Shepherds of the Wild

no ordinary cougar: for more years than the swan could remember he had ranged through Smoky Land, killing as he went. He had felled the horned cattle; in one starving winter he had fought Cry-in-the-night, the wolf, and had mastered him; he had taken the old tusked boar gone wild in the underbrush. He knew the hunting craft to the last wile, and time had been when a cattail plume, falling on the reeds, made more noise than his own step. But he was old: his unusual size proved that fact. By the same token was revealed his past prowess: only an animal that had surpassed in all the wiles of hunting and self-preservation could live to attain such a growth. But tonight⁠—the deer had fled from him before he ever got within leaping range.

The wind had been right, the thickets had hidden his advance, the magic and the thrill of the hunting hour had been upon him. No human ear could have discerned his approach on the winding trail. But the difficulty lay in the fact that the deer have not human ears, but rather marvelous receivers as sensitive as the antennæ of a wireless outfit. Broken Fang was growing old; some of his marvelous muscle-control was breaking; and no longer could he accomplish a successful stalk.

The triumph that he had felt the first hour of the hunt was quite dead in him now. He would have welcomed any kind of prey. Just before dawn he had come upon a porcupine; but even this unprepossessing game had escaped him. It didn’t make a story that he would care to tell to his cubs. There is a certain legend, in the forest, regarding those who cannot catch a porcupine.

“When Quill-back escapes the hunter,” the saying goes, “the buzzards will be full-fed tomorrow.”

The meaning is wholly simple to one who knows porcupines and buzzards. There is no more awkward, stupid, guileless creature in the woods than Quill-back, and the only reason why the beasts of prey haven’t wiped out his breed centuries ago is because he is so fiendishly awkward to kill and eat. One spine in the nose means days of agony, a few in the mouth is apt to bring on slow starvation. And when one hunts porcupines, and they escape him, it means simply that the hunter is getting so old and so stiff that the scavengers may dine upon him very soon. In this case Quill-back crept up a tree and crawled out to the end of a limb where Broken Fang couldn’t get him.

There was no more magnificent slayer in the whole woods than this huge puma, yet he had gone for a full day without food. And it was not to be wondered at that⁠—just before dawn⁠—the blood leaped in his veins anew when he caught the smell of the sheep flock on the wind.

He had killed sheep in plenty in his time, only on the far eastern border of his range. He hadn’t known that any were to be found in this part of Smoky Land. They were an easy game to kill, dying at one little touch to the head or shoulder, and offering no sport at all to a bold hunter of deer. Yet tonight he was in no mood to be discriminating. And it was wholly possible that the smell of that flock seemed to grant a new lease of life.

To linger at the outskirts of the band, to kill when he chose, perhaps even to know that most terrible of all wilderness lusts⁠—the feast of death. All forest creatures know this feast: they have an inborn passion for it that simply must almost tear them in twain. In all the world of carnage and wickedness there is no debauch that is half so terrible, and the first laws of the forest have decreed against it. For the death-feast is not the rational, honest killing of the hunt. Rather it is the thing that sheepmen dread above all things else: a perfect orgy of slaying, not for food but from desire, the tearing-out of a hundred throats in so many seconds. Yet was not Broken Fang the monarch of the forest? What laws were there to restrain him?

His long tail began to lash back and forth; his fangs caught the dim light of the encroaching dawn as he crept like a serpent through the thickets. The smell became even more plain, the fierce blood leaped even more wildly in his veins. There was nothing here to fear: no leaping camp fire to fill him with the age-old awe, no tall form of the herder on constant guard. He could kill, kill, kill⁠—as much as he wanted⁠—until the savagery in his heart was satiated. It was true that human beings had recently been on guard, but their smell was dim, and even now they were starting away, into the forest.

He paused, taking full stock of the situation. Usually at camps such as this there were, besides the herder with his death-stick, two dogs that would die before they would permit him to touch the sheep. He knew something about the fighting spirit of the shepherd dogs. He knew their blind courage, their terrible ferocity, and he knew only one fighting spirit to compare with theirs⁠—that with which the she-wolf guards her whelps. Such dogs always seemed to partake of man’s own unconquerable spirit and they were terrible to face. But tonight only one of the dogs was on guard, and he could find killing in plenty before they should come to grips.

Then he drew up short, scarcely able to restrain a yowl of disappointment. He was on the wrong side of the river. A veritable torrent, deep and swift, flowed between. He came of a breed that has no love for water. Of course he could cross in time, he could wander up and down the bank until he found a dead tree stretching the full way over, but he was in