The Way of the Wild (Sass)/Lynx Lucifer
_11.png)
FROM time to time during the night there al had been both sound and movement in the wood; but now, in the grayness of the November dawn, there was not even the flutter or the rustle of a leaf. The watcher behind the big pine log shivered. This, and not midnight, was the hour for ghosts and goblins in the swamp country—this pallid unearthly interval when the wild creatures of the night seemed to have withdrawn to their secret refuges and the wild creatures of the day had not yet ventured forth from their retreats. The lone watcher, long unused to the grim witchery of utter solitude, strained to catch the first reassuring sound which would announce the awakening of the daytime folk of the woods and prove that all life had not suddenly and mysteriously perished.
At last this sound came—a sharp metallic note from some small throat, slitting the silence like a miniature javelin. The watcher turned his head. Across the little glade at the edge of which his pine log lay, a narrow trail, hedged on each side by a dense growth of young pines, opened into the clear ing. He had selected his station behind the log so that he could watch this trail, knowing that it would be a thoroughfare for all who happened to pass that way in the moonlight, and his good judgment had been rewarded.
Since midnight, when he had gone on watch, three glimpses of woods wild folk had been vouchsafed him. He had scarcely settled himself behind the log when a big buck with widely arching antlers walked slowly along the trail, leaped the dry bed of the little stream which before the summer drought had wound through the glade, and passed on without pause into the woods some twenty feet to windward of the watcher. An hour later a raccoon ambled by, taking the same course which the buck had followed; and not long before daylight the watcher suddenly realized that a doe had come from nowhere and was standing motionless in the glade, a shadowy, impalpable figure the outlines of which he could barely distinguish. Presently the doe vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared, and thenceforward the patient watcher saw no living thing, though now and again his ears told him that smaller wild folk, invisible in that faint light, were passing at intervals. With the approach of dawn even these infinitesimal noises ceased, and for half an hour or more the silence was absolute untill that first sharp, small, metallic voice for the morning punctured it with startling suddenness.
The sound came from across the glade, where the trail through the pine thicket opened. The watcher recognized the voice as that of a water thrush, and presently in the brightening light he saw the bird walking about on the ground with quick steps and an incessant seesaw motion of its tail, searching for insects amid the brown pine needles. He watched it with the keen interest that he felt in all living things, large or small, wondering whether it had come to the glade expecting to find the little stream which had rippled through the place before the drought. The stream's bed was now dry sand; but on the previous evening a brief shower had fallen; and on the other side of the glade, near the edge of a small canebrake, there was one low spot still moist. To this spot the water thrush soon found its way; and there fate descended upon it.
From the edge of the canebrake a tawny beast shot out into the open. With a startled cry the water thrush took wing, but a widespread paw, bristling with curved needle-pointed claws, caught it in mid-air and bore it lifeless to the ground. For a moment the lynx crouched motionless, one furry forefoot planted upon his victim, his pale eyes searching the shadows around the edges of the glade to make sure that no enemy had witnessed his leap from the shelter of the canes. Then, taking the bird in his mouth, he crossed the glade in three bounds, making for the opening of the trail which led away through the pine thicket.
A low growl halted him. The watcher behind the pine log saw a strange sight, a sight which by itself was ample reward for his long vigil. At the entrance of the trail crouched another lynx, much larger than the first, his back arched, his glassy eyes glinting with a greenish light, his teeth bared in a menacing snarl. There was no mistaking the hostile purpose of this unlooked-for intruder, and he allowed no time for speculation. Hair bristling, white fangs gleaming, he stalked stiffly towards his smaller antagonist; then, as the latter backed away still holding the bird in his jaws, the big lynx launched himself forward in a long bound of almost incredible swiftness.
The struggle was far less noisy than the eager watcher behind the pine log had supposed that a fight between lynxes would be. Deep-throated savage snarls, now and again a low, mournful, repressed whine as fang or claw ripped through fur and hide to the white flesh underneath—these were the only sounds, and they would have been inaudible to a man if one had happened to pass twenty yards from the spot. Even in the fury of combat the instinct which renders the bay lynx the most silent and most mysterious inhabitant of the swamp woods kept its grip upon the two big cats. Yet they were too much absorbed in their struggle to note that from behind the pine log the form of their most dreaded enemy had reared itself into full view—the form of a man, or rather a slim, tall, black-haired boy of seventeen or eighteen years, clad in the brown shirt and corduroys of a woodsman, leaning forward over the log the better to view the battle.
