The Way of the Wild (Sass)/The King of the River

by Herbert Ravenel Sass

The King of the River

The King of the River

THE king of the river was predestined to ad© venture. It was his heritage and he accepted it phlegmatically, as he accepted all things, both good and ill. His adventures began early in his career—on the day when he first saw the light. They began not gradually or mildly, but grimly and fiercely, and it was only a fortunate chance that prevented his first day from being his last. But the king of the river had also been born lucky. The outcome of that first day's encounter marked the beginning of his luck.

He lay with twenty-seven of his brothers and sisters in the warm shallow water close to the edge of a small cypress-bordered lagoon. He was very tired, for he had just made a long journey—a journey of more than two hundred yards from the dry ridge in the swamp, where the alligator nest was situated, to the margin of the lonely swamp lake which was to be the home of his youth. The eight-foot saurian which had laid the eggs in that nest, covering them with sand and leaves and committing them to the care of the sun, had not returned when the time for hatching came, and the little black-and-yellow gators had no guide save unerring instinct.

Automatically, that one of them who was afterwards to be king of the river took command. He was fully nine inches long, longer by an inch than any of the others, and doubtless it was his superior size and strength that put him in the van as the strange procession started for the lagoon. So it fell to him to break a path through the lush weeds and stiff grasses, and when at last he reached a small shallow cove of the little woods lake he was too weary to swim on to the broader reaches beyond.

He lay at the surface of the still wine-brown water, in the midst of his brothers and sisters, basking in the warm sunshine, despite his weariness deliciously content; and as he lay thus, indolently enjoying his first taste of life, death came out of the rank reeds along the shore of the cove and struck right and left, claiming a victim at each stroke. For the tall white-and-black wood ibis who had been standing motionless as a statue at the edge of the water, his long bill resting on his chest, the arrival of the gator family was an unexpected piece of luck, and he was quick to take advantage of it.

A wise old bird was this long-legged, long-necked ibis. He moved not a muscle or a feather as he watched the little saurians come down through the narrow fringe of short marsh. Only when the last of them had reached the water did he stir. Then, hidden from them by a small peninsula of reeds, he hurried with swift awkward strides to the feast.

His mandibles gaped greedily, his wide, white, black-tipped wings were half open as he stalked like a tall ghost out of the reeds into the midst of his victims. If they saw him coming the instinct which was their only friend in the hard battle for life could not warn them in that brief instant that here was a foe who would cut life short before it had well begun. Down flashed the stout curved bill, its mandibles closed, a heavy, sharp-pointed pickax of which the ibis' long sinewy neck formed the handle—down, then up, down in another place, up once more, then down again with marvelous quickness and with perfect aim. Each time the pickax fell it fell upon a baby gator, generally striking the little saurian on the domelike head or just where neck and body joined. Six in all the ibis slew or stunned in quick succession before the survivors, awake at last to the danger, scuttled out to the deeper water or hid themselves under the duckweed and green slime. Then, with half a dozen victims dead or insensible behind him, the slayer opened his mandibles, thrust out his long neck and seized a seventh just as it was disappearing under a lily pad.

This seventh victim was he who was afterwards to be known as king of the river. He dangled by his tail from the ibis' bill as the tall bird stalked toward the shore; and it was fortunate for him that heavy rains had raised the water level of the cove, covering the dead logs and cypress knees that ordinarily studded its surface at that point. Had there been a log close at hand, the ibis would have killed him instantly by slapping his head against it; but the only log visible lay on the shore close to the spot where the gator procession had come down to the water's edge.

The ibis strode with swift steps toward this log which was to serve as an execution block for the little gator hanging from his bill; but because a tangle of smilax lay in front of the log, between it and the edge of the water, he did not approach it directly. Making a slight detour, he followed for ten feet or so the faint trail which the gator procession had made, then turned toward the log from the landward side where no smilax vines would hamper the movements of his head as he hammered his captive to death.

Preoccupied with the pressing business in hand, he did not see the furry form crouching close to the ground behind the smooth gray-green trunk of a young sycamore close beside the trail. He turned his back on the sycamore and took two steps toward the execution log; and instantly the gray fox, his delicate feet lightly touching the ground, skimmed silently over the grass and weeds and leaped upon him from the rear. It was a stroke of fortune for the fox. He had picked up the trail of the gator family on the ridge in the swamp and had followed it as fast as he could, hoping to overtake the procession before it reached the water. But this tall whiteand-black bird would furnish sweeter meat than the meat of baby gators; and, big though the bird was, the fox, landing squarely upon the ibis' back, knew how to chop that long neck neatly and effectively from behind.

