# Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 23

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Chapter XXIII
In the still midday, desperate and half-mad with hunger, Broken Fang, the cougar, came stealing along a narrow pass in the high ranges of Smoky Land. He hadn't had a great deal of success with the mountain creatures. The previous day he had caught a little pika on the sliderock; once a mountain grouse had failed to detect him lying like a tawny piece of crag beside a pass, but the great bighorn themselves had mostly been able to keep out of his way.
In the first place he was under the great disadvantage of fighting in the enemy's country. The cougars are never quite at home in the high mountains. They are essentially a lowland people, and they have no love for the fields of glittering snow. They need trees in which to hide, brush thickets to wait in till the deer graze near by. The narrow passes, the rugged precipices, and the high knife-edge trails were the natural habitats of the wild sheep, but Broken Fang liked better walking. Besides, he didn't know the country.
If any one supposes that animals do not have to learn the geographical nature of a hunting ground before they are really adept in it, it is ​wholly plain that he has never followed the tracks of a pack of strange wolves in a new land. By knowing all the trails, the bighorn were able to avoid the traps that Broken Fang so laboriously set. More than once, after a weary half-day's wait, he would find to his chagrin that the sure-footed sheep had been watching him—chuckling no doubt among themselves—from a nearby promontory. They knew how to see him before he saw them, and in a fair chase he was simply out of the running. If his luck didn't change soon, it seemed very likely that the buzzards would have a large heap of poorly upholstered bones to pick clean.
But to-night—as September days rolled to their mellow end—he had fresh hopes. For the wind had come and brought him good news. The flock was feeding on a little grass slope just in front.
Broken Fang felt that it was almost his last chance, and he intended to make the most of it. But desperate as he was, he kept his hunting cunning. This would indicate that certain of the beasts have even better nerve control than their superiors, human beings,—for a starving man would have been unlikely to go about his hunting with the same stealth and caution. He crept slowly forward, his nerves singing wild melodies within him. And stealing from above, he soon caught sight of the flock.
Some of them were feeding; Argali, Spot, and ​one or two of the other young rams were lying down. Broken Fang's glaring eyes encompassed the whole scene, and with the swiftness and accuracy of a general, he mapped out his plan of attack. No naturalist explains by what swift avenues of intelligence he made his plans. Animals cannot reason. Instinct alone is severely taxed to account for all the wiles and astuteness of the wild creatures. But if this were instinct, it served him even better than intelligence.
It was true that his prey was out of leaping range of his trail. Yet for all that his heart throbbed with rapture. A jagged cliff approached within a few feet of them from the opposite side, and one détour would bring him close enough to strike. Best of all, he could leap at them from above.
The wind was right, the animals were not suspecting danger. He crept slowly about to the shelter of the opposite pass, then began to creep stealthily toward the sheep.
He didn't see how he could miss, particularly the yearling ram that lay nearest the cliff. He was a newcomer in the band, and he wouldn't be so wary as the others. It was a simple matter of stealing quietly over a ledge of rock, where there were no dry twigs to break beneath his feet, then to spring down with outstretched talons and open jaws. Already he was within a hundred feet. Their pungent smell was a madness in his ​nerves. Nearer—ever nearer—and now they were just below him. He had sunk so low against the crag that he looked more like a great tawny serpent than a feline. His tail twitched at its very tip as he crept on,—a few feet more. The whole realm was hung with that tense silence of the high mountains, a stillness wherein not even a wind whispers and the heart pounds like a drum in the breast.
This was not a coyote to be frightened away by an attitude of defense. If once the great puma launched forth in his spring, no power on earth could save the young ram. It seemed as if Spot were to lose his heritage already.
Broken Fang knew this crag. He had made a kill of one of its little people a day or two before. He had always had only scorn for these lesser folk,—the scurrying gophers, the timid rabbits, and the furry pikas in the rocks. Yet at that instant he was to receive a taste of their might. A shrill shriek suddenly split open the silence,—just in front of his head.
After all it was only a miniature sound, really little more than a high-pitched squeak. Yet in that unfathomable silence it cracked like a rifle. In one second of thought Broken Fang would have identified the sound, would have kept his poise, and a moment later would have sprung with fatal power into the flock of sheep. Yet that second of thought did not come in time. The impulse to his muscles, the sudden explosion ​of his tightly drawn nerves had the speed of light itself.
It was only a little pika—a rock rabbit, as the mountaineers call them,—such as the puma had killed the day before. It would have been surpassing poetic justice for it to have been the mate of the small, gray creature that had died so recently in his talons, squealing for the mother of his litter to come back to him. And his sharp squeal was just enough, and no more, to put high explosives under the sheep hunt.
The cougar's nerves had been pitched to the highest key, and the muscular reaction to that shrill sound could not be restrained. His paw lashed out: the little rodent leaped from beneath it. And at the same instant he snarled.
