Some hunter once had encamped at the foot of a tree, cooked his supper, seen
his fire die out and lain down to sleep, with only the infinite solitude of
the woods for his blanket, with the dreary, dismal silence for his pillow.
Opening his eyes to look up for the last time at the peaceful stars, what he
perceived above him were two nearer stars set close together, burning with a
green light, never twinkling. Or another was startled out of sleep by the
terrible cry of his tethered horse. Or after a long, ominous growl, the
cougar had sprung against his tent, knocking it away as a squirrel would
knock the thin shell from a nut to reach the kernel; or at the edge of the
thicket of tall grass he had struck his foot against the skeleton of some
unknown hunter, dragged down long before.
To such adventures with all their natural exaggeration John Gray had
listened many a time as they were recited by old hunters regarding earlier
days in the wilderness; for at this period it was thought that the cougar
had retreated even from the few cane-brakes that remained unexplored near
the settlements. But the deer, timidest of animals, with fatal persistence
returns again and again to its old-time ranges and coverts long after the
bison, the bear, and the elk have wisely abandoned theirs; and the cougar
besets the deer.
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