Chapter I

A white flood, still and wonderful, the moonlight lay on the naked rampikes and dense thickets of Ringwaak Hill. Beneath its magic the very rocks, harsh bulks of granite, seemed almost afloat; and every branch, spray and leaf, swam liquidly. The rampikes, towering trunks of pine, fire-blasted and time-bleached, lifted lonely spires of silver over the enchanted solitude.

Apparently, there was neither sound nor motion over all Ringwaak, or over the wide wilderness spread out below its ken. But along the secret trails, threading the thicket, and skirting the granite boulders, life went on with an intensity all the deeper and more stringent for the seal of silence laid upon it. The small, fugitive kindreds moved noiselessly about their affairs, foraging, mating, sometimes even playing, but ever watchful, a sleepless vigilance the price of each hour's breath; while even more furtive, but more intermittent in their watchfulness, the hunting and blood-loving kindreds followed the trails.

Gliding swiftly from bush to rock, from rock to thicket, now for an instant clear and terrible in a patch of moonlight, now ghost-gray and still more terrible in the sharp-cut shadows, came a round-eyed, crouching shape. It was somewhere about the size of a large spaniel, but shorter in the body, and longer in the legs; and its hind legs, in particular, though kept partly gathered beneath the body, in readiness for a lightning spring, were so disproportionately long as to give a high, humped-up, rabbity look to the powerful hind quarters. This combined suggestion of the rabbit and the tiger was peculiarly daunting in its effect. The strange beast's head was round and cat-like, but with high, tufted ears, and a curious, back-brushed muffle of whiskers under the throat. Its eyes, wide and pale, shone with a cold ferocity and unconquerable wildness. Its legs, singularly large for the bulk of its body, and ending in broad, razor-clawed, furry pads of feet, would have seemed clumsy, but for the impression of tense steel springs and limitless power which they gave in every movement. In weight, this stealthy and terrifying figure would have gone perhaps forty pounds--but forty pounds of destroying energy and tireless swiftness.

As he crept through a spruce thicket, his savage eyes turning from side to side, the lynx came upon a strange trail, and stopped short, crouching. His stub of a tail twitched, his ears flattened back angrily, his long, white fangs bared themselves in a soundless snarl. A green flame seemed to flicker in his eyes, as he subjected every bush, every stone, every stump within his view to the most piercing scrutiny. Detecting no hostile presence, he bent his attention to the strange trail, sniffing at it with minute consideration.

The scent of the trail was that of a wildcat; but its size was too great for that of any wildcat this big lynx had ever known. Wildcats he viewed with utter scorn. For three years he had ruled all Ringwaak Hill; and no wildcat, in those three years, had dared to hunt upon his range. But this newcomer, with the wildcat smell, seemed about as big as three wildcats. The impression of its foot on a patch of moist mould was almost as large as that of the lynx himself--and the lynx well knew that the wildcats were a small-footed tribe. Like most of the hunting beasts, he was well-schooled in the lore of the trails, and all the signs were to him a clear speech. From the depth and definiteness of that footprint, he felt that both weight and strength had stamped it. His long claws protruded from their hidden sheaths, as he pondered the significance of this message from the unknown. Was the stranger a deliberate invader of his range, or a mere ignorant trespasser? And would he fight, or would he run? The angry lynx was determined to put these questions to the test with the least possible delay.

The trail was comparatively fresh, and the lynx began to follow it, forgetful of his hunger and of the hunt on which he had set out. He moved now more warily than ever, crouching flat, gliding smoothly as a snake, and hoping to score the first point against his rival by catching him unawares. So noiselessly did he go, indeed, that a weasel, running hard upon the trail of a rabbit, actually brushed against him, to bound away in a paroxysm of fear and rush off in another direction, wondering how he had escaped those lightning claws. In fact the lynx, intent only upon the hunting of his unknown foe, was almost as astonished as the weasel, and quite unprepared to seize the sudden opportunity for a meal. He eyed the vanishing weasel malignly for a moment, then resumed his stealthy advance. A white-footed mouse, sitting up daintily at the door of her burrow, fell over backwards, and nearly died of fright, as the ghost-gray shape of doom sped up and passed. But the lynx had just then no mind for mice, and never saw her.

The strange trail, for some hundreds of yards, kept carefully to the thickets and the shadows. In one place the marks of a scuffle, with a heap of speckled feathers and a pair of slim claws, showed that the intruder had captured and devoured an unwary partridge mothering her brood. At this evidence of poaching on his preserves, the big lynx's anger swelled hotly. He paused to sniff at the remnants, and then stole on with added caution. The blood of the victim was not yet dry, or even clotted, on the leaves.

A little further on, the trail touched the foot of a clean-stemmed young maple. Here the trespasser had paused to stretch himself, setting his claws deep into the bark. These claw-marks the lynx appeared to take as a challenge or a defiance. Rearing himself against the tree, he stretched himself to his utmost. But his highest scratch was two inches below the mark of the stranger. This still further enraged him. Possibly, it might also have daunted him a little but for the fact that his own claw-marks were both deeper and wider apart than those of his rival.

From the clawed tree, the trail now led to the very edge of the open and thence to the top of an overhanging rock, white and sharply chiseled in the moonlight. The lynx was just about to climb the rock, when there beneath it, in the revealing radiance, he saw a sight which flattened him in his tracks. The torn carcass of a young doe lay a few feet from the base of the rock; and on top of the prey, glaring savage challenge, crouched such a wildcat as the lynx had never even dreamed of.