y ready across my knees. Then
I would watch the kittens a little while, and kill them also. I wanted
their skins, all soft and fine with their first fur. And they were too
big and fierce to think of taking them alive. My vacation was over.
Simmo was already packing up, to break camp that morning. So there
would be no time to carry out my long-cherished plan of watching young
lynxes at play, as I had before watched young foxes and bears and owls
and fish-hawks, and indeed almost everything, except Upweekis, in the
wilderness.

Presently one of the lucivees came out, yawned, stretched, raised
himself against a root. In the morning stillness I could hear the cut
and rip of his claws on the wood. We call the action sharpening the
claws; but it is only the occasional exercise of the fine flexor
muscles that a cat uses so seldom, yet must use powerfully when the
time comes. The second lucivee came out of the shadow a moment later
and leaped upon the fallen tree where he could better watch the
hillside below. For half an hour or more, while I waited expectantly,
both animals moved restlessly about the den, or climbed over the roots
and trunk of the fallen tree. They were plainly cross; they made no
attempt at play, but kept well away from each other with a wholesome
respect for teeth and claws and temper. Breakfast hour was long past,
evidently, and they were hungry.

Suddenly one, who was at that moment watching from the tree trunk,
leaped down; the second joined him, and both paced back and forth
excitedly. They had heard the sounds of a coming that were too fine
for my ears. A stir in the underbrush, and Mother Lynx, a great savage
creature, stalked out proudly. She carried a dead hare gripped across
the middle of the back. The long ears on one side, the long legs on
the other, hung limply, showing a fresh kill. She walked to the
doorway of her den, crossed it back and forth two or three times,
still carrying the hare as if the lust of blood were raging within her
and she could not drop her prey even to her own little ones, which
followed her hungrily, one on either side. Once, as she turned toward
me, one of the kittens seized a leg of the hare and jerked it
savagely. The mother whirled on him, growling deep down in her throat;
the youngster backed away, scared but snarling. At last she flung the
game down. The kittens fell upon it like furies, growling at each
other, as I had seen the stranger lynxes growling once befor