78 Ways of Wood Folk. 



But the eyes were not looking at me at all. In- 

 deed, he had not noticed me. He was stealing along, 

 crouched low in the snow, his ears back, his stub tail 

 twitching nervously, his whole attention fixed tensely 

 on something beyond me out on the barren. I wanted 

 his beautiful skin ; but I wanted more to find out what 

 he was after; so I kept still and watched. 



At the edge of the barren he crouched under a dwarf 

 spruce, settled himself deeper in the snow by a wriggle 

 or two till his feet were well under him and his balance 

 perfect, and the red fire blazed in his eyes and his big 

 muscles quivered. Then he hurled himself forward 

 — one, two, a dozen mighty bounds through flying 

 snow, and he landed with a screech on the dome of 

 a beaver house. There he jumped about, shaking an 

 imaginary beaver like a fury, and gave another screech 

 that made one's spine tingle. That over, he stood very 

 still, looking off over the beaver roofs that dotted the 

 shore of a little pond there. The blaze died out of 

 his eyes ; a different look crept into them. He put 

 his nose down to a tiny hole in the mound, the beavers' 

 ventilator, and took a long sniff, while his whole body 

 seemed to distend with the warm rich odor that poured 

 up into his hungry nostrils. Then he rolled his head 

 sadly, and went away. 



Now all that was pure acting. A lynx likes beaver 

 meat better than anything else ; and this fellow had 



