A big limb, growing out of the trunk, had rotted and fallen. In falling, it had left a cavity that had been enlarged by a pair of pileated woodpeckers which had nested in it over a period of years. Blowing leaves had sifted in and partly filled the hollow, and the cold wind seethed harmlessly past. Frosty found it a warm, dry and safe bed. Since the opening was barely big enough to admit him, he could defend it against anything else that tried to enter.
More than once, in the days that followed, it was necessary for him to fill his belly with grasshoppers only for the simple reason that he could catch nothing else. He learned to see them in the grass, and to gauge his strike so he could catch them before they were able to take to the air. He became an expert hunter of grasshoppers, and the precise training this afforded helped him in other ways.
The mice in their grass-thatched runways could never be seen. They must be heard, and since the strike was always blind, it had to be exact. A fraction of an inch one way or the other and the mouse escaped. Frosty learned to strike so expertly that almost never did his victim elude him. Only when he was feeling lazy or had a run of bad luck did he depend on the browsing deer to flush his mice for him.
As he lived, so did he learn. Stealthy footsteps foretold some slinking beast of prey. But so did the sudden chatter of an excited bird, a madly-scooting rabbit, or the deer when they stopped eating and became alert. Frosty taught himself to read such signs, and by them he always knew when the coyote or some other dangerous creature was aprowl. He acquired a vast confidence in his own ability to meet and overcome any dangers that threatened.
Hunting mice in the meadow one night, he came face to face with a bobcat that was similarly engaged. The bobcat snarled and leaped at him, and had he turned to run, Frosty would have been overtaken and killed. Instead of running, he stood his ground and spat back. The bobcat, pretending vast interest in a clump of grass near the kitten, scraped the grass with contemptuous feet and stalked away.
Frosty extended his range from the meadow into the woods, and each journey became a bit longer and a bit more daring. He not only lived but lived well, and his first great triumph was achieved some six weeks after he came to the meadow.
Every afternoon, when the sun was hot and high, a mother grouse led her five bobtailed young to some abandoned ant hills beside the forest. The birds burrowed luxuriously in the gritty earth, working it into their feathers and using their wings and beaks to throw it over their backs. The sand and grit acted as a cleansing bath.
Occasionally other predators visited the meadow in the afternoon, but the grouse came so quietly that these passers-by never knew of them. Frosty, who hunted the meadow almost every afternoon, knew all about them. But after stalking his stealthiest, only to have the mother grouse sound a warning and the whole brood take wing in his very face, he gave himself over to studying them. They were very difficult to stalk because the grass around the ant hills was short and he could be seen. But after two weeks, he thought he saw a way.
This afternoon, a full hour before the grouse family was due to come out of the woods, Frosty was lying motionless behind one of the ant hills. His eyes were unblinking and even the tip of his tail did not twitch. To all appearances, he was a dead thing.
He heard the grouse coming; they were announced by the tiny sounds of their own feet and the mother's querulous clucking as she warned her young to take every care. Frosty remained motionless until two of the young grouse mounted the very ant hill behind which he lay. Then, without seeming to move at all and certainly without visible effort, he was up and over. While the other grouse took thundering wing, he fastened his claws in one and pulled it down.