4A EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
the great talons of the flying death clamped through 
his soft fur. X is the signature of the owl-folk just 
as K is of the hawk-kind. The size of the mark in 
this case showed that the killer was one of the larger 
owls. Later in the winter it might have been the grim 
white Arctic owl, which sometimes comes down from 
the frozen North in very cold weather. So early in 
the season, however, it would be either the barred or 
the great horned owl. 
I had hunted and camped and fished and tramped 
all through this hill-country, and although I had 
often heard at night the “‘Whoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo” 
of the great horned owl, which keeps always the 
same pitch, I had never heard the call of the barred 
owl, which ends in a falling cadence with a peculiar 
deep, hollow note. So I decided that the maker 
of the track was that fierce king of the deep woods, 
whose head, with its ear-tufts or horns, may be seen 
peering from his nest of sticks on the mountainside 
in a high tree-top as early as February. On wings so 
mufiled by soft downy feathers as to be absolutely 
noiseless, he had swooped down in the darkness, and 
the tiny bubble of the shrew’s life had broken into 
the void. 
Beyond this point the road wound upward toward 
the slope of the Cobble, a steep, sharp-pointed little 
hill which suddenly thrust itself up from a circle of 
broad meadows and flat woodlands. Time was when 
all the Cobble was owned and ploughed clear to its 
peak by Great-great-uncle Samuel, who had a hasty 
disposition and a tremendous voice, and ploughed 