 

This was the first manifestation of the luck that was to follow the future king of the river through the first months of his life—those perilous months when, far from being lord of all the water wild folk, he was among the least formidable of them all and was beset on all sides by enemies of many kinds against whom he had no defense except instinct and the cunning that grew in him as he grew.

This cunning must have begun to develop very early. Perhaps there was a hint of it in his behavior on that first day when, as the stricken ibis struggled in the throes of death, the little gator, released from the grip of that cruel bill, did not make straight for the water as blind instinct might have directed. Had he done so, he would have been spotted instantly by the fox, which would have had baby gator as an appetizer. Instead, he crawled very slowly under the log at a point where it was raised a little from the ground and buried himself in the muck, lying there utterly motionless until the gray-and-russet killer had feasted and had gone on his way. If the fox's nose told him that there was a little gator under the log, he was well fed by that time and did not think it worth while to dig the youngster out.

Thenceforward the baby saurian knew that danger lurked in the shallows along the margins of the lagoon. Whether this knowledge was merely instinct awakened by his encounter with the ibis, or whether it was the beginning of the wisdom that developed in his small brain as the months passed, it was a decisive factor in carrying him through his perilous babyhood. He still kept mainly to the shallows, for somehow he knew that there were even greater dangers in the brown translucent depths; but always he had a sharp eye open for tall birds which frequented the lagoon margins—for wood ibises, which he saw only occasionally, and for herons, which he saw in great numbers every day. The small life of the warm teeming waters afforded him abundant food; and all the while he was growing, not slowly, as most people suppose that alligators grow, but very fast.

The first and most dangerous season of his babyhood was also the shortest. A few weeks after he had emerged from the egg came the cool weather of fall; and, burying himself in the mud near the edge of the lagoon, he slept through the winter in peace. When he reappeared in early March he entered upon a period of still swifter growth. By the end of that summer he had more than doubled his length, and as he grew longer and bulkier the number of his enemies decreased. When he emerged from his second winter sleep the tall birds of the lagoon margins no longer terrified him; and that same summer he turned the tables on his feathered foes.

His warfare against the feathered water folk began on a modest scale. Many gallinules nested in wampee beds along the sunny margins and on floating islands of aquatic plarits in the open spaces, while at least half a dozen wood duck mothers had laid their eggs in deep holes dug in dead pines by big red-crested pileated woodpeckers or logcocks, giants of the woodpecker tribe. The saurian inhabitants of the lagoon, both large and small, took toll of the downy ducklings and the little gallinules; and now and again the yawning jaws of a big gator, rising suddenly from the depths, engulfed a parent bird.

It was late summer before the future king of the river had his first taste of revenge on the tall javelinbilled waders that had loomed so large among the ogres of his babyhood. One sunny morning, as he lay at the surface close to the shore, a great blue heron, which probably mistook the young gator for a small log, lit so near him that a sudden flirt of his muscular tail knocked the heron's stiltlike legs from under him. In an instant the saurian's long jaws clamped upon the bird's body, and in another half second the heron had been pulled into deep water. Two other young gators, attracted by the commotion, laid hold of the draggled bloody body and helped to tear it to pieces and devour it.

One more blow the tribes of the air were to strike at their saurian enemy; but before that happened a great change came to pass. In late summer came torrential rains continuing for many days. All the swamps of the Low Country were filled to over flowing, and the water level of the lagoon rose until the highest of the old watermarks on the bulging trunks of the cypresses were four inches under the surface. Dry swales and bottoms became pools or ponds, and the lagoon, as its level rose, sent out long arms of water, reaching like tentacles far off through the woods.

Exploring one of these new coves of the lagoon one September day, the future king of the river pushed on and on until he crossed a divide and came to the edge of the river ricefields. It was easier then to go on than to go back; and presently he was swimming down an old ricefield canal which led through a sunny wilderness of big round lotus leaves covering the abandoned flooded rice lands as far as the eye could see. The canal deepened as he swam on, emptying finally into another canal, which in turn emptied into a creek. Down this creek he followed the ebbing tide; and at last, in midafternoon, he came to the river of which he was destined to be king, and the cypress lagoon of his babyhood knew him no more.

The change was an advantageous one. Fish formed his staple food and the river teemed with fish of many kinds, while the scores of canals and ditches extending from the river far across the wet rice lands on either side of the winding stream were inexhaustible hunting grounds. The young gator fed bounteously and grew faster than ever. He was big enough now to prey on the biggest of the black bass; purple gallinules which lived in the lotus fields occasionally fell victim to him; once he was lucky enough to dine on an unwary marsh rabbit; and once a young raccoon, which rashly attempted to swim a break in a ricefield bank, afforded htm a sumptuous repast.

