Adventure Magazine Cover, June 18, 1921 — page 151: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Chivalry of the Wild as the whole of that arctic fox, brush and all, and ten times more massive. The head was dirty yellow except for its little eyes, but most of it seemed to be composed of very red mouth, wide open, and of yellow fangs that gleamed. After the head came a paw, broad enough and clawy enough to brain anything almost, and—well, the fox felt the draft from it, as he was in mid-jump, as it fairly whistled over the very spot where he had been standing. That represented one polar bear deliver- ing his final ultimatum of war upon one poor little white arctic fox, which he had been stalking for the past half-hour. The polar bear was a dirty yellow, and not the stereotyped picture-book pure white, and he was in a vile temper. Noting these things, the fox removed another forty yards before he sat down on his hams, dog fashion, and yapped a lonely, guttural little yap upon the stillness. He knew that bear; at- least he knew his character, and knew everything that was conceivably bad of him, for it is only the gaunt, yellow old male bears that mooch about and keep active during the Winter. The rest are under the snow, hibernating, and these nomads of the frozen wastes are as crusty as it is possible for a naturally crusty beast to be in a land where if you do not hibernate in Winter you had better go and drown yourself and have finished with it, for there is next to no chance of finding» anything to eat. When the fox dodged the blow, the bear hauled his immense, loose-jointed bulk up over the hummock and sniffed like a young gas-engine at the holes in the snow. Then he began to dig and tear at them, and the sight of that digging would have turned any coal-miner white with envy. It pwas like about ten badgers, plus eight pigs, plus a few entrenching tools, and every now and then the great beast would pause to snort up those tunnels like a suction pump. The arctic fox left off yapping, and silent- ly trotted nearer. Envy and exasperation were oozing out all over him from every hair on end, and his flat ears said so. The bear turned with a ‘‘Whuff!” to warn off the fox once or twice and went back to his digging, and the fox continued his watching and his abusive yapping till the bear had nearly dug himself out of. sight under the snow. Then suddenly there came a burst and a rush as if, almost, the I4I bear had in his digging touched off a land- mine and it had blown up, hurling lumps of snow everywhere into the sky. The lumps of snow, however, were ptar- migan, and the bursting noise was made by their frenzied leap aloft, with confusion of whirring wings, from the mouth of the burrow they had been driven to as the great white bear approached. One only was left; that one, cut off in a “blind” tunnel, was in the jaws of the bear. The arctic fox ran like a fleeting vrai across the dreary white, on and on, in the direction the ptarmigan had taken, for he knew they must stop somewhere, and when they stopped would be stalkable. He did not notice that it was beginning to snow,. or that the wind had taken on a new and more vicious voice. He did not notice that the white ptarmigan were becoming harder and harder to see among the thickening, hurry- ing flakes, till suddenly he saw them turn from their northward course, swing, circle round and come back, hugging the ground and going like the wind. He heard the wind, saw the landscape blotted out in a striding curtain of white, and crouched flat, right in the path of the speeding birds. A IT WAS a beautiful leap, straight | up, a clear four feet, and timed to the fraction of asecond. There was a whir of wings overhead, a clash of fangs, a squawk, and then fox and ptarmigan came down together. And in the same instant the blizzard was upon them. The fox could do no more than lie upon his prey and gasp. It seemed as if the wind would rip the very breath out of him, and he could see barely more than a yard in any direction. There was also ice among the snow, big, jagged lumps of it that would cut your eye out if they hit there. The ice could not hurt through the fox’s layer upon layer of soft, white, thick fur, but he kept his head well out of the way be- tween his neat paws, and shut his eyes. - It was the only thing he could do. It must have been some time about then that the apparition in black fell over him, blundered right on top of him as it stag- gered its way blindly through the white inferno. Being a wild creature, it sank its fangs into his shoulder first, bounced clear of the return compliment next_and stopped to find out who he was afterward. That COmicloo CN Wp) CO