Skookum was on him at once, but got a slap on the ear that changed his music, and the panther bounded away out of sight with the valiant Skookum ten feet behind, whooping and yelling like mad.
It was annoyance rather than fear that made that panther take to a low tree while Skookum boxed the compass, and made a beaten dog path all around him. The hunters approached very carefully now, making little sound and keeping out of sight. The panther was wholly engrossed with observing the astonishing impudence of that dog, when Quonab came quietly up, leaned his rifle against a tree and fired. The smoke cleared to show the panther on his back, his legs convulsively waving in the air, and Skookum tugging valiantly at his tail.
“My panther,” he seemed to say; “whatever would you do without me?”
A panther in a deer yard is much like a wolf shut up in a sheepfold. He would probably have killed all the deer that winter, though there were ten times as many as he needed for food; and getting rid of him was a piece of good luck for hunters and deer, while his superb hide made a noble trophy that in years to come had unexpected places of honour.
Chapter 43. Sunday in the Woods
Rolf still kept to the tradition of Sunday, and Quonab had in a manner accepted it. It was a curious fact that the red man had far more toleration for the white man's religious ideas than the white man had for the red's.
Quonab's songs to the sun and the spirit, or his burning of a tobacco pinch, or an animal's whiskers were to Rolf but harmless nonsense. Had he given them other names, calling them hymns and incense, he would have been much nearer respecting them. He had forgotten his mother's teaching: “If any man do anything sincerely, believing that thereby he is worshipping God, he is worshipping God.” He disliked seeing Quonab use an axe or a gun on Sunday, and the Indian, realizing that such action made “evil medicine” for Rolf, practically abstained. But Rolf had not yet learned to respect the red yarns the Indian hung from a deer's skull, though he did come to understand that he must let them alone or produce bad feeling in camp.
Sunday had become a day of rest and Quonab made it also a day of song and remembrance.
They were sitting one Sunday night by the fire in the cabin, enjoying the blaze, while a storm rattled on the window and door. A white-footed mouse, one of a family that lived in the shanty, was trying how close he could come to Skookum's nose without being caught, while Rolf looked on. Quonab was lying back on a pile of deer skins, with his pipe in his mouth, his head on the bunk, and his hands clasped back of his neck.