In the still midday, desperate and half-mad with hunger, Broken Fang,
the cougar, came stealing along a narrow pass in the high ranges of
Smoky Land. He hadn’t had a great deal of success with the mountain
creatures. The previous day he had caught a little pika on the
sliderock; once a mountain grouse had failed to detect him lying like a
tawny piece of crag beside a pass, but the great bighorn themselves had
mostly been able to keep out of his way.
In the first place he was under the great disadvantage of fighting in
the enemy’s country. The cougars are never quite at home in the high
mountains. They are essentially a lowland people, and they have no love
for the fields of glittering snow. They need trees in which to hide,
brush thickets to wait in till the deer graze near by. The narrow
passes, the rugged precipices, and the high knife-edge trails were the
natural habitats of the wild sheep, but Broken Fang liked better
walking. Besides, he didn’t know the country.
If any one supposes that animals do not have to learn the geographical
nature of a hunting ground before they are really adept in it, it is
wholly plain that he has never followed the tracks of a pack of strange
wolves in a new land. By knowing all the trails, the bighorn were able
to avoid the traps that Broken Fang so laboriously set. More than once,
after a weary half-day’s wait, he would find to his chagrin that the
sure-footed sheep had been watching him—chuckling no doubt among
themselves—from a nearby promontory. They knew how to see him before he
saw them, and in a fair chase he was simply out of the running. If his
luck didn’t change soon, it seemed very likely that the buzzards would
have a large heap of poorly upholstered bones to pick clean.
But to-night—as September days rolled to their mellow end—he had fresh
hopes. For the wind had come and brought him good news. The flock was
feeding on a little grass slope just in front.
Broken Fang felt that it was almost his last chance, and he intended to
make the most of it. But desperate as he was, he kept his hunting
cunning. This would indicate that certain of the beasts have even better
nerve control than their superiors, human beings,—for a starving man
would have been unlikely to go about his hunting with the same stealth
and caution. He crept slowly forward, his nerves singing wild melodies
within him. And stealing from above, he soon caught sight of the flock.
Some of them were feeding; Argali, Spot, and one or two of the other
young rams were lying down. Broken Fang’s glaring eyes encompassed the
whole scene, and with the swiftness and accuracy of a general, he mapped
out his plan of attack. No naturalist explains by what swift avenues of
intelligence he made his plans. Animals cannot reason. Instinct alone is
severely taxed to account for all the wiles and astuteness of the wild
creatures. But if this were instinct, it served him even better than
intelligence.
It was true that his prey was out of leaping range of his trail. Yet for
all that his heart throbbed with rapture. A jagged cliff approached
within a few feet of them from the opposite side, and one détour would
bring him close enough to strike. Best of all, he could leap at them
from above.
The wind was right, the animals were not suspecting danger. He crept
slowly about to the shelter of the opposite pass, then began to creep
stealthily toward the sheep.
He didn’t see how he could miss, particularly the yearling ram that lay
nearest the cliff. He was a newcomer in the band, and he wouldn’t be so
wary as the others. It was a simple matter of stealing quietly over a
ledge of rock, where there were no dry twigs to break beneath his feet,
then to spring down with outstretched talons and open jaws. Already he
was within a hundred feet. Their pungent smell was a madness in his
nerves. Nearer—ever nearer—and now they were just below him. He had
sunk so low against the crag that he looked more like a great tawny
serpent than a feline. His tail twitched at its very tip as he crept
on,—a few feet more. The whole realm was hung with that tense silence
of the high mountains, a stillness wherein not even a wind whispers and
the heart pounds like a drum in the breast.
This was not a coyote to be frightened away by an attitude of defense.
If once the great puma launched forth in his spring, no power on earth
could save the young ram. It seemed as if Spot were to lose his heritage
already.
Broken Fang knew this crag. He had made a kill of one of its little
people a day or two before. He had always had only scorn for these
lesser folk,—the scurrying gophers, the timid rabbits, and the furry
pikas in the rocks. Yet at that instant he was to receive a taste of
their might. A shrill shriek suddenly split open the silence,—just in
front of his head.
After all it was only a miniature sound, really little more than a
high-pitched squeak. Yet in that unfathomable silence it cracked like a
rifle. In one second of thought Broken Fang would have identified the
sound, would have kept his poise, and a moment later would have sprung
with fatal power into the flock of sheep. Yet that second of thought did
not come in time. The impulse to his muscles, the sudden explosion of
his tightly drawn nerves had the speed of light itself.
It was only a little pika—a rock rabbit, as the mountaineers call
them,—such as the puma had killed the day before. It would have been
surpassing poetic justice for it to have been the mate of the small,
gray creature that had died so recently in his talons, squealing for the
mother of his litter to come back to him. And his sharp squeal was just
enough, and no more, to put high explosives under the sheep hunt.
The cougar’s nerves had been pitched to the highest key, and the
muscular reaction to that shrill sound could not be restrained. His paw
lashed out: the little rodent leaped from beneath it. And at the same
instant he snarled.
