CREATURES OF MYSTERY 
207 
a thrashing among the palmettoes, and then silence. Slowly 
the great snake uncoiled, and with head held high and horrible, 
disappeared into the brush, following the stricken animal’s 
trail by scent. 
A few days later the rattlesnake again came out of cover 
and coiled itself in the very center of the trail, sinister and 
unafraid in the warm sunlight. A faint musky odor exhaled 
from its mottled body, and at that scent of death all the wild 
creatures who had been accustomed to use that path turned 
aside long before they reached the sentinel who guarded it. 
Toward noon the basking snake sensed the vibrations of 
some approaching animal, and around the bend came a huge 
black beast with a splash of white in the center of its broad 
chest. The color, the humped hind quarters and the head 
swinging low on a long neck marked the king of all the car¬ 
nivora of Eastern America, the black bear. As his feet came 
nearer and nearer to the silent shape on the sand, a clicking 
whir broke the drowsy, noontide silence shary and sudden as 
an electric bell, and the nineteen rattles of the great snake, 
thrust straight up beside its flat, waiting head, moved so rap¬ 
idly that they showed only as a blur within its coils. Even 
before he caught the sound, the bear’s nostrils had told him 
who it was that guarded the trail before him. For a moment 
the black beast faced the brown snake, his body swaying inde¬ 
cisively in the sunlight. Then suddenly he turned aside and, 
making a wide detour around the threatening figure, picked 
up the trail farther on and disappeared in the brush. 
For fully five minutes after the bear had gone on, the whir 
of the snake’s rattles sounded as if controlled by some auto¬ 
matic mechanism which had to run down before it could stop. 
It was that prolonged rattling that was the great snake’s un¬ 
doing, for the long-continued insistent sound brought to the 
spot the one creature in the half-thousand square miles of that 
marsh who did not fear and avoid the reptile whose body lay 
across the trail. 
As the alarm-notes of the rattlesnake died away to a few 
scattered ticks, from the underbrush beside the path flowed a 
snake whose black body, cross-barred with chains of white 