The boy knew that rival male lynxes sometimes fought fierce duels in the woods, but he had never witnessed one of these combats, and he watched this one with breathless interest. The flying leap of the larger lynx had overborne his opponent, and during the first few seconds of the fight the big lynx was on top, his body completely hiding that of his foe. Almost immediately, however, this condition was reversed. The action was so swift that the boy could not follow it in detail, for the combatants were a squirming, writhing, revolving mass, and, locked as they were in close embrace, they were indistinguishable from each other. Presently this revolving motion ceased and the boy saw that the smaller lynx was uppermost, its fangs apparently buried in the throat of its adversary. He concluded that for once pluck and skill had triumphed over size and weight, but in an instant he realized his mistake.
The hind legs of the larger lynx were working like steam piston rods and his claws were tearing his enemy to ribbons, while with his forepaws and teeth he held his antagonist almost immovable. Evidently in lynx warfare the victor was he who kept his own shoulders pinned to the mat and fought upward from below, ripping and slashing with the ten sharp sheath knives with which his long muscular hind legs were equipped, knives which sooner or later would lay bare his foe's vitals. In a flash the boy saw that unless the smaller lynx could break away from that fatal embrace there could be but one ending. Moved by a sudden impulse of pity, he mounted the log with a shout and instantly the combatants flew apart, the smaller lynx shooting backward into the pine thicket, catapulted to safety by those same powerful hind legs of his enemy which a moment before had been ripping the life out of him.
The boy never saw him again. His attention was focused upon the victor, the biggest bay lynx that he had ever seen, facing him across the glade, its yellow eyes glaring amazement, hate and fear, its wide bearded face rendered almost demoniacal by the implacable fierceness of those eyes and by the savage snarl which revealed long teeth gleaming white in reddened jaws, teeth curved and thin like the teeth of a vampire. For a moment the boy stood spellbound, not with fear—for he knew the bay lynx too well to anticipate an assault even in the case of so huge a lynx as this one—but with astonishment at the size of the beast and at the ferocity of its aspect. Then suddenly he was aware of something else even more astonishing.
This lynx had but one ear. There was no doubt about it, for the light was now strong enough to show him every detail of the creature. Yet the fact was so amazing to the boy that in his eagerness to verify it he forgot even the hideous beauty of those savage unwinking eyes which at first had held his gaze as though there lurked in the greenish-yellow depths of them some strange power akin to hypnotism. Completely satisfied at last, he did a queer thing, queer almost to madness. He got down very slowly from the log on the side nearest the lynx, taking care to make no sudden movement, and stretched himself on his back in the short grass within a dozen feet of the crouching animal. Then clasping his hands under his head he said, "Come on, Byng."
No sooner were the words uttered: than he regretted his rashness. He could no longer see the lynx, but there flashed into his mind a vision of those long vampirelike fangs and those relentless eyes. His body quivered as he strained to catch the faintest sound, and at once he was sure that he heard, despite the thumping of his heart, stealthy footfalls slowly drawing nearer. A cold sweat chilled him; for a moment he was on the point of leaping to his feet. Yet, having begun his experiment, he was game enough to see it through, and once again he said calmly, 'Come on, Byng."
For perhaps half a minute more he lay still, fearing rather than hoping that his experiment would succeed. Then, slowly and still lying on his back, he turned his head.
The glade was empty.
The boy walked home through copper-splashed autumn woods and open savannahs of waving broom grass which with all their glory of gold and purple blooms could not keep his thoughts from returning again and again to the strange thing that had happened that morning. It was the strangest thing in all his experience, a thing the beginnings of which went back two years or more to those last days of his on the plantation before, in an evil moment, he had been persuaded to accept the offer of a former schoolmate in the North, whose father, a wealthy manufacturer, had gladly agreed to make an opening in his office for his son's closest friend. The plan had failed dismally. After many months of unhappiness in the rush and tumult of a great city, the boy, a planter born and bred, had given up a fight not only hopeless but mistaken; and now he was back again amid the scenes that he loved and in the country that was his own—that wild and beautiful Low Country which in the old days had been the domain of the great rice planters, a country of great woods, deep swamps, wide marshes, secret secluded lagoons and many winding rivers.
He had come back to it with a joy that was almost ecstatic, longing for the sight of the gray weather-worn plantation house amid its moss-tapestried live oaks, for the sight and the sound of the happy Low Country black folk scarcely changed by all that had happened since the rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon startled the herons from the rice fields in the '60's; longing for the ample sweep of the river marshes and the grateful silences of the cypress swamps; longing most of all, perhaps, for the companionship of the abundant wild folk of the Low Country woods and waters, the deer and the tall bronze wild turkeys, the gleaming white herons and the fantastic long-shanked wood ibises, the vast fleets of ducks that covered the rice fields in winter, the innumerable hosts of singing birds that came with the spring.
