Adventure Magazine Cover, June 20, 1925 — page 96: what you’re looking at

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

78 Adventure to him as spirits. Because why? Because they were all dressed in white, pure white— except for a few parts of the snowflakes and the tip of the stoat’s, or ermine’s, if you like, tail, from head to heel in white. Slowly the eagle passed on, soaring su- perbly, sullen and savage, ravenous and desperate. He seemed almost as if he hada feeling that prey was beneath him, though he could not see it, and once swung back again to make sure. Then when he was but a black speck in the sky, no more than a mote dancing on the eyeball, the ravenous, bloodthirsty nature of the stoat got the upper hand of his cun- ning, and he broke the spell. Some chance eddy of the icey mountain breeze had carried to him the scent of the snow buntings flattened amongst the snow all round him, and, creeping cautiously, he began to follow up the scent of one of them. He could not see the others because they were still, but they could see him, and in- stantly with a gentle prattle of alarm they were up and away, taking the stalked bird with them—just so many little dancing flakes of snow whirling down the wind. The stoat stood for a moment with head up watching them go, then turned to the business he had first had in hand when the eagle stopped him, the trailing of the white mountain hare. But that hare was no big- ger fool than she looked. Not so big, in fact. She had made her form in such a position that anything tracking her along her‘trail must approach down-wind, must, that is, give itself away hopelessly. There- fore, she smelt the deadly ermine coming, and—pff—was gone like some _ ghostly shadow racing over the spotless white slopes like the wind. The stoat stopped dead and expressed his feelings in an angry chatter of sheer temper, as he watched that hare literally dropping down the giddy slopes to the far valley be- neath. He might, of course, continue to track her with that amazing doggedness of which the stoat is master, but goodness knows whether she would stop within a mile or two, and even half that distance is a lot to a beast cursed, or blessed, with such short legs as friend ermine, especially over snow. Then Fate, who loves to play idle tricks and give things a wobble and see what will happen, shifted the wind eddies a little, and —that ermine had ‘‘frozen” to the likeness of a marble carving of rare purity. He was smelling ptarmigan, and it smelt good. The hare could go hang himself in a crofter’s snare for all he cared now. Ptarmigan was as good for dinner as hare, or better. Flat as a white snake he crept over the sparkling snow, himself invisible upon it, save for the moving black tip of his tail— vard by yard, foot by foot, inch by stealthy hungry inch he drew on the scent trail. In another six strides he must have simply sprung by scent alone upon the motionless bird that he could not see. And then, before he could move, under his very nose, it seemed as if a subterranean mine had burst there in that place beneath the snow. ‘There was a spurt, a spout, an upheaval, a cloud of snow, a loud, wild whirring and flapping, a very chaos of white, and, in a breath almost, the astonished stoat was standing there alone and in silence, the immemorial silence of the mountains, brok- en only by the beat of wings dwindling down-hill into the distance. He had, as a matter of fact, put up— burst up would more correctly describe it— nine ptarmigan, crouched in their tunnels! on and under the snow. He did not ‘know it, of course, but they, or some of them, had heard his chatter when he reviled the van- ishing hare, and had, therefore, been warned of his malignant presence in time. It wasa small matter, but it shows how bad and worse it is to lose one’s temper in the wild. It is, however, ten times worse to forget an enemy in the wild. The stoat had for- gotten one, and again it was his temper that made him do it. There was a sound in the air above him, suddenly and unexpectedly, as if a gigantic sword had been whirled very quickly, and there shot athwart him a vast shadow that put out the sun. The stoat had no time to jump, no time to do anything. He had only time to scream his death cry before he had passed in a single grip of mighty talons beyond the worrles of this world forever. The eagle with prismatic binocular eyes had seen him move in the first place when he put up the snowflakes, from very far off, and stealing back, a very speck in the sky, had swooped upon him in that instant, and—slain. COMIGDIOOKSEEO