that moment cost
it dear. Quick as a hawk, Dusty Star stooped and struck. The keen blade
of his hunting knife flickered in the sun, and then buried itself in the
Catamount's fur.

With a scream of rage and terror, the animal dropped the cub, and turned
savagely on its foe. But at that very instant there was a rush and a
hoarse squall, and it was knocked clean head over heels by the furious
charge of the mother fox.

This totally unexpected attack completed the great cat's discomfiture.
Spitting and squawling, it bounded into the underwood and was instantly
out of sight.

It might have been expected that the fox, having routed one enemy of her
little one, would have turned at once on what she might have well
supposed was another. But just as she had quitted the den to look for
the missing cub, she had seen Dusty Star attack the Catamount, and her
quick senses told her that the action had not meant any injury to her
cub.

For all that, he was a new experience; and the wisdom of the wilderness
is that new experiences had better not be trusted. So while she nosed
the cub tenderly, turning it over with her paw, to see if it had been
injured, she kept one eye jealously on Dusty Star to watch his slightest
movement.

And now that wonderful knowledge of the feelings of wild animals partly
taught him by Kiopo, which he had been gradually gathering all his life,
came to his aid and told him what to do. For while his body remained so
absolutely motionless that he hardly seemed to breathe, his mind made
itself a finer body, and went out towards the fox; and the fox,
receiving the message, learnt that she had nothing to fear. For all
that, she was not easy that the cub should be left in the open, so far
from the den's mouth. Dusty Star she had ceased to mistrust; but her
instinct told her that, although the Catamount had disappeared, he was
still in the neighbourhood. So before she allowed herself to find out
any more about Dusty Star, she picked up the cub by the loose skin at
the back of its fat little neck, and carried it back to the den. As a
matter of fact, the Catamount was further than she knew, and now sat in
the fork of a red-cedar tree, licking the wound inflicted by Dusty
Star's knife, and making up his mind that if this new monster, with a
paw that struck so fiercely was a protector of the foxes, it would be
wiser to leave the entire gang severely alone.

When Baltook returned from his hunting with a plump partr