Then the one thing happened that could have saved him. Fleet Foot reached the spot. Rearing furiously on her hind legs, she struck at Baldy’s head with her sharp hoofs, tearing great wounds in his scalp. Then, with a scream of rage and pain, he raised his wings and slanted swiftly upward, wings hissing, to his granite peak.
The fawn was not seriously hurt,—only terribly frightened. His back was bruised, but that would heal, and he would be none the worse for his experience.
But where was the other fawn?—They found him wedged in between the boulders,—the one place where he could ever have escaped the beat of those wings. Fleet Foot praised him mightily for having so much sense, and he felt quite cocky,—though of course his brother was the real hero of the day.
One other danger marred their summer.
Every now and again, as they were passing beneath some low-hanging branch, they would catch a glimpse of a tawny form flattened along the limb, watching them with pale yellow eyes that gleamed through narrowed lids.
Perhaps it would be in a deep, dark hemlock thicket, or a cedar swamp, that they would meet the giant cat.
He was a ferocious-looking fellow, was Old Man Lynx, with his great, square, whiskered face, and his ears with their black tassels and the black stripe down the middle of his back. And my, how his claws crunched the bark as he sharpened them! How his whiskers twitched and his mouth watered as the fawns passed beneath him! He seemed all teeth and claws.
Perhaps the little family would be drowsing peacefully in the shade of a long September afternoon when suddenly some spirit of their ancestors, (or was it some guardian angel of their antlered tribe?) would whisper “Danger!” and set their fur to rising along their spines in a cold shiver of nameless fear.
Had Old Man Lynx ever really put it to the test, he could have won out with Fleet Foot. But he knew the sharp drive of her little hoofs, and he was terribly afraid of pain. (Did he not wear a great scar in his side, due to an adventure of his rash young days, when a fat buck had given him a rip with his antlers?)
Perhaps that was why Fleet Foot always raced away in a wide curve that presently brought her back to where she could peer curiously at the invader of her solitude, without herself being seen.