Little by little he was learning strategy. At a certain bend of the river many kingbirds perched on snags and sticks projecting from the soft sloping mud exposed along the banks at low tide. An inch above that mud innumerable winged insects darted and danced, and on these the kingbirds fed. Barn swallows, also, skimming with infinite grace back and forth above the marginal mud flats, preyed on these insect hosts, and never a wing of a swallow touched the mud. But the kingbirds, swooping down from their sticks and snags, often patted the mud with their wings. That mud was like oily glue. Little wings that patted it were sometimes held fast by it, and many kingbirds were thus trapped. Once they fell upon the mud, it incased them all over, clogging their feathers, rendering them incapable of flight.

Close to the edge of the water the young gator found a panting kingbird lying helpless. He swallowed the bird; then, slipping back into the water, he resumed his sun bath, lying six feet or so from the shore, only his eyes and nostrils showing above the surface. Soon he saw another kingbird touch the mud with its wing, flutter wildly, then lie still. This bird, too, he caught; and thenceforward for a week, while the kingbird migration was at its height, he found it profitable to lie in wait by the muddy margins at low tide. Late one afternoon, however, when the sun was sinking through crimson-dyed skies toward the distant purple woods beyond the lotus fields, something happened that cured him of this habit.

He had not learned to look for peril from above. His periscope eyes, projecting from the surface, kept keen watch upon the river and the river margins, but they neglected the upper spaces of the air. He was swimming slowly when the blow fell, his body barely submerged; and the red shafts of the late sunlight, shimmering and glinting on the myriad wavelets of the river, must have deceived the great white-headed eagle hurrying homeward after a long journey to distant hunting grounds.

Perhaps the eagle had hunted vainly that day and, mistaking the young gator's submerged body for a slow-moving fish, decided that this was one of those rare occasions when he would deign to do his own fishing instead of having his underlings, the ospreys, perform that service for him. At any rate, the moment he saw the gator gliding slowly through the rippling shallows close to the muddy margin where the kingbirds perched on their snags, he closed his wide wings and plunged, his legs thrust downward, his trenchant talons spread to the utmost.

In a whirl of wind from wildly beating wings, and in a shower of spray, those claws struck the saurian's back and side just behind the forelegs. The leathery plates of his back were not pierced; but on his flank, where the hide was less tough, the long claws penetrated deeply, so deeply that they could not be withdrawn. Once the eagle screamed—a farewell, perhaps, to the wide skies and the lonely swamp woods and the river lotus fields and marshes which he had known for nearly fifty years; but whether or not in that instant he realized his fate, he fought fiercely and bravely to wrench himself free as the terror-stricken young gator raced for the deeper water. For ten yards or so the river bottom shelved gradually, and for that distance the proud white head and the laboring wings remained above the surface. Then suddenly they vanished.

 

The years passed, and year by year the king of the river grew in length and bulk and cunning. A time came when he was king in fact, lord of all the river wild folk and afraid of no wild creature of the waters, the woods, or the air. Of monstrous girth and stretching fully fourteen feet from nose to tail tip, he was the greatest gator that the river had seen in half a century—a dragonlike monarch of the waters, rivaling those mighty saurians of the old days that lived out their allotted span because their armor was proof against the red man's weapons. That time had long gone by. Though the saurian race still abounded in the beautiful winding rivers and the deep swamps of the Low Country, it was seldom now that any member of that race lived long enough to attain a length of twelve feet. Soon or late, buckshot or rifle bullet found a vital spot; and it was only the great cunning of the king of the river—and perhaps the good luck that had seemed to attend him from the start—that kept him safe for so long.

Man was now the only foe that he feared; but so intense was his fear of man that it was the ruling passion of his life, shaping and directing all his activities. The selection of his basking places on the shore and of his dens under the river banks and the old ricefield dams, his comings and goings, his hunting expeditions and forays—all these depended upon and were governed by the degree of mandanger involved. Yet now and again he hit back at his dreaded foeman. He became an adept at hog stealing, skillfully stalking the half-wild woods hogs where they came down to wallow in the mud, seizing them in his huge jaws or knocking them senseless with his powerful tail. Several times man had provided him with even choicer meat—small 'possum dogs and coon dogs from the negro cabins; and once a fine imported setter, ignorant of the dangers lurking in the Low Country waters in the warm season, found her way into his insatiable maw.

Again and again, in spite of his cunning, death all but had him. Once he was hooked—caught on a set line baited with a dead gallinule suspended six inches above the water with a big shark hook imbedded in its carcass. Fortunately for him, a section of old rope, with which the line had been pieced out, was too rotten to withstand his struggles. He was never hooked again—the one lesson was enough.