In only one important respect had his long absence from these familiar scenes changed the boy. In the old days he had been an inveterate hunter. He now realized that though he was still a hunter the lust of killing had gone out of him. He would not throw away his gun, a gun scarred with notches each one of which told a memorable tale of a buck or a gobbler; but he knew that now he would often forget to carry it with him when he went into the woods. For in those last weary months of his exile he had missed the wild folk not as game but as friends.
He had not carried it with him when, only two or three nights after his return to the plantation, he had gone out into the moonlit woods shortly before midnight to wait and watch until dawn at a certain spot which had been a favorite resort of his because it was a favorite resort of the wild folk also. He wanted no gun that night because his desire was not to kill, but to renew old acquaintanceships—to catch a glimpse, if luck favored him, of some of the wild creatures that move by night. He had been lucky beyond his highest hopes and he felt that the woods gods had prepared a special welcome for him upon his home-coming, showing him a wide-antlered buck and a doe, his wily old friend the coon, and, as a thrilling climax, a battle of lynxes, a rare sight which very few have ever witnessed. And even all this had not contented the gracious woods gods. They had so arranged matters that one of the battling lynxes should be a giant lynx with only one ear and that he should view this one-eared lynx from behind a certain big pine log where once upon a time a strange thing had happened.
The boy's thoughts returned to that event of nearly three years before. Guests were expected at the plantation. His mother's ideas of hospitality required a wild turkey for the occasion, and he went out to try to get one. Before dawn he took his station behind the big pine log at a point where a low evergreen bush afforded additional concealment. At day-clean, as the Low Country woodsmen term the full dawn, he began calling. With his lips pressed against the bowl of an old brier pipe he could make sounds which only the wiliest of the long-bearded old gobblers could recognize as counterfeit. He called three or four times, waited a few minutes, then called again. It was just the hour when the turkeys should be coming down from the tall trees deep in the swamps to feed, and the boy listened eagerly for an answer to his summons.
Presently he heard a faint sound which, however, was certainly not made by a turkey. It came, he thought, from the reeds fringing the little canebrake at the edge of the glade, and he concluded that it was probably only a marsh rabbit. Sitting on the ground behind the log, his gun within easy reach of his right hand, he continued calling at intervals, using all his art, trying all the tricks of tone and of timbre which experience had taught him.
Suddenly he heard again that queer faint sound, this time close at hand and directly in front of him, just beyond the log and behind the evergreen bush. Leaning forward to look over the log, he found himself gazing straight into the glowing eyes of a lynx, crouched, poised, taut for the spring, almost in the very act of springing.
For a fraction of a minute neither boy nor wildcat stirred. Then, as the boy's hand shot towards his gun, the lynx sprang straight at him. Poised as she was, her mind and her muscles keyed up for her final leap upon the supposed turkey behind the log the moment the bird moved, she could not readjust herself upon the instant to the astounding discovery that this turkey which she had been stalking was a man.
The boy's quickness saved him from serious injury. He ducked like a flash, and the flying lynx passed between his face and his right hand gripping the gun, one hind claw scratching his knuckles as she passed. She struck the ground running, a brown streak flashing towards the cover of a dense thicket thirty yards away, and the boy was rather surprised when the load of turkey shot which went crashing after her bowled her over like a rabbit.
He was a little regretful when he found that she was a nursing mother, and his conscience compelled him to make a search for the kittens. He found them an hour or so later, after he had gone back to the plantation house and returned with his big black-and-tan hound, but the dog killed two of the three before the boy could get to them. The third owed its life to the fact that, baby though it was, it made a brave fight against its huge foe. It was badly chewed about the head and ears and was covered with blood when the boy pulled the dog out of the lynx den in a great hollow oak stump and rescued the sole survivor of the family; but it was still full of fight as he wrapped it in his hunting coat, and once or twice during the walk back to the plantation house it made its claws felt even through that thick covering.
As soon as its wounds had healed, the striped and spotted bobtailed kitten throve amazingly. From a diet of milk it passed with evident relish to a diet of meat, and by the time it was three months old its size and strength already proved it to be an exceptional specimen of its kind. The boy kept it in a large wire-covered inclosure in the yard under a wide-spreading live oak and fed it himself with the greatest care. He knew that the bay lynx, or wildcat, is not easily tamed and that even when taken very young its savage instincts are always close to the surface. But the boy had a way of his own with animals, and although the young lynx hated and feared all the other members of the family and all the plantation hands, it soon conceived a real affection for its master. Sometimes, when the plantation dogs were absent, he would let it out of its pen and the two would play games about the yard—games which often ended with the boy taking a nap under a tree, lying flat on his back in the shade, his head resting on his clasped hands. At such times the little lynx invariably jumped upon his big playmate's chest and, curling himself up, dozed there in great content, growling viciously at anyone who approached.
