I had not once changed my position since first seeing the wildcat. He was a trifle to my left, and my left foot and shoulder were pointed up-stream. Our lives hang on such trifles as that! Now, with the trained instinct of the boxer—who has first to learn to act without stopping to think how to act—I threw my left hand up and out! Half-way to arms-length it met that furry avalanche, and broke its force. The cat landed full against my side.
Its sharp hind claws sank into my thigh, and the sharper fore claws clutched me in the pectoral muscles in front and between the shoulder-blades behind. The pain was cruel, but I had no time even to cry out. At the instant I expected to feel those merciless jaws on my neck, and that would be the last.
The wildcat knows where the jugular vein is as well as the best surgeon of them all; and it is for that that he invariably jumps. Animals killed by these cruel ambuscaders are sometimes left whole and unmangled, save for that wicked little gap at the side of the throat.
But my boxing lessons had saved me. As my left hand went out in that “straight counter,” it struck full in the throat of the cat; and with the swift inspiration of desperate men, I clutched the folds of fur there with all my might.
The cat strained hard to pull-in to me—and that was a cruel leverage it had in my own flesh. But my arm, never a weak one, was doubly strong now; and, though I could not force him from his hold, I kept his head well away from mine, which I “ducked” to increase the still unsatisfactory distance.
Then, drawing the keen six-inch blade, I drove it against his side. His left side was, of course, the one exposed to me; but we were so “mixed up” that I could take no accurate aim at his heart, and just thrust blindly and madly at that stretch of mottled fur.
Nothing will ever dim my recollection of that desperate struggle; and yet I seemed in a sort of trance. You have had nightmares, wherein some savage beast pursued you, and you slammed vain doors on him which he brushed open, and fired ineffective rifles at him whose diminished pop did not affect him in the least; and, do what you would, nothing availed against that implacable danger. So it was with me. I seemed under a spell.
Those awful claws were tearing me everywhere; that fatal head was struggling to break down my tiring arm; and the desperate thrusts of the knife with all the force of my right arm seemed not even to penetrate the tough hide. They went deep enough, as I found later, but at the moment I was sure they hardly scratched him.
Since that day I have been through a great many of the things of whose suspense we say, “They seemed eternities,” but never one, I think, that seemed so endless as that. And yet it could hardly have lasted a minute. I was growing very weak. Blood was running down in my boots, and my weary left arm was no longer rigid. My right was no longer fully under control, and once, when the knife glanced a rib, it nearly flew from my hand.