Gunners were more dangerous foes. He carried much lead in his body, some of it in his head, for he had been wounded at least a dozen times, and three of these wounds were serious; but the gator, though more vulnerable than is commonly supposed, is exceedingly tenacious of life, and the bigger he is the harder it is to kill him. Because, in common with all his kind, he slept all winter in a secret den extending far back under the river bank, the river king was out of harm's way during the greater part of the period when human hunters were numerous in his domain; for when once summer had come to the Low Country, not many white men cared to brave the almost intolerable heat of the fresh-water rivers and lagoons. A few negro fishermen were even then abroad, but he had learned that these were not so greatly to be feared. They seldom took their rusty single-barreled shotguns with them when they went fishing, and they were not often tempted to waste their precious buckshot shells upon so difficult a target as a gator's eyes—two knobs, scarcely bigger than a pair of walnuts, projecting from the surface of the water some sixty or seventy yards away.

 

One afternoon in early April, when there was a sharper nip in the air than the king of the river liked, he passed through a gap in a ricefield bank and made his way along deep canals leading from the river to the landward edge of the ricefields. Presently, when he was sure that no man was near, he drew his huge body out upon the bank, which was merely a low dyke shaded by tall moss-bannered cypresses. Following a well-marked gator crawl, for many years a pathway for numberless saurians, he crossed this dike and entered the clear brown water of a long serpentine lagoon behind it. For half a mile he swam up the middle of this lagoon, only his eyes and nostrils visible. Swinging around a willow-covered point of land, he came into a hidden cove, secluded and still, surrounded on three sides by a dense growth of young cypresses in which perched many black-crowned night herons. At the end of the cove rose a high yet gently sloping bank facing the sun; and on this bank, basking in the warmth, lay six large alligators, ranging in size from eight to eleven feet, while from the water nearby protruded the grotesque heads and the rough, rugged, black backs of ten or twelve other saurians.

The king of the river had not expected to find the cove so crowded. He had not foreseen that the same reason which brought him there—the fact that this high westward-facing bank was an especially fine basking place on this unusually chilly April afternoon—would attract many others of his kind also. His favorite spot was already occupied by a big ten-foot bull, but the latter hastily made way for the saurian monarch as he drew his vast bulk out upon the shore.

For an hour he lay motionless among his fellows, drowsy yet watchful, his broad flat head facing the water, his long, jagged, perpendicularly flattened tail curved behind him. Then a sharp crack shattered the heavy silence of the cove and the dark water all along the bank surged and heaved as six ponderous armored bodies slid down the slope and plunged beneath the surface.

The king of the river had not moved. Just behind his right eye a black-red spot appeared and slowly grew larger. Soon his cavernous jaws gaped widely, his huge plated head twisted a little to the left, his ridged tail writhed slowly back and forth. A shudder shook his giant frame. Then he lay still, while a dark rivulet of blood trickled down the bank toward the water.

A canoe, which had emerged from behind the point of willows far up the cove, came skimming across the glassy surface. The white man who sat in the bow, a rifle across his knees, had not yet recovered from his amazement, though he carefully concealed this fact from his negro paddler. He was not a Low Countryman, but an uplander who had come to the Low Country to fish for black bass, and it pleased him to pretend that he made astonishing shots like this as a matter of course. He leaped out of the canoe the moment its bow touched the bank and, disregarding the negro's word of caution, advanced toward his victim.

Luckily for him, he was just beyond the danger zone when the king of the river came to life. So swiftly that the man's eye could scarcely follow the sweep of the long tail, the great gator's massive body bent itself like a bow, then instantly straightened. The man leaped back and, jerking the rifle to his shoulder, fired into the heaving water where a colossal black bulk, catapulted outward from the bank by the powerful muscles of that mighty tail, had vanished as if by magic.

Fifty feet from the shore the king of the river came to the surface. Straight down the middle of the cove he rushed, his juggernaut head and eight feet of his armored rugged back showing above the water. Madness had him—madness that was something more than a frenzy of terror and pain. The bullet which had entered his skull and temporarily paralyzed his body seemed now to have paralyzed instinct also. To the right of him, to the left and ahead the water spouted in little jets as the rifle bullets struck, but the great saurian did not submerge. Like a submarine with half its deck awash, he raced on at full speed, while the night herons, startled by the fusillade, flapped and croaked above him.

A bullet ripped a furrow in the armor of his back, but even this did not send him down to the depths where he would have found safety. Yet, if the instinct that should have kept him under water was dead for a time, he seemed to know even in his madness where he was going. Sometimes a gator, suddenly recovering consciousness after an almost fatal shot, charges aimlessly about at the surface, swimming frantically in circles or even driving himself up on the bank. But the king of the river, in that wild race, somehow held a straight course. Halfway down the cove, another bullet seared his back; but when at last he reached the end of the cove and, turning into the main lagoon, swung broadside to the gunner, the range was too great for any save a master rifleman.

