But Fate is whimsical in dealing with the wild kindreds. She seems to
delight in unlooked-for interventions. While the squirrel trembled in
his dark nest, and the weasel, intent upon the first taste of warm
blood in his throat, ran heedlessly up a bare stretch of the trunk,
there came the chance which a foraging hawk had been waiting for. The
hawk, too, had been following this breathless chase, but ever baffled
by intervening branches. Now he swooped and struck. His talons had the
grip of steel. The weasel, plucked irresistibly from his foothold, was
carried off writhing to make the great bird's feast. And the squirrel,
realizing at last that the expected doom had been somehow turned
aside, came out and chattered feebly of his triumph.

The Grip in Deep Hole

The roar of the falls, the lighter and shriller raging of the rapids,
had at last died out behind the thick masses of the forest, as Barnes
worked his way down the valley. The heat in the windless underbrush,
alive with insects, was stifling. He decided to make once more for the
bank of the stream, in the hope that its character might by this time
have changed, so as to afford him an easier and more open path.
Pressing aside to his left, he presently saw the green gloom lighten
before him. Blue sky and golden light came low through the thinning
trees, and then a gleam of unruffled water. He was nearing the edge
now; and because the underbrush was so thick about him he began to go
cautiously.

All at once, he felt his feet sinking; and the screen of thick bushes
before him leaned away as if bowed by a heavy gust. Desperately he
clutched with both hands at the undergrowth and saplings on either
side; but they all gave way with him. In a smother of leafage and
blinding, lashing branches he sank downwards--at first, as it seemed,
slowly, for he had time to think many things while his heart was
jumping in his throat. Then, shooting through the lighter bushy
companions of his fall, and still clutching convulsively at those upon
which he had been able to lay his grasp, he plunged feet first into a
dark water.

The water was deep and cold. Barnes went down straight, and clear
under, with a strangled gasp. His feet struck, with some force, upon
a tangled, yielding mass, from which he rose again with a spring.
His head shot up above the surface, above the swirl of foam,
leafage, and debris; and splutteringly he gulped his lungs full of
air. But before he could c