Few living creatures can strike in silence. One of them is the mighty elephant, most intellectual and, of course, majestic of all the beasts. This jungle king can lunge out with a resistless force and still keep the tremendous silence of the sphinx. But the stallion screams when he strikes with his lashing hoofs. The elk bellows, and even the venerable, dignified old bear has a savage growl at his lips as he slashes his terrible paws at his foe. The pent-up passions do not find sufficient escape in the blow itself, and a vocal utterance usually accompanies it. As Broken Fang struck at the rodent, his short, terrible snarl rang through the still air.
The sheep needed no further warning. They ​sprang forward as if the sound had been a great hand that hurled them, without an instant's delay. Broken Fang caught himself then, snarled and sprang among them; but he was a mere fraction of an instant too late.
The flock was divided—Argali and some of the ewes and immature rams circled about and dashed up the rocks at one side. The others—Spot and two young ewes—were cut off from this avenue of escape, and headed down the steep wall of the mountain. The way of the bighorn is the climbing trail—to flee to the heights where the ordinary run of hunters cannot follow. But Spot was obliged to take another course.
Broken Fang leaped after him. At first he ran only in anger and frenzy, for his instincts told him plainly and surely that it is usually the height of folly for a cougar to attempt to overtake the hoofed creatures in an open chase. But he had been cheated too many times; and his self-control had fallen further from him than the bottom of the gorge. The sheep raced on lightly, easily, and Broken Fang filled the canyons with his snarls.
But in a moment of vain pursuit a certain knowledge came to him. These sheep were headed down into his own country,—into the land of forest and thicket where he could hunt to an advantage. The thing to do was to continue the chase, prevent them from circling back, and ​who knows what glory might be his in the still, tree-clad ridges below him.
The chase of Spot and his bighorn ewes down into the greenwood was not the only stir of life in the midday silence of Smoky Land. At the same hour the hoofbeats of a running horse carried far through the dusky thickets of a certain great ridge to the east,—a place that divided Crowson's range from the old Bear Canyon country. A man rode lightly in the saddle: and his dark skin revealed him as an alien in this northern land. José Mertos was riding on orders, and he came swiftly. There was work for him to-day.
He seemed to know just what to do. From time to time he scanned the horizon as if searching for a landmark. Then he turned off the trail through the heavy timber. The forest constantly grew more brushy, his advance ever more difficult. And at last he came to the mouth of a great, still canyon.
Very swiftly he went to work. And if it had not been for the curious intentness of his eyes, an unexplainable nervousness in his motions, one would have thought that he was merely making a camp. He collected a little pile of dry bark and pushed a few brown pine needles under it. Then he broke off some of the brittle branches of the underbrush. These were piled on too; and a match flashed in his hand.
​Just a moment he stood, waiting until the flame—a yellow hungry little tongue that a slap of the hand could extinguish—crept like a serpent into the little heap of dead bark. He saw it grow and climb till, with a sudden leap, it sprang into the dry branches that he had broken off. And from there it was only one leap to the brittle brush of the shrubbery of the thicket.
José smiled then, a little, dim curling of his thin lips over his gleaming teeth. And he did not smile often. An event had to be very cruel and hurt some one very badly to waken mirth in him. And now there was no answering echo of simple pleasure in his dark eyes. Rather the fire that he had ignited had crept into them also: the pupils were oddly contracted and bright as points of steel. He seemed somewhat breathless, too, stirred to the depths with a madness unknown even to the wild creatures.
There is no more wholesome emotion on earth than the love for the open fire. It was the first friend, and its comradeship and protection are remembered from the immeasurable past. And there is no madness that is so devastating and terrible as that of incendiarism. José was not, ordinarily, a man given to excesses. But the fire madness was upon him now.
A fiendish light was in his eyes, a ghastly drawing distorted his features. His motions were less careful and patient. He laughed harshly, then swung on to his horse. He headed ​up the canyon, swooped off his horse's back, and lighted another fire. The crackle of the first conflagration had already grown to a menacing roar behind him.
A quarter of a mile farther he lighted the third fire, and then the fourth. It was not to be just a sporadic brush fire, with open lanes between. It was to be a veritable wall of flame. It was the forest fire in its full sense, sweeping swiftly and immutably over hill and valley, through thicket and open forest, and leaving only ugly sticks and black ashes in its wake. The flame pounced upon the trees. The dusky branches caught, the red demon mounted higher, and already the spaces between his first few starting fires were closing up.
But still José did not cease. For five miles across the canyons he rode — in a great crescent—stopping ever to light his fires. And when that ride was done, he turned his mount back through Smoky Land, toward a certain canyon that was a gateway out of the region to high mountains where the fire could not go. He had other work to do.