The Way of the Wild

ast glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of an owl slid low over the spiked ramparts, and wings-the

tle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there. Once some bird-thing of the ni

how at midnight he managed to land himself far out over the marsh, unperceived. He was there-y

could have got over safely by night. It was not man, therefore, that was causing the cat to melt into t

n it, though night does play odd tricks with the human eyesight-faintly phosphorescent.

g. Once there was a splash, as if some

ine cases out of ten, to be invisible. The tenth case doesn't matter, because the creature that dis

ching of the black tip of his tail. Tiger-hunters know that twitching, and those who have stalked the lion will tell you of it, as also the sparrow on

t twitching then! I think so. It stopped, anyway, and became a pillar o

n-w

elin from the ghost, and--the cat on his hindlegs, screaming like a stricken devil, clawing at the ghost, now revealed as a very big, long-legged

-to be driven through the cat's skull as a sheer act of necessary self-defense, I fancy. But the cat did not wait to see. Imagine the infamy, the absolute sacrilege, from a cat's point of view, of

, and the water-voles ("rats," if you like) bolting to their holes; and there was the sighing "frou-frou-frou!" of great wings as the big bird rose and fled majestically. There was the sucking gurgle and drip-drip of

beak implies. A heron is one of those birds that can fight at need, and-knows it. Moreover, in his long beak, set on his

ng in the grass, and nothing else, had mistaken the same for his quarry. And this will be the easier to believe because w

em to be scandalized past speech at the fact. Indeed, he went farther. He came upon a ripple and a dot, some fi

c-spirited fashion from between Pharaoh's jaws, and it was the cat who was swimming. He had just taken a flying leap from the bank and lande

full upon the dumbfound