When the boy went North to begin his business career this comradeship ended. There was no one to whom the lynx, now more than half grown, could be given, for its dislike of all other human beings had become more intense as it grew older. Once when the boy had taken his pet with him to a wooded hollow near the house the lynx had gone bounding off after a rabbit. He had remained away nearly two hours and upon his return had shown for the first time in his life a certain coldness towards his master. This had worn off presently, but the boy understood its significance and remembered it.
As the time for his departure drew near he took the lynx again and again into the woods and thicket-bordered fields and generally managed to start a rabbit. Longer and longer grew the lynx's absences, and once he stayed in the woods all night. The next afternoon, an hour before sunset, the boy, feeling rather sad about it, prepared to make an end.
This time he went with the lynx far into the deep woods, three miles or more from the plantation house, at the edge of a great swamp; and this time he took his gun with him.
He walked, with his velvet-footed companion at his heels, along the margin of a reed-grown lagoon until a short-eared, short-legged marsh rabbit, slow and clumsy compared with a cottontail, jumped up in front of him, and the long-limbed, lanky wildcat went bounding away, gaining upon the fugitive at every leap. The boy waited a half minute, raised his gun and fired first one barrel, then the other. Reloading hurriedly, he fired two more shots, conscious of a certain pang as he recalled the frantic terror with which the discharge of a gun always inspired the lynx.
"Good-by, Byng," he said, with a touch of sentimentality by no means foreign to his nature. "If I ever see you again I'll know you. But I guess it's good-by forever."
But the woods gods ruled otherwise. After more than two years they had brought the boy and Byng together again. There was no doubt in the boy's mind as to the identity of the great one-eared lynx that had fought the battle in the glade. That missing ear was a convincing identification mark. The black-and-tan hound, which had found the lynx kittens in the hollow oak stump and killed two of them, had mangled the right ear of the third so badly that, as soon as the boy reached the plantation house with his captive, he had clipped away the ragged and bloody remnants of that ear with a pair of sharp scissors.
In this way Byng was marked for life, and marked unmistakably, while, in addition, his great size would render him easily recognizable. As the boy, still thrilling with the strangeness of that dramatic meeting in the glade, walked homeward through the painted autumn woods and the yellowing broom-grass fields where nodding plumes of goldenrod shone in the morning light, he felt that for Byng and himself the woods gods had still other adventures in store.
That fall and winter were a busy time for the boy. He had taken over the management of the plantation and he worked hard. Yet, insatiable woodsman that he was, he contrived to spend part of nearly every day in the woods; and always he was on the lookout for the one-eared lynx, who was, he knew, the ruler of all the wild folk of those woods except the big, arrogant whitetail bucks, who feared none of the other wild four-foots, barring only the black bears when at rare intervals they passed through on their journeys from one of the great swamps to another, and the long armored alligators who were the masters of the rivers and lagoons.
But not once that winter did the boy see Byng, though several times he saw his handiwork. Sometimes it was a smooth-barked sapling scratched and scarred where a tall beast had reared on its hind legs and sharpened the claws of its front feet. Sometimes it was the scanty remnant of a rabbit devoured hide and all, and in the sand near by great rounded tracks nearly twice as large as those of the average wildcat. Occasionally, too, the boy had a feeling that he was being watched and followed. All his skill at woodcraft, however, failed to confirm this suspicion, and finally he decided that his imagination was playing him tricks and he determined to put Byng out of his mind.
It was otherwise with Byng. He could not put the boy out of his mind because the boy was forever crossing his path. The big lynx had a definite range marked by two rivers, neither of which he ever attempted to cross because, in the first place, he was not much of a swimmer, and, in the second place, alligators lived in them. The plantation house was situated midway between these rivers, the center of some five thousand acres of forest, savannah and swamp. This was the lynx's hunting ground, a hunting ground abounding in bird and animal life and especially rich in quail and rabbits, both swamp rabbits and cottontails. Here food was plentiful and was easily obtained; even in the first weeks of his freedom he had found little difficulty, thanks to his inherited woodcraft, in picking up a living. And here he was fairly safe.
Few poachers invaded these woods, and during the boy's absence in the North little hunting had been done there. Sometimes at night Byng heard or saw negro possum and coon hunters, but these gave him little anxiety. Twice, however, he encountered a more serious problem when Sandy Jim Mayfield followed his pack of long lean deer hounds, hot on the trail of buck or doe, into the one-eared lynx's territory. As luck would have it, on each of these occasions the pack crossed Byng's trail, and it might have fared ill with him had not these dogs been trained so well by Sandy Jim to disregard all the other scents of the woods when they were on the track of a deer.
