No sooner had the Catamount made good his hold on its squirming prey, than it turned to flee. To its intense astonishment, it found itself face to face with Dusty Star!
Never in its life before had the great cat set eyes on a human being. For one brief moment, it was paralysed with fear. And that moment cost it dear. Quick as a hawk, Dusty Star stooped and struck. The keen blade of his hunting knife flickered in the sun, and then buried itself in the Catamount's fur.
With a scream of rage and terror, the animal dropped the cub, and turned savagely on its foe. But at that very instant there was a rush and a hoarse squall, and it was knocked clean head over heels by the furious charge of the mother fox.
This totally unexpected attack completed the great cat's discomfiture. Spitting and squawling, it bounded into the underwood and was instantly out of sight.
It might have been expected that the fox, having routed one enemy of her little one, would have turned at once on what she might have well supposed was another. But just as she had quitted the den to look for the missing cub, she had seen Dusty Star attack the Catamount, and her quick senses told her that the action had not meant any injury to her cub.
For all that, he was a new experience; and the wisdom of the wilderness is that new experiences had better not be trusted. So while she nosed the cub tenderly, turning it over with her paw, to see if it had been injured, she kept one eye jealously on Dusty Star to watch his slightest movement.
And now that wonderful knowledge of the feelings of wild animals partly taught him by Kiopo, which he had been gradually gathering all his life, came to his aid and told him what to do. For while his body remained so absolutely motionless that he hardly seemed to breathe, his mind made itself a finer body, and went out towards the fox; and the fox, receiving the message, learnt that she had nothing to fear. For all that, she was not easy that the cub should be left in the open, so far from the den's mouth. Dusty Star she had ceased to mistrust; but her instinct told her that, although the Catamount had disappeared, he was still in the neighbourhood. So before she allowed herself to find out any more about Dusty Star, she picked up the cub by the loose skin at the back of its fat little neck, and carried it back to the den. As a matter of fact, the Catamount was further than she knew, and now sat in the fork of a red-cedar tree, licking the wound inflicted by Dusty Star's knife, and making up his mind that if this new monster, with a paw that struck so fiercely was a protector of the foxes, it would be wiser to leave the entire gang severely alone.
When Baltook returned from his hunting with a plump partridge in his mouth, he was confronted by a strange sight. At the very entrance of their den he saw his mate sitting wholly at her ease, with a human being by her side.
In all his life of surprises, Baltook had never come upon anything so surprising as that. Boola must be crazy—gone clean mad before the time of the Mad Moon when the wolves and foxes sing. Yet Boola had no appearance of madness. She just sat and gazed at the human being with extreme calmness as if she had known him all her life. For a moment or two, Baltook stood observing this astonishing sight, with one fore foot raised, as if uncertain what to do. Then he laid the partridge down quietly in order to get clear of the smell of the kill and so be able to scent the stranger. Screened by the bushes, he wrinkled his fine nose, and sniffed, and wrinkled, and wrinkled and sniffed, and still was unable to make up his mind. And there Boola sat all the time, as calm as a toadstool and seemed to have neither eyes nor ears except for her new friend.
At last Baltook could bear the suspense no longer. With his brush held high, and his eyes shining, he stepped warily out into the open.