Scotty looked up. Already the entire world seemed to have been stood up on end above him. The green pines and yellow pinnacles of the rim above looked like a line of mere dents in it, with a little dark moss covering their tops. It would be days and days of work getting up there again! But Big John had only paused to get the location of the dogs in mind before he set off again along that precipice wall. Scotty followed. He might as well be killed sticking close to Big John as be killed anyhow, by some fall which could only end up in the Colorado itself, perhaps half a mile yet below him in a vertical line!
Ruler had charged out of the bottom of the chimney, barking a regular hullabaloo of a treeing call. If the dogs had slid down this cleft, men could climb down it, the boy reasoned as he began descending an almost perpendicular chimney, hanging to small, stout pines and catching his toes in crevices in the rock. They came upon Lee, whining piteously, afraid of being left behind, afraid to make the jump that would land in a sort of chute already worn with dog and cougar tracks where the others had gone down. Big John picked him up unceremoniously and tossed him into the chute, where he sprawled and slid with lightning speed down to the slope below. Without a word the man climbed on down after him, with Scotty panting and laboring behind.
Once on the slope below a columnar yellow pine loomed up far down the slide. It had survived avalanches, rock slides, ice rifts—was Nature’s survival of the fittest, to seed the slopes beneath it and below it. Upon one of its branches the tawny body of the cougar crouched, treed, spitting at the dogs prancing below, twitching his tail angrily, ready to spring on the instant.
“Shoot, you little wart—if you miss I’ll pisen yore grub!” barked Big John at Scotty, holding his own rifle at the ready. Scotty braced himself and poised the heavy .405. He had always prided himself on his shooting, but never in any such condition as this. His whole body shook with fatigue; he was covered with a scalding perspiration. Hold as he might, the bead refused to steady. Its square white patch nearly covered the cougar at that range, yet it could not have been over two hundred yards. Scotty finally attempted trigger release on the swing. The rifle went off, driving his shoulder back a foot with its recoil and, as they watched, a huge spall of bark flew out of the tree trunk above the cougar’s back. Instantly he sprang down among the yelping dogs. A whirlwind of unbelievably swift action ensued. Yellow and brown were inextricably mixed as the cougar struck this way and that, the dogs darting in from every angle, the cat turning to strike as each grabbed a new hold. Big John raced forward, his rifle at shoulder, ready to put in a shot at the first possible instant.
Then the cougar made a sidewise swipe of his paw, so swift that the eye could not follow it. The steel hooks of his claws caught in Ruler’s ear and the cat pulled him towards a snarling open mouth, towards the glistening white fangs that awaited him. But with a furious tug the dog tore himself loose, his ear slitting to ribbons. Big John fired at that tense instant when dog and cougar were braced in the fixed rigidity of their tug of war. The cat leaped in the air, high above the whole mob of dogs, landed running, and darted like a squirrel over the brink of the ledge.
The dogs tore after him. Big John and Scotty raced down the slope in giant strides, that for Scotty kept getting longer and longer as his momentum gained. He finally threw himself sideways to the ground as he felt himself falling downhill rather than running.
“Thar he is!—Mark left!” rasped Big John hoarsely, pointing below. The ledge was a mere escarpment, and along its base the cougar was flying, his tail erect and bushy like a scared household tabby. Pepper clung like a viper to his hock, while Ruler was trying to forge ahead and get a throat hold. Then the cat disappeared into a rock crevice taking the dogs with him.
Putting in their last burst of speed, Scotty and Big John threw themselves over to it. The huge rocky knife-edge that made the cleft, stuck up like a fan,—one of those little insignificant spalls on the cliff faces, as seen from El Tovar. Here it was enormous, and led down to no one knew where. A hoarse, snarling murmur and the worrying and fighting of dogs came up from inside it.
“Run down to the lower edge, Scotty!” yelled Big John. “I’ll drop a rock in here an’ he’ll come out to you like a bat out of hades.”
Scotty slid down, arriving torn and bruised at the lower edge of the crack where the rock fan sprang up ten feet thick from the cliff. The narrow crack between it and the wall was dark as a pocket; nothing came from there but the maddening roars of Ruler and the snarling of the cat. Then Big John whooped, above, and the crash of a falling rock resounded. Out of the rift, straight at Scotty the cougar exploded in a frightful cat-spit. His rear was covered with dogs, but his chest showed clear and tawny as he sprang. Scotty met him with the heavy .405, himself knocked flat against the cliff with its recoil. A reeking mass of animals shot past him in a fury of flying paws, rolled over and over down the slope, and fetched up in a writhing heap in the midst of a nest of scraggy pinyons.