An osprey, circling above the lower reaches of the lagoon, saw a huge black shape go surging by beneath him, sending out on either side long waves that rustled and whispered along the reedy margins. A gray fox, walking the cypress-shaded dike between the lagoon and the abandoned ricefields, quickened his pace as a dragon-like saurian charged straight for the dike and, rearing his gigantic dripping body out of the water, waddled awkwardly yet with surprising speed along the gator crawl and into the deep canal beyond. A lithe snake-bodied mink, about to swim the canal near the gap where it emptied into the river, heard a sound as of a swiftly moving boat, and, hiding amid the reeds, watched the river king race past along the narrow waterway.

In the river tide was ebbing. The wounded saurian, still swimming with frenzied energy, swung downstream with the current. The setting sun turned the rippling water to bronze, which changed to silver when the moon came up above the forest on the eastern bank; and in that ghostly, glimmering radiance a negro, crossing the river in his little bateau after a visit to his sweetheart's cabin, was suddenly aware of a monstrous black beast of the waters rushing down upon him. Groaning with superstitious terror, the man hid his face in his hands, and the bateau pitched and rocked as the monster surged past not five feet from the square bow. Miles farther down, well below the point where his river joined another river to form one of the main water highways of the Low Country, the mad gator met the flood tide. For some distance he bucked the current; but as its sweep grew stronger, little by little he turned and, swinging far over toward the eastern bank, headed back upstream.

His frenzy was passing now, or else his strength was giving out. He drifted rather than swam, and the current kept him near the eastern shore. Hence, when he reached the place where the river divided, it was the eastern branch that he ascended and not the western, down which he had come and which would take him back to his home. On and on he drifted for hours—weak, dazed, suffering, but no longer insane, dully conscious of his surroundings. At last, passing close to the mouth of a marsh gully, he propelled himself with feeble movements of his tail into this small waterway and came to rest on a mud bank just within the entrance.

 

In this strange manner the king of the river came to a new country. It was in early April that he came; and about the middle of the following September, Sandy Jim Mayfield, the hawk-faced, white-haired woodsman who lived at the edge of a big swamp near the eastern river, set himself two tasks—two tasks that were much to his taste. He would kill the great gator that was known as the king of the river and whose cunning had become famous in that region of the Low Country; and he would nail to his dining-room wall, bristling with more than fifty sets of antlers taken by him and his three sons, the massive, strangely palmated antlers of the big whitetail buck that had taken up his abode that spring in a laurel bottom near the southern end of the swamp.

These were undertakings which would test Mayfield's skill, but would surely add to his fame as a hunter and woodsman—the only sort of fame for which the old swamp ranger gave a snap of his horny fingers. For Sandy Jim, supremely confident of his own woodcraft, never doubted his success. Before the first frost of October the great armored hide of the river king would be drying in Mayfield's yard; and even sooner than that—for he preferred deer hunting to gator hunting—the splendid antlers of the flat-horned buck of Laurel Bay would be hoisted to the place of honor above the fireplace of the big room where Sandy Jim and his sons dined and smoked and talked, sometimes about crops, but more often about deer and dogs.

Mayfield lost no time in carrying out his plans. During the long Low Country summer the old woodsman was always lazy and indifferent; but invariably, as autumn drew near, his interest in life revived—and life for him meant hunting. That afternoon he saddled his wiry claybank mare and rode off through the pinelands toward the river ricefields. He had an idea that the flat-horned buck had taken to lying amid the reeds on a certain causeway, long ago fallen into disuse, connecting a large wooded island at the river's edge with the mainland. The spot was difficult of access and Mayfield had no expectation of getting a shot at the buck that afternoon; but he wanted to locate the animal's bed as a step in preparation for the hunt which he planned for the next morning.

Riding along the edge of the wooded highland toward the place where the ruined causeway made out across the green wilderness of the old rice fields, Sandy Jim suddenly slapped his thigh. He had learned much about the habits of the giant gator which had appeared in the river that spring and whose thunderous voice, deeper, more resonant, more menacing than any other voice of the springtime saurian chorus, had first apprised Mayfield of the monster's coming. But he had never discovered this great gator's basking place. Now, on a sudden, the woodsman believed that he understood why. Almost the only suitable locality that he had failed to examine was the muddy slope at a certain point on the old causeway toward which he was riding. He had never thought of looking there; the in accessibility of the spot caused him to forget it; and now, as he turned the matter over in his mind, suspicion ripened to conviction.

