22 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS 
should be his home for a while. He was tired of 
wandering. 
In the weeks that followed, Swiftfoot saw little 
of Fang, and nothing at all of Softfur. It was 
Fang’s task to hunt for his mate and the care of 
his family was his own particular business, which 
he shared with nobody. As summer came on, the 
game, for some reason, grew scarcer, and Swift- 
foot more than once met the other going down or 
coming up the mountain; he was hunting now on 
dangerous ground, around the clearings of the 
two-legged creatures. Once he had a chicken in 
his mouth, once a piece of juicy calf meat. They 
both smelled good to Swiftfoot, but with only 
himself to look after, he preferred to go a bit 
hungry rather than take such chances. Still, he 
did go down at night to the upper edges of the 
pastures, in the hope that he might cut a calf out 
of the herds, and once he came on a fox carrying 
a chicken, and ran it for a mile, till the fox had to 
drop his load in order to escape. That was an 
easy meal! 
All went well for some time, until one moon- 
light night, while he was cruising through the 