As it was, Byng had one close call. Sandy Jim, sitting on his wiry little mare in a narrow woods road, listening to the music of his hounds and holding his gun at his shoulder for a quick shot, saw a long brown shape flash across the opening in front of him. He fired, then cursed himself not only for missing the lynx but for firing at all. The empty cartridge jammed in the breech of his single-barreled gun, and before he could pry it out the buck which his dogs had been trailing walked across the road with a nonchalance and deliberateness which would have sealed his doom had the old hunter been ready for him.
Sandy Jim did not know it, but he had not missed altogether. One buckshot had plowed a furrow across Byng's back just above the haunches. The wound was nothing. It healed within a week. But for months afterwards Byng's hair bristled whenever his thoughts went back to that experience.
The big lynx did not need this lesson to teach him the fear of man. That fear he already had, by inheritance, and it was implanted deep in his being. But his encounter with Sandy Jim sharpened and intensified his dread of the whole human species and helped to repress and nullify the strange promptings which came to him always when his path happened to cross that of the boy.
At that first meeting in the glade he had recognized the latter instantly, and a flood of memories had swept into his brain as the boy lay down in front of him and called to him in the old unforgotten way. For a few moments conflicting forces in his nature had struggled for the mastery; but the influence of unnumbered generations of man-fearing and man-hating ancestors had triumphed in the end. Swiftly he had slunk away into the thicket, trembling, hating, fearing, yet remembering and loving; and always thereafter, when he saw or scented the boy in the woods, these memories—like faint whisperings or dim cloudy picturings in his brain—came back to him. But they never conquered his fear or led him to approach very close to the boy. Even when, as happened upon more than one occasion, he came upon the boy taking a nap in the woods, the lynx kept his distance, watching from some dense covert until the sleeper rose and went his way.
Thus the winter passed and presently it was spring in the Low Country; for the boy a season of delight because of the immeasurable beauty of it and the wonderful birds that it brought—the tall white egrets, the high-soaring ibises, the fantastic anhingas, or water turkeys, the painted blue-and-green-and-crimson nonpareils, and all the other gay-plumaged makers of music who came up from the tropics with the warm weather. He seldom thought of Byng now on his rambles because there were so many other things of absorbing interest to occupy his mind.
Then, early one May morning, when the boy discovered a newly born fawn curled up under a myrtle bush and concealed himself near by to await the return of the fawn's mother, the woods gods intervened again.
Three hundred yards up the wind from the spot where the fawn lay motionless on the soft bed of leaves where its mother had left it, a tall wild gobbler was getting his breakfast. The forest was open and parklike here, a mixture of pines and oaks with no underbrush to speak of; and Byng, who had acquired a decided taste for turkey, was studying the situation from the shelter of an oak trunk a hundred feet or so to the gobbler's left.
To stalk the wary old bird under such unfavorable conditions he knew to be impossible. After some minutes' consideration he had almost made up his mind to leave the gobbler in peace, for he realized that this might be a rather protracted affair, and it was not his custom to hunt by day. But at that moment the gobbler, having exhausted the foraging possibilities of that immediate locality, began to stride away through the woods, and it flashed into Byng's mind that he knew where the big bird was going and that there was an excellent chance of ambushing him on the way. Making a wide circle so as to avoid all danger of detection, he set off to post himself at a point in the gobbler's path where a lucky leap might result in a kill.
He had almost gained the spot that he had in mind when he halted suddenly. Though a far less efficient organ than the nose of a fox, his nose was of some value to him in hunting, and it had brought him tidings of sweet tender meat near at hand. Swerving sharply, he crept forward very slowly, inch by inch, his cushioned feet making no sound. Presently he stopped close to a myrtle bush, feasted his fierce eyes for a moment upon a spotted, gently breathing thing underneath it, then searched carefully the opening beyond the bush. Next moment he leaped upon the fawn and buried his long fangs in the little creature's throat.
The boy, watching from his place of concealment fifteen yards away behind a log, saw the murder and sprang to his feet with a shout. Nothing in the wild life of the woods moved him more than the love of a doe for her little one. Several times the rare privilege had been accorded him of witnessing this mother love, and he had waited patiently behind his log, anticipating eagerly the moment when the mother, called away by some urgent business of her own, would return. His gaze was resting on the fawn, as motionless as though it were fast asleep, though its big eyes were wide and alert, when, without the slightest warning, the great lynx burst through the leafy screen behind it and tore its throat open.