He rode a quarter of a mile out of his way to a little knoll where a stunted live oak looked out over the wide wastes of river marsh. With almost simian litheness, in spite of his seventy years, he swung his light body from the saddle to the first of the live oak's limbs and climbed thirty feet up into the tree. For two minutes he gazed across the green expanse at a sunny spot on the slope of the causeway where the loop of a creek came in to the bank. When he dropped from the oak limb and reached for the shotgun which he had leaned against the tree trunk, his thin keen face looked more than ever like that of a hunting hawk.

A half hour later, the king of the river, stretched at full length close to the water's edge, woke suddenly. Perhaps he had felt the ground quiver slightly under him. The flat-horned buck had made no sound as he rose hurriedly from his bed in the tall reeds on the high level top of the causeway; but possibly the impact of his feet on the hard earth had sent an almost imperceptible tremor along the bank and down the muddy slope. Yet, of the three gators dozing there in the security of the safest basking place within many miles, only the river king awoke.

He awoke, but he did mot move. For two minutes, perhaps, he lay motionless as a log. Then from the reeds fifteen feet above him came a snort, followed by the sound of deers' hoofs hitting the sun-baked clay. Swiftly but noiselessly the leviathan form of the king of the river slid into the wine-brown water and vanished.

Five minutes after the great gator's disappearance, Sandy Jim Mayfield reached the point on the slope of the causeway for which he had been heading and saw what he had expected to see. Working his way on foot through the reeds, he had heard the snort of the flat-horned buck as the wily creature winded him and gave warning to the does; and, knowing the river king's reputation for wariness and wisdom, he considered it almost certain that the big saurian also had heard that snort and had interpreted it correctly. Hence, though he still pushed on slowly and cautiously toward the spot from which he had hoped to shoot the river king, he felt that his caution was wasted. The other gators which he had seen when he climbed the live oak might still be basking on the sunny slope, but he would not find the monster whose life he had sworn to take.

The old woodsman smiled as Ke crouched in the cover of the reeds, slowly drawing a bead on the larger of the two saurians still dozing on the mud. He was disappointed, yet pleased. This king of the river, as he had heard the negroes call the saurian monarch, was a foeman worthy of his steel. Sandy Jim realized that he would need all his skill if he expected to stretch that great armored hide before the October frosts.

Many things Sandy Jim Mayfield knew about the deer and the alligators of the Low Country, for all his life he had lived close to these wild creatures, and all his life he had hunted them. But there were two things that he did not know—two things of primary importance to him just now. He did not know that the great gator, against whose cunning he had so confidently matched his own experience and skill, never waited until the October frosts before going into seclusion for the cold season, but always retired to his winter den in advance of most of his fellows, as soon as the crisp nights of September announced the approach of fall; and he did not know that the flat-horned buck, whose splendid antlers he so ardently desired, was that rare thing, a roaming, wandering whitetail, which, instead of remaining year after year in the same general region, ranged widely about the Low Country, never lingering in any district where he was persistently hunted. Three days after Mayfield's fruitless attempt to stalk the king of the river on the ruined causeway came a cold change and the giant saurian was seen no more that season. Three times Mayfield and his sons hunted the flat-horned buck with their full pack of lanky, long-eared hounds, and on the third hunt, Sandy Jim, trying a snap shot from his mare's back, thought that he had drawn blood. But after that hunt the flat-horned buck vanished as completely as though the earth had swallowed him, and never once that fall or winter was hair or hide or track of him seen again.

Chagrined at his failure, Mayfield consoled himself as best he could. The buck, he believed, would return sooner or later, for these were among the best feeding grounds for deer in all the Low Country. As for the king of the river, he would come forth from his secret den with the first warm breath of spring and he would come forth bold and hungry, craving red meat. Until he had filled his empty stomach he would be less cautious than usual. A yelping cur tethered at the water's edge would interest him tremendously. Sandy Jim bided his time.

 

March came in windy and chill, but toward the end of the month the weather broke and spring burst suddenly upon the Low Country in a blaze of sunshine and a glory of song. Maples flamed in the swamps; the wood-edges swarmed with varicolored warblers; the wild turkey hens built their nests of grass, pine straw and cane leaves in the deep woods and the thicket-grown broom-grass fields; long-necked, long-tailed anhingas swung round and round like airplanes in the still upper air; tall blue herons and slim white egrets walked about over the flooded rice lands along the river flats. Sandy Jim heard a few gator voices at dawn and toward dusk, but the big bulls had not yet begun to make their dragon music. He heard no bellow which might be the challenge of the river king.

On the first warm day Mayfield, sitting hunched in his narrow square-nosed punt, his rifle leaning against the thwart in front of him, scouted the river, the ricefield canals and the long cypress-bordered backwater which made in from the creek a mile behind his house. On the second day he searched with equal diligence. On the third day, as he rested in the shade under the sycamores near the backwater's upper end, he heard the music of hounds.

