Adventure Magazine Cover — page 141: what you’re looking at

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

Author of “Goomasaka Makes Good, OME one has said that, in the wild, half the creatures spend their time in killing, and the other half in avoiding being killed. This is trying. Misty, the wildcat, how- ever, belonged to neither the one half nor the other, but to both; and he had his paws full. Misty lay out along the grained limb of a fir-tree and listened, in the almost religious silence, to the soft soughing of the north wind among the tufted tree-tops. Down below, all around him, everything was as still as in a grotto; but he knew what the north wind was saying, all the same— “Snow! Snow! Snow!’ ever so softly, to itself. And indeed the dazzling purity of newly fallen snow already covered the ground between the trees below, as it were a carpet for the gods. Then suddenly the immemorial silence of the forest was broken by a faint but growing whimper, as if great swords were being whirled very quickly high aloft in the cold grays sky. It grew and grew with great swiftness, till it seemed to fill the whole scene. Misty glanced up quickly with his sinister green eyes and stared at the five great spotted white forms of wild swans heading south. A flicker seemed to cross his inscru- table orbs. He appeared to be calculating whether they would stop to rest upon the lake a mile away. He listened, and pres- ently the musical beat of their huge sharp wings ceased. They were volplaning down. = aS = ee ey “ — Bye St Dare " “The Anti-Husiler,” etc. Misty arose and stretched himself lan- guidly, cynically. He was only about three feet long from tip to tip, and a foot of that tail, that wild- cat ‘“‘Tom’”—no tame wild, or wild tame cat—and the biggest of those swans would not be less than sixty inches. It was a hefty proposition to take on; but Misty’s hunger, sharpened by cold upon the grindstone of a forty-eight hours’ fast, was a heftier one. He paused, appeared to make some calcu- lation again, then lightly leaped down; but scarcely had he slouched a dozen yards when a great commotion in the forest back behind dropped him flat to the snow as if his legs had been puiled from under him. It was almost like the burst and rush of a rocket, that racket, but something must have made it. Misty knew that; knew, too, that only one could—a full-grown cock cap- ercaillie, perhaps of sixteen pounds weight, the heavyweight feathered champion of the woods in fact, taking wing. Rapidly the noise grew, and growing, approached. Misty never blinked an eyelid even, but watched—watched while the mighty black- green bird came sailing and rocking along overhead, checked, volplaned, and _ slid down. Then Misty put in the finest stalk of his life; and the beast that can stalk a full- grown cock capercaillie in light snow de- serves watching. Nobody however watched Misty’s gray and dark-striped nondescript form creep, creep, creeping, nearer by 133 GoOmiGodooks C@