ROOT AND THE BOB-CAT 281 



that said plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! 

 Be careful there — oh! — I'll be on to you in just one minute!" 

 Koot kicked the dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at 

 himself because his eyes and his ears failed to localize, to real- 

 ize, to visualize what those little pricks and shivers tingling down 

 to his finger-tips meant. Then the civilized man came upper- 

 most in Koot and he marched off very matter-of-fact to the next 

 snare. 



But if Koot's vision had been as acute as his sense of feel and 

 he had glanced up to the topmost spreading bough of a pine just 

 above the snare, he might have detected lying in a dapple of sun 

 and shade something with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled 

 ear-tufts caught the first crisp of the man's moccasins over the snow- 

 crust. Then the ear-tufts were laid flat back against a furry form 

 hardly differing from the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl 

 eyes closed to a tiny blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell- 

 tale light. The big round body mottled gray and white like the 

 snowy tree widened — stretched — flattened till it was almost a part 

 of the tossing pine bough. Only when the man and dog below the 

 tree had passed far beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward 

 and the owl eyes open and the big body bunch out like a cat with 

 elevated haunches ready to spring. 



But by-and-by the man's snares began to tell on the rabbits. 

 They grew scarce and timid. And the thing that had rifled the 

 rabbit snares grew hunger-bold. One day when Koot and the 

 dog were skimming across the billowy drifts, something black far 

 ahead bounced up, caught a bunting on the wing, and with another 

 bounce disappeared among the trees. 



Koot said one word — "Cat !" — and the dog was off full cry. 



Ever since he had heard that wailing call from the swamp woods, 

 he had known that there were rival hunters, the keenest of all still 

 hunters among the rabbits. Every day he came upon the trail 

 of their ravages, rifled snares, dead squirrels, torn feathers, even 

 the remains of a fox or a coon. And sometimes he could tell from 