They were his own dogs, he knew, and he remembered suddenly that his sons, weary of pork and butts meat, had planned one more deer hunt before the weather grew too warm. The law forbade spring deer hunting, but the law meant little in that remote corner of the Low Country. Sandy Jim, sitting cross-legged in his punt, listened eagerly to what his dogs were saying, comprehending their meaning as clearly as though they spoke his own tongue.

They told him that a deer had been jumped on the low myrtle-grown peninsula between the house and the backwater. That peninsula was both a haven and a trap. If the hunters guarded its upper end, the deer must run down the length of it toward the backwater and the flooded rice lands. With the pack pressing him hard, and with the whoops of the hunters sounding near at hand, he would hardly take to the open water on either side, but would run on and swim the deep break at the peninsula's lower end to reach the remnant of a low, narrow, marshy dike which, in the old rice-planting days, had divided the upper backwater from the lower. There he would be safe if hounds and hunters halted at 'the break. But if hounds or hunters swam the break and followed along the dike he would be doomed; for a dense mat of telanthera, a floating water growth through which no deer could swim, bordered the dike on both sides and inclosed its lower end. Thus the place was a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape.

Sandy Jim reviewed the situation swiftly. Then a grim smile twisted his hawklike face. His boys had chosen to hunt without him. He would show them something little to their liking. Knowing his sons, his dogs and every inch of the ground, he needed no clairvoyant powers to foretell the outcome of that hunt.

With long noiseless strokes of the paddle he drove the punt forward, heading down the upper backwater toward the dike at its lower end. Myrtles and young cedars bordered the dike for the greater part of its length, but there was one clear stretch of fully twenty yards where the deer must pass in full view; and Sandy Jim remembered a bushy willow, growing out of the butt of a great rotting log in the backwater, which would make an ideal ambush. Presently he wedged the punt's bow between two low branches of this willow and waited, rifle in hand, listening to the music of the oncoming pack.

Other ears hearkened to that music. The king of the river lay in the lower backwater fifty yards from the dike, his eyes and nostrils projecting above the glassy surface. That morning he had emerged from his winter den under the river bank; but the river water was still too cool to suit him, and he had cruised up the creek and had passed through a hidden tunnel under a ricefield dam into the backwater's lower sunny reaches where no currents stirred the slender water weeds. He had scarcely reached the place that he had in mind when the dogs' voices came to him; and instantly he was aware of a fierce, terrible hunger, the sequel of his long winter fast—hunger which would brook no delay.

The sudden craving for meat took possession of him. He remembered a morning months ago when he had seen a dog trail a marsh rabbit along the low narrow dike toward which the pack seemed now to be heading. His periscope eyes began to slide across the surface of the water. At the outer edge of the thick carpet of water growths bordering the dike the eyes vanished. A minute later the gigantic head of the river king was thrust upward through the telanthera carpet near its inner margin.

A moment the huge head remained motionless, a dreadful apparition, incredibly sinister, the enormous jaws gaping slightly revealing long, conical, pointed teeth. An exultant burst of melody, louder than ever, rang out on the myrtle-grown peninsula a quarter of a mile away. With a surge and heave the monstrous black body of the giant saurian, trailing long weeds from the spines and ridges of its armor, reared itself out of the water and mounted the bank.

 

Sandy Jim Mayfield, alert and watchful behind the bushy willow in the upper backwater, jerked his rifle to his shoulder as he saw the vast bulk of the king of the river appear on the dike within fairly easy range. It was the opportunity for which the old woodsman had been waiting all winter, yet he let it pass. Like a flash his quick mind foresaw the drama that was preparing; and instantly, too, he realized that in the enactment of that drama he might find an opportunity even better than this one. Only for a moment did he see the river king clearly. No sooner had the great saurian mounted the dike than he sank on his belly amid the tall dark-green rushes bordering it on both sides. These hid his head and most of his body from Mayfield's view, but the woodsman knew that the monster was lying on the low flattened ridge of the narrow bank, his head facing the quarter from which the dogs would come.

Mayfield figured the chances rapidly. He did not wish to lose a hound; yet he was keen to see what would happen. A few minutes more would tell the story. The dogs were nearing the break at the peninsula's lower end, and the deer must be swimming the break or already running along the dike. Myrtles extended in a dense hedge to within twenty feet of the place where the giant gator lay in ambush, and Sandy Jim could not see the deer until it had passed the last of these. He waited, every muscle taut, his rifle raised halfway to his shoulder.