The boy had been idly whittling a stick. As he leaped over the log and rushed to the fawn's rescue, his eyes blazing with fury, he flourished the big knife in his right hand and shifted his grip upon its handle. To his surprise the lynx, crouching upon its victim, remained motionless, teeth bared in an ugly snarl, blood dripping from its jaws. For a moment the boy believed that he was in for a battle, and in the rage that possessed him the prospect filled him with fierce joy. But as a matter of fact it was sheer amazement that paralyzed the lynx temporarily, and when the boy was still ten feet from him he recovered his wits. He bounded three feet to the right, and as though made of India rubber, bounced thence to the edge of the thicket. Whirling in mid-career, the boy hurled the knife at him as he vanished amid the foliage.
Two minutes later the fawn died in the boy's arms, gazing up into his face with large, crystalline, stricken eyes full of vague, questioning wonder. As the light went out of them the boy vowed unceasing relentless war against the murderer. To him the one-eared lynx was no longer Byng, the playful, affectionate, striped-and-spotted kitten of other days. He was the savage, bloody-toothed slaughterer of innocent woods babies. The boy, who had to have a name for everything, renamed him Lynx Lucifer; and thenceforward there was a price upon his head.
When the boy picked up his knife after a short search in the thicket where he had thrown it, he was glad to note that there was blood on the blade.
Byng, roaming his woods as usual and, as always, more or less on the lookout for the boy, of course knew nothing of the great change that had come about. He could not know that a dollar had been offered to any negro on the plantation who would bring in the body of a big wildcat with only one ear. Nor could he know that the boy had ridden over to the house of Sandy Jim Mayfield, his nearest white neighbor, to learn whether he had a dog in his deer pack that would follow the trail of a cat and to give him leave to hunt wildcats in the plantation woods. Byng was conscious of no resentment over the boy's sudden attack upon him, and the flesh wound where the knife had struck him on one hind quarter was too slight to cause serious annoyance. When, two mornings afterwards, he heard the boy in the woods, he left his sleeping place in a tangled, almost impenetrable thicket of thorny vines and moved swiftly towards the sounds. For a half mile or so he followed the boy, catching a glimpse of him now and then, sensible of those same strange promptings born of the old comradeship, never suspecting the reason why this time the boy carried his gun.
On the fifth night after the killing of the fawn Byng did something that he had never done before. Always up to that time a wholesome respect for Sandy Jim's dogs had caused him to avoid the vicinity of the woodsman's house; but on this night he happened to take a short cut which led him within a hundred feet of Mayfield's fence and, perhaps because the night was an especially black one and no dogs seemed to be about, he was encouraged to explore the premises.
The blackness meant nothing to Byng. His luminous eyes were made for such nights, and when a slight noise caused him to glance upward he recognized instantly the five big bulky objects fifteen feet or so above him on a limb of a large leaning mulberry tree. He passed like a ghost up the slanting trunk of the tree, fastened himself upon the nearest turkey hen, and leaped with it to the ground. The turkey was too heavy to be carried far. Within a half mile he stopped, feasted to his heart's content, then buried the rest of the carcass and scratched dead leaves over the spot.
The boy was writing a letter in the plantation-house library when he saw Sandy Jim Mayfield galloping up the long avenue of live oaks leading to the house. He greeted his visitor cordially; for if it was true that Sandy Jim sometimes followed upon the plantation lands a deer which his pack had jumped, it was true also that his woodcraft was of that rare quality which the boy always admired wherever he found it. If a man were a good enough woodsman the boy would forgive him most of his sins; and so, although there was much about the lean, stoop-shouldered, white-mustached swamp ranger that was far from admirable, the boy and he were friends after a fashion.
The old woodsman, lithe as an otter in spite of his seventy years, drew up his clay-bank mare in front of the white-pillared portico and declined an invitation to dismount and come in.
"Remember that big wildcat you was after killin'?" he drawled.
The boy nodded.
"You kin kill him today if you want to."
"How's that?" asked the boy.
"Night before last he stole one o' my turkeys an' buried the carkiss in the woods a half mile from my house. I found the place an' set traps all round it. Las' night he come back to finish eatin' the carkiss an' one o' the traps got him. But he yanked the trap loose an' carried it with him. Must be a powerful brute."
Sandy Jim paused to shift his quid.
"Why didn't you trail him?" the boy asked.
"Couldn't. My old woman's took another sick spell. Got to hustle to town this mornin' an' git some o' them heart drops. Gabe's off seein' his gal, an' the boys are gone with the pack on a hunt over in Big Cypress where there ain't no chance o' runnin' into one o' them game wardens. But the Airdale's at the house, an' he trails a cat pretty good. You kin take him an' have that cat's hide in a couple o' hours. He can't go fur with that steel trap a'-hangin' on his forefoot."
