tree when morning came. Nor was the herd reduced by the loss of so much as one calf.
CHAPTER XXXIII
DAPPLE DISAPPEARS
AS her second summer came to an end, Dapple was seen to be more and more vain. Every day she licked her fur till it shone. She had even made friends with a young cow of almost equal vanity, who did her the service of washing her neck where she could not reach it, a service she returned in kind.
Then one day she disappeared. The children were mystified, but Fuzzy could have told them what had become of her.
His wanderings had often taken him into the haunts of the mule deer. Not that he ever got very near them. Even had he trusted the antlers of the bucks he saw summering together in the high country,—they had prongs even before the tall branching antlers came in September,—he could not have escaped observation, so keen were both their eyes and their ears.