Few living creatures can strike in silence. One of them is the mighty
elephant, most intellectual and, of course, majestic of all the beasts.
This jungle king can lunge out with a resistless force and still keep
the tremendous silence of the sphinx. But the stallion screams when he
strikes with his lashing hoofs. The elk bellows, and even the venerable,
dignified old bear has a savage growl at his lips as he slashes his
terrible paws at his foe. The pent-up passions do not find sufficient
escape in the blow itself, and a vocal utterance usually accompanies it.
As Broken Fang struck at the rodent, his short, terrible snarl rang
through the still air.
The sheep needed no further warning. They sprang forward as if the sound
had been a great hand that hurled them, without an instant’s delay.
Broken Fang caught himself then, snarled and sprang among them; but he
was a mere fraction of an instant too late.
The flock was divided—Argali and some of the ewes and immature rams
circled about and dashed up the rocks at one side. The others—Spot and
two young ewes—were cut off from this avenue of escape, and headed down
the steep wall of the mountain. The way of the bighorn is the climbing
trail—to flee to the heights where the ordinary run of hunters cannot
follow. But Spot was obliged to take another course.
Broken Fang leaped after him. At first he ran only in anger and frenzy,
for his instincts told him plainly and surely that it is usually the
height of folly for a cougar to attempt to overtake the hoofed creatures
in an open chase. But he had been cheated too many times; and his
self-control had fallen further from him than the bottom of the gorge.
The sheep raced on lightly, easily, and Broken Fang filled the canyons
with his snarls.
But in a moment of vain pursuit a certain knowledge came to him. These
sheep were headed down into his own country,—into the land of forest
and thicket where he could hunt to an advantage. The thing to do was to
continue the chase, prevent them from circling back, and who knows what
glory might be his in the still, tree-clad ridges below him.
* * * * *
The chase of Spot and his bighorn ewes down into the greenwood was not
the only stir of life in the midday silence of Smoky Land. At the same
hour the hoofbeats of a running horse carried far through the dusky
thickets of a certain great ridge to the east,—a place that divided
Crowson’s range from the old Bear Canyon country. A man rode lightly in
the saddle: and his dark skin revealed him as an alien in this northern
land. José Mertos was riding on orders, and he came swiftly. There was
work for him to-day.
He seemed to know just what to do. From time to time he scanned the
horizon as if searching for a landmark. Then he turned off the trail
through the heavy timber. The forest constantly grew more brushy, his
advance ever more difficult. And at last he came to the mouth of a
great, still canyon.
Very swiftly he went to work. And if it had not been for the curious
intentness of his eyes, an unexplainable nervousness in his motions, one
would have thought that he was merely making a camp. He collected a
little pile of dry bark and pushed a few brown pine needles under it.
Then he broke off some of the brittle branches of the underbrush. These
were piled on too; and a match flashed in his hand.
Just a moment he stood, waiting until the flame—a yellow hungry little
tongue that a slap of the hand could extinguish—crept like a serpent
into the little heap of dead bark. He saw it grow and climb till, with a
sudden leap, it sprang into the dry branches that he had broken off. And
from there it was only one leap to the brittle brush of the shrubbery of
the thicket.
José smiled then, a little, dim curling of his thin lips over his
gleaming teeth. And he did not smile often. An event had to be very
cruel and hurt some one very badly to waken mirth in him. And now there
was no answering echo of simple pleasure in his dark eyes. Rather the
fire that he had ignited had crept into them also: the pupils were oddly
contracted and bright as points of steel. He seemed somewhat breathless,
too, stirred to the depths with a madness unknown even to the wild
creatures.
There is no more wholesome emotion on earth than the love for the open
fire. It was the first friend, and its comradeship and protection are
remembered from the immeasurable past. And there is no madness that is
so devastating and terrible as that of incendiarism. José was not,
ordinarily, a man given to excesses. But the fire madness was upon him
now.
A fiendish light was in his eyes, a ghastly drawing distorted his
features. His motions were less careful and patient. He laughed harshly,
then swung on to his horse. He headed up the canyon, swooped off his
horse’s back, and lighted another fire. The crackle of the first
conflagration had already grown to a menacing roar behind him.
A quarter of a mile farther he lighted the third fire, and then the
fourth. It was not to be just a sporadic brush fire, with open lanes
between. It was to be a veritable wall of flame. It was the forest fire
in its full sense, sweeping swiftly and immutably over hill and valley,
through thicket and open forest, and leaving only ugly sticks and black
ashes in its wake. The flame pounced upon the trees. The dusky branches
caught, the red demon mounted higher, and already the spaces between his
first few starting fires were closing up.
But still José did not cease. For five miles across the canyons he
rode—in a great crescent—stopping ever to light his fires. And when
that ride was done, he turned his mount back through Smoky Land, toward
a certain canyon that was a gateway out of the region to high mountains
where the fire could not go. He had other work to do.