Terror and agony such as he had never before known were driving Byng almost mad in the woods. He had traveled farther than Sandy Jim had thought possible. The trap gripping his left foreleg was not a very large one, and the big lynx, spurred on by a frenzy of pain and fear, was able to make fairly good headway on three legs, half-lifting, half-dragging the cold terrible unknown thing which clutched and paralyzed the fourth. But it was heart-breaking work and after an hour of it Byng was utterly exhausted.
He lay down, flanks heaving, eyes glaring, head lolling on his shoulders. Presently, when he had got his wind back, he bit savagely at the hard steel, then staggered to his feet again and pulled and tugged, jerking the trap this way and that. The pain was less severe now, because the leg had grown numb, but he was wilder than ever with terror. Blindly, with no idea of where he was going and no sense of direction, he started off again through the woods.
It was nearly midday when he heard the Airedale coming. The dog was really half Airedale, half hound, a huge, light-brown, shaggy creature, ill-tempered and powerful, the undisputed master of Sandy Jim's pack. Byng knew him and instantly recognized his voice, a short sharp yelping very different from the resonant voice of a hound. The hair bristled along the lynx's back and his curved claws unsheathed themselves, then withdrew into their scabbards.
Yet in the presence of this new danger he did not give way to panic. For two hours he had been lying quietly in the midst of a small thicket of arundinaria cane, deep in a lonely pine wood. The pain had gone out of his leg, which was now completely benumbed, and the stillness and seclusion of the spot had served to steady his nerves. Resting thus, his strength, so nearly spent in his frenzied and laborious progress through the woods, had slowly come back to him, and as his strength returned the mad terror gradually subsided. At the first sound of the Airedale's voice his wits went to work to meet the new emergency.
He saw no tree near him that he could climb. With only three good legs he could never drag himself and the trap up the straight trunk of one of those giant pines. A hundred yards away the pine wood thinned and sloped down to a deep hollow, where a backwater from a small creek had made a little swamp densely grown with young sweet gums. Byng hated to leave the cover of the cane thicket, but if he could reach this swamp in time the many small pools of water might baffle the trailing dog.
At once he set out and had traveled fifty yards from the edge of the canes, when the trap caught on a snag in the sparse grass under the scattered trees, resisting all his efforts to jerk it loose. For five minutes he struggled vainly to free himself, while the yelping of the dog drew steadily nearer. Then, just as the snag broke at last, throwing him backward in a heap, he saw the tall form of the boy striding amid the tree trunks.
Somehow, as a reflex of the strange subtle emotions which always rose in him when he saw or scented the boy, the sight brought him reassurance. He had thought that it was Sandy Jim who was ranging the woods with his dog; but instead it was the one human being for whom his heart held something else than fear and hate, the human being who was a part of those shadowy recollections that sometimes hovered in the background of his mind as he dozed away the daylight hours in some one of his many secret sleeping places. Again the panic, which had been swelling in him like a tide, halted and began to recede. He crouched low, his eyes fixed upon the boy, knowing that in those open woods the moment he moved he would be seen, still fearing discovery, though now discovery had been robbed of half its terrors.
The boy, holding the straining Airedale in leash, his gun balanced in his left hand, was heading straight for the cane thicket. So hot was the scent that at any moment he expected to come upon the lynx, and his eyes were searching the woods ahead of him. Near the edge of the canes, however, the scream of a red-shouldered hawk circling above the sweet-gum swamp to the right caused him to glance in that direction, and in a moment he saw the tawny form of the lynx in full view, standing out conspicuously against the green carpet of the thinly wooded savanna. Releasing his hold upon the leash, he let the dog plunge into the canes on the hot trail, while he himself turned at right angles and walked swiftly towards the lynx, holding his gun ready.
At a distance of ten paces he halted. The big cat had moved not a muscle, uttered not a sound. But for its bristling hair and its steady, unwinking eyes, he might have believed it dead as it lay there in front of him, its one ear pricked forward, its round bearded face pillowed on its forepaws, to one of which the steel trap still clung.
The boy muttered an exclamation of impatience. It was his own weakness which provoked him—the sentimental weakness which had caused him to see for an instant in that round bearded face the face of the striped-and-spotted lynx kitten which used to curl itself up on his chest when he lay down for a nap under the plantation trees—the face of Byng, his playmate, and not the fiendish face of Lynx Lucifer, murderer of little fawns. He raised his gun and took careful aim, drawing a bead upon the furry forehead between the unwinking eyes.
