Edison Marshall

“ Everywhere Pounce hunted he found Landy Gibbs ahead of him in the trail. The man seemed to have an unerring instinct as to what glades and hillsides the deer were using. The great cat was ever finding his fresh spore, hearing his heavy body in the brush, glimpsing him as he waited by the deer-licks. And more than once, just as the long tawny body lowered for the death-leap, the thunder-stick would roar in the brush beside and Pounce would be cheated of his prey. ”

“ They were always crossing trails. Many and many the time Landy took the trail of a fine, fat buck only to find a half-devoured carcass—and a round print in the earth. Many the time the pungent cougar-scent frightened into panic a little herd, all of which might easily have fallen to Landy’s rifle. It was a rare day now that Landy took three hides. He did well to get one on the average—and the price of one hide hardly bought food, much less strong drink. His hatred for Pounce came as near being a religion as any emotion that had ever touched Indy’s life. ”

“ This smallness was in his nature, which even in these raw wilds is a much more tragic thing than smallness of stature—a petulance, a delight in petty cruelty, a giving-way to frenzied rage that had before now led him into serious crime, all in a land where all things brood in sorrow but are never petulant, where cruelty, though omnipresent, is never petty, but rather an unimpassioned instrument of the vast, slow-moving aims of nature, and where the trees themselves, even in the rage of the storm, are the name of imperturbability and calm. ”

“ And he also left the knowledge that here was the beginning of a long rivalry, one that could never end as long as they hunted the same district—a bitter war between these two remorseless deer-slayers, Landy the hide-hunter, and tawny Pounce, the largest, strongest, most glorious of all the cougars that ranged the lake country.
THE wound on Pounce’s scalp had no more serious effect than to give him, at times, a racking headache, to increase his natural caution and to fill him with a deathless hatred for all mankind. He had no other real natural enemies. ”

“ THEY made a queer trio—the cat, the white man and the Indian. All three were really hunting one another. Sometimes when the moon was up and his glory upon him, Pounce trailed one or the other of the two men; but his great cowardice always commanded him in the end and kept him from success. Tom hunted both the cougar and the white man steadily and determinedly, because this was the deal he had made with Chatburn. Landy hunted Pounce because he hated him, because his depredations were spoiling his own profits, and he hunted Long Tom in self-defense. ”

“ Landy, after certain years of varied kinds of lawlessness, had taken to the pleasant occupation of poaching deer for their hides. He was a hide-hunter only, and his usual kill was around three deer a day.
He had heard the soft twitch and crack of a deer’s step in the brush; and it was only a matter of time until the animal would come in to the lick to be viewed along Landy’s sights. There was little to warn her of his presence. He had posted himself so that his smell was blown away. The eyes of the wild creatures cannot ordinarily interpret motionless forms ”

“ Man was given in the beginning a fighter’s build—as perfect a construction for physical activity as nature ever hit upon—and it can be said for Landy that he made the most of it. He was tough as forged iron, and, besides, he managed to whip his knife from his belt as he went down. The cougar found need for all his mighty strength before this hated prey would lie still. ”

“ Tom told him; “maybe hide-hunter.”
“I think it’s a cougar; but there’s a possibility that a skin-hunter is working up there.” He paused. “Of course, Landy Gibbs has never come out where he went in—but we’ve all supposed he went through to the Coast Range and is a thousand miles away by now. Tom, the truth is that the cougars are just about wiping out the deer. There’s one particular big brute. His track has been seen a dozen times by hunters, and one chap who got a glimpse of him says he’s got a white scar clear across the scalp. ”

“ So it came about that these two deer-slayers continued to hunt each other—Pounce dogging the man’s trail for hours with never the courage to attack, Landy tracking the cougar for weary miles only to lose him at last in some mountain fastness. ”

“ He would not pass up opportunities to kill the pest just to perpetuate his job. Yet he was an Indian, and he hunted according to his own private system—not with dogs, as a white man hunted, but with heathen stealth and animal cunning. He seemed to plan his campaign as if he were a beast himself, going where he thought a beast would likely go; and this was not Chatburn’s idea. Still, Long Tom now and then had been extraordinarily successful. He was badly in need of money, Anderson said, and he would try hard to earn it. ”

“ They fought a great fight in the close darkness, claws and fangs, wrenching muscles and surging shoulders, and the cruel knife drinking blood. It was true that some of Long Tom’s best furniture was broken to kindling and his device for closing the door irremediably ruined. There was also the noise of conflict that disturbed the little forest people scurrying on the hill. ”

“ How the Indian arrived at this conclusion he could not tell. Wise cougars ordinarily avoid the cabins of men, particularly when they have once been frightened away. By the rules of the woods, Pounce would not come again. But rules are made to be broken, and the law of the forest and the natures of wild beasts has not yet been wholly written down. Long Tom had sudden knowledge, given him, perhaps, because he was a born woods-creature, too, that before another sun had set Pounce would return. ”

“ The rifle leaped in Tom’s arms, gleaming steel itself, but there was no time for the keen black eyes to lower to the sights. Only the rustling of brush showed where the prey had gone.
There could be no doubt of the creature’s identity. The length of the streak, the size of the track in the mud named him plain enough. Besides, who but Pounce himself was bold enough to come to a man’s cabin in broad daylight, enter the door and help himself to a carcass of venison hanging just within the portals? Evidently his own heavy step on the trail had alarmed the beast almost the moment of its arrival ”