Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/205

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lynx, he bounded upon the horse's back. The light of triumph, the joy of fulfillment in his eyes, he gave the long war whoop of his tribe. Then, as two white hunters dashed for their horses and their guns, he dug his heels into the pony's flanks and raced for the canebrake and the swamp where ten thousand hunters could not track or find him.

The chuck-will's-widows, those strange night fowls which are like the whippoorwills but much larger, do not understand the nature of moonlight. Ordinarily they sing chiefly at dusk and toward dawn; but when the moon shines in spring they think that the whole night is one long dusk or one long dawn, and they sing unceasingly from sunset to sunrise.

All night, in a sparkleberry thicket near Ahowhe's round hut in the village, a chuck-will's-widow had been singing. It was only one of many, for these birds were plentiful about the Yemassee town. Ahowhe, wakeful because of the trouble that had befallen, had listened to the bird for hours, scarcely aware that she heard it, her mind being full of other things.

She knew that Sinnawa, the aged chief, must bow to Almayne's demand. At dusk the famous white warrior and four others, one of them groaning with