Far across the meadow Hugh did not hear and he did not heed. He turned to the guide, waiting at the horse’s head. “Lead the way,” he ordered. “There’s no use of our waiting any longer.”
Broken Fang, the cougar, had had a discouraging night. Never in his long years could he remember a time of darkness when the hunting had been so barren of results. Now the dawn was coming out, and not even a rabbit had been caught to appease the gnawing hunger within him.
He wouldn’t have liked to admit the true explanation: that he had seen his best days. The cougar shares with all living things a resistless propensity to grow old, and already his years were many. He had had his day. The deer that had died in his talons, even the elk that he had laid low with one lightning, terrible bite to the throat would make a number not pleasing to contemplate by lovers of the wild game. It is to be remembered that an ordinary cougar will kill two deer a week, year on year, until the buzzards come to feed upon him. Broken Fang was no ordinary cougar: for more years than the swan could remember he had ranged through Smoky Land, killing as he went. He had felled the horned cattle; in one starving winter he had fought Cry-in-the-night, the wolf, and had mastered him; he had taken the old tusked boar gone wild in the underbrush. He knew the hunting craft to the last wile, and time had been when a cat-tail plume, falling on the reeds, made more noise than his own step. But he was old: his unusual size proved that fact. By the same token was revealed his past prowess: only an animal that had surpassed in all the wiles of hunting and self-preservation could live to attain such a growth. But to-night—the deer had fled from him before he ever got within leaping range.
The wind had been right, the thickets had hidden his advance, the magic and the thrill of the hunting hour had been upon him. No human ear could have discerned his approach on the winding trail. But the difficulty lay in the fact that the deer have not human ears, but rather marvelous receivers as sensitive as the antennæ of a wireless outfit. Broken Fang was growing old; some of his marvelous muscle-control was breaking; and no longer could he accomplish a successful stalk.
The triumph that he had felt the first hour of the hunt was quite dead in him now. He would have welcomed any kind of prey. Just before dawn he had come upon a porcupine; but even this unprepossessing game had escaped him. It didn’t make a story that he would care to tell to his cubs. There is a certain legend, in the forest, regarding those who cannot catch a porcupine.
“When Quill-back escapes the hunter,” the saying goes, “the buzzards will be full-fed to-morrow.”
The meaning is wholly simple to one who knows porcupines and buzzards. There is no more awkward, stupid, guileless creature in the woods than Quill-back, and the only reason why the beasts of prey haven’t wiped out his breed centuries ago is because he is so fiendishly awkward to kill and eat. One spine in the nose means days of agony, a few in the mouth is apt to bring on slow starvation. And when one hunts porcupines, and they escape him, it means simply that the hunter is getting so old and so stiff that the scavengers may dine upon him very soon. In this case Quill-back crept up a tree and crawled out to the end of a limb where Broken Fang couldn’t get him.
There was no more magnificent slayer in the whole woods than this huge puma, yet he had gone for a full day without food. And it was not to be wondered at that—just before dawn—the blood leaped in his veins anew when he caught the smell of the sheep flock on the wind.
He had killed sheep in plenty in his time, only on the far eastern border of his range. He hadn’t known that any were to be found in this part of Smoky Land. They were an easy game to kill, dying at one little touch to the head or shoulder, and offering no sport at all to a bold hunter of deer. Yet to-night he was in no mood to be discriminating. And it was wholly possible that the smell of that flock seemed to grant a new lease of life.