A long-bodied, gray-brown shape shot into view from behind the last of the myrtles. Mayfield straighteged suddenly in his seat and muttered an exclamation of amazement. Beyond a shadow of a doubt it was the flat-horned buck. His antlers were in velvet and were as yet scarcely half their full size, but the old woodsman knew that buck as well as he knew his own sons. Head held high, white flag jerking from side to side, the splendid stag bounded along the narrow bank, racing at full speed, yet appearing singularly deliberate and unconcerned, his dun body rising and falling with exquisite grace as he floated over the tall rushes and the low treacherous tangles of vine. He did not see the great gator lying in his path until he was almost upon the saurian and he had no time to prepare for the leap. Yet without hesitation, and apparently without extra effort, he soared with birdlike buoyancy more than twenty feet and, landing lightly and airily as though the leap were nothing, bounded on without a backward glance along the dike and into the cover of the screening myrtles beyond.

Mayfield, crouching in his punt, swore delightedly. Once, on the reed-grown causeway, the flat-horned buck had saved the king of the river. Now, by a strange trick of fate, the king of the river was squaring that account. The dogs had crossed the break and were coming in full cry. If nothing stopped them, in another five minutes they would bring the buck to bay at the dike's lower end where he must turn and face them or else drown miserably in the dense mat of floating water growths. But Mayfield knew that no dog of his pack would pass the great saurian that held the narrow way. He waited eagerly, anxiously, wondering whether young Frank, the impetuous leader of the pack and the swiftest trailer, would see the danger in time or tush headlong to destruction.

Frank was well in the lead. His resonant voice, the clearest and mellowest in that woodland choir which made, to Sandy Jim's ears, the sweetest music ever heard by man, boomed out behind the last of the myrtles. Another quarter minute would decide his fate. Just clear of the bushes, a log lay across the dike. As the big black and white speckled hound hurdled it, his eyes lit upon the monstrous incredible thing in the path ahead of him—an appalling dragonlike bulk, reared upward on short, thick forelegs, the long armored body almost hidden from the hound's view by cavernous, tusk-studded, hugely yawning jaws.

A piercing half-human yell burst from the dog. He had seen the danger too late to check his next leap. Seemingly he was doomed. Yet terror gave him strength. Twisting his body in the air, the hound landed sideways and rolled and slid to the very brink of death. The giant gator, his gross body lurching horribly, launched himself forward; but long ago his weight had grown too great for his legs to uphold him and his rush fell short. A scant ten inches from the scrambling dog, the mighty jaws snapped together with a hiss. Next moment, Frank, whimpering pitifully, every hair erect, had gained his feet and jumped clear of the danger zone.

Sandy Jim Mayfield breathed a deep sigh of relief. For an instant he had believed that he had sacrificed his best dog and he had bitterly cursed his own folly. But there was no time to waste. The rest of the pack—five gaunt hounds and a big brown shaggy beast, half hound, half Airedale, the killer of the crew—had reached the scene. Apprised of danger by Frank's howls and whines, they had looked before they leaped and none had come within reach of those gigantic jaws which could crush their bones like reed stems.

Sandy Jim knew that his chance had come. The king of the river, famished from his winter fast, his prey almost within his reach, heaved his massive body upward once more and tried another waddling rush. He had eyes for nothing except those dogs, the meat that a gator loves best; and Sandy Jim, crouching low, his rifle close to his hand, eased the punt out from behind the willow. Slowly and soundlessly he paddled, at first heading parallel with the dike, then, when the rushes hid him from the saurian's view, turning straight toward the bank. Along the edge of the water growth he pushed the boat inch by inch, screened by the tall green rushes. and at last he laid down the paddle and reached cautiously for his rifle.

Mayfield smiled happily as he drew his bead. Not for worlds would he have missed the drama which he had witnessed; and not for worlds would he have let the flat-horned buck be killed at that season when his undeveloped antlers were scarcely worth having. The old woodsman would have a memorable tale to tell of how the river king had saved the great stag and thus had paid a debt which he owed. For a moment, as he gazed along the rifle barrel, Mayfield was tempted to shoot a little high.

The thought passed as quickly as it had come. The smile faded. The thin sun-tanned face pressed against the rifle stock was fierce and keen like that of a hunting hawk. The eager hounds leaped and bayed as the rifle cracked.

 

An hour later, Sandy Jim, approaching his house from the rear, walked up to the kitchen door. He had not seen his sons. He had sent the dogs back along the dike, and rather than swim the break, the hunters had ridden on with the pack toward the big swamp to try another drive. Mayfield slouched into the kitchen, where Gabe, the negro boy who cooked for him, was prodding the wood fire in the stove.

The old hunter explored the oven and found a square of hot cornbread.

"The flat-horned buck's come back," he drawled. "We'll get him this fall when his horns are prime."

He dropped into a chair and began to unlace his boots.

"I jes' killed that big gator they call the king of the river," he said casually. "We'll go down to the backwater after dinner an' take off his hide."