Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 4, 1925 — page 161: what you’re looking at

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

THE TAWNY PERIL. noisy fashion cawed around him for a whole morning. On the fourth day, spurred by hunger- pangs, the eagle wabbled out of the thicket. He managed to catch a few big, short-tailed mice by overturning stones. They put Strength enough in him so that he could fly a few hundred yards at a time, painfully, slowly. Swift things of the air, or even rabbits and lemmings, were out of all hope as food. Chak-oor’s first flight was to the glacier stream which came down from the moun- tains a step at a time. Beside the overfalls, spent salmon lined the banks and struggled feebly in shallow eddies. The weak, taste- less flesh was not at all to his liking; but the alternative was starvation. On the sixth day he was strong enough for a flight to the sea, and out to a reef where he had often fished when game was scarce, as periodically it was, in the woody haunts of his range. There he caught scul- pins in low-tide rock pools; and turned over stones where he heard the zoom-zoom of singing fish. A few days later he flew back toward the peak where his rival had usurped his nest and mate and peeping eggs. The latter, sitting triumphantly on the ledge, screamed a warning, a challenge, across the void at him. Chak-oor was too wise to answer the challenge; his ragged feathers, his wings still weak, made him swerve aside. He alighted on Little Dunali, a mile away, and took up his solitary abode. The female, his former mate, suddenly began visiting the sea several times a day. Chak-oor realized that the splotchy eggs had burst; that three hungry éaglets were craning their necks for her return to the nest. He itched to help her rob the fish- hawks; to guard his young against tawny marauders from the mountain canons. As his full strength began to come back to him, Chak-oor tried a thing which his caution had always kept him from attempt- ing. He was morose and vengeful; the fish diet had palled; game more to his palate still eluded him. He flew down the valley one day; watched till the hunter had left his cabin on the cleared slope; then dropped down upon a kid that was pasturing in a tiny prairie. | 951 But before he could eat of the dainty flesh, he was driven away by a big lynx that had seen him swoop and had heard the bleat of the kid. The tawny old enemy snarled spitefully as Chak-oor screamed above him, too wary to attack. Between the two, one master of the air as the other was of the ground, there had been a feud of years standing. A red anger kindled in the hunter when he discovered the killing the next morning. But his ire was directed against the lvnx, that had been guilty of cruel forays in the past, and who left his plain signs around the eagle’s kill. The man threw grub into a gunny-bag, and put his quintet of brush hounds upon the cold trail, swearing to chase the lynx clear across the range if necessary. For that whole day and until noon of the next, the hunt wound in and out of the gorge. The lynx sensed the relentless pur- suit. With the brush hounds pressing hotly upon his fresh trail, he left the lower valley and made for the fastnesses at the border of Dunali Major. | At the foot of the mountain the canon stream forked, one branch swerving north- east, the other south. Both ended in the glaciers that gave them their milk-white torrents; both were flanked along their en- tire length by impassable cafion bluffs and at their source by ice overfalls. The only passes were over the two Dunali peaks. But the nimble-witted, nimble-footed hounds had turned the lynx from the easier pass and forced him up the rugged slope of Major. Chak-oor had watched the hunt come up the narrowing valley. From his perch on Little Dunali he saw the hungry lynx, driv- en desperate, climb a tree and look back at his pursuers, a scant half-mile behind. The cat waited till the hunter was within rifle shot; then leaped down and started the steep climb to the peak. Not far beyond the tree, the dogs were stopped by the man- high wall they could not scale. They waited for the hunter, who hurried to boost them up. But he stayed his hand, watching with something of awe a swift drama up on the eagie’s eerie. g CO DOOLK CO