Coming from behind, in long leaps that made no sound as his big paws pounded the springy turf, the Airedale flashed past him, a long-drawn streak of yellowish brown that almost brushed his elbow as it shot by. So startled was the boy that, in the very act of pulling trigger, he jumped aside, and the load of buckshot dug a hole in the ground three feet from the squirming, writhing mass in front of him where dog and lynx heaved and strained in deadly embrace. A half minute the boy stood irresolute, watching the battle. Then he hurriedly laid down his gun, useless now because he could not shoot one combatant without hitting the other, and made a leap for the end of the Airedale's leash, switching and jumping about over the ground like a black serpent engaged in some strange dance.
Sandy Jim's last word to him had been an earnest injunction not to let the dog come to close quarters with the lynx. Knowing his dog's fierce and indomitable spirit and aware also that the lynx was an extraordinarily large and powerful specimen, Mayfield realized that, though the Airedale might win in the end, the victory would be dearly bought. So tough is a lynx's skin, especially about the region of the throat, that a dog's teeth can tear it only with great difficulty, and in most single combats the dog wins, if he wins at all, by dint of the throttling pressure of his jaws constricting his foe's windpipe. This is likely to be a comparatively slow process, and in the meantime the dog may be slashed almost to ribbons by the lynx's long curved claws.
This was what was happening now. Again, as in that other battle in the glade at dawn, Byng was on his back, his enemy on top of him; and again his hind legs were working like steam piston rods, drawing blood at nearly every upward trust. Badly hampered though he was by the trap clinging to his forepaw, he was fighting furiously and effectively for his life; and even in the hurry and excitement of the moment the boy felt a thrill of admiration for the lithe, steel-sinewed beast that could make such a fight against such odds, and for the wild, fierce spirit that would not give up so long as breath remained in the body that incased it.
But that breath was growing shorter. The big Airedale had his grip now. His great jaws were clamped upon the lynx's throat just where it left the chest, clamped with a vicelike grip which all the mad struggles of his enemy, heaving and writhing underneath him, could not shake loose; and the boy knew that they would remain fastened there till life went out of the lynx or till the dog, now streaming with blood from his lacerated under parts, was disemboweled.
The boy feared the latter ending. Abandoning his efforts to seize the elusive leash and disregarding the danger of injury to himself, he jumped close in and managed at last to get his hand under the Airedale's collar. Then, straining and stumbling, putting all his strength into the effort, he finally succeeded in pulling the dog clear. As the long, square jaws lost their hold the lynx, which had been lifted a little from the ground, fell back limp and helpless and lay still.
The boy tied the struggling dog to a sapling twenty feet away and left him there plunging and rearing at the end of the stout leather leash. The lynx, hideously besmeared with blood, still lay on its side as if dead; but the yellow eyes were open and it still breathed, the breath coming in quick gasps. The boy moved towards his gun lying in the grass, breeched it, and slipped a shell into the empty barrel. When he turned towards the lynx again he saw that it had moved its head slightly and that the eyes were fixed upon him, steady, unwinking, unafraid.
A long time the boy looked into the translucent depths of them, his gun half raised to his shoulder. He was not happy. Suddenly the thought came to him that this was a cowardly business and a shoddy victory, this victory that he had won over Byng—it was Byng that he thought of now, not Lynx Lucifer—hampered and crippled by the steel trap clinging to his forefoot, Byng who had fought so magnificently an utterly hopeless fight. He lowered the gun and laid it on the grass, then stooped beside the lynx.
Watching the yellow eyes narrowly, though he believed that the animal was too weak to use tooth or claw, he felt the skin of its throat and chest. It was as Mayfield had said; the hide was not torn; all the blood of that bloody battle had come from the dog. Still watching those eyes, and alert to withdraw his hand quickly at the first hostile move, he took the left foreleg in his hand, testing it with deft fingers. No bones were broken. Bearing down upon the trap with his knees, he drew it off as the steel jaws opened, and tossed it behind him.
Then he stepped back five paces and sat down in the grass.
For five minutes, perhaps, the lynx lay still. It had been very close to death and its strength came back very slowly. Gradually, however, its breathing became more regular and presently it raised its head slowly and weakly, then struggled to its feet.
A half minute it stood, swaying precariously, head hanging low, eyes still fixed on the boy's face. There was no fierceness in them: but the whiskered jaws were still red with the Airedale's blood, and instantly the boy's mind went back to the murdered fawn. His hand stole towards his gun, but stopped halfway.
"Good-by again, Lynx Lucifer," he said. "Don't ever let me get another sight of you along a gun barrel."
As though roused by the words, Byng turned and tottered on three legs across the savannah towards the friendly green coverts of the sweet-gum swamp.