Then he hurled himself forward--one,
two, a dozen mighty bounds through flying snow, and he landed with a
screech on the dome of a beaver house. There he jumped about, shaking
an imaginary beaver like a fury, and gave another screech that made
one's spine tingle. That over, he stood very still, looking off over
the beaver roofs that dotted the shore of a little pond there. The
blaze died out of his eyes; a different look crept into them. He put
his nose down to a tiny hole in the mound, the beavers' ventilator,
and took a long sniff, while his whole body seemed to distend with the
warm rich odor that poured up into his hungry nostrils. Then he rolled
his head sadly, and went away.
Now all that was pure acting. A lynx likes beaver meat better than
anything else; and this fellow had caught some of the colony, no
doubt, in the well-fed autumn days, as they worked on their dam and
houses. Sharp hunger made him remember them as he came through the
wood on his nightly hunt after hares. He knew well that the beavers
were safe; that months of intense cold had made their two-foot mud
walls like granite. But he came, nevertheless, just to pretend he had
caught one, and to remember how good his last full meal smelled when
he ate it in October.
It was all so boylike, so unexpected there in the heart of the
wilderness, that I quite forgot that I wanted the lynx's skin.
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