THE CAT

The snow was falling, and the Cat's fur was stiffly pointed with it, but
he was imperturbable. He sat crouched, ready for the death-spring, as he
had sat for hours. It was night--but that made no difference--all times
were as one to the Cat when he was in wait for prey. Then, too, he was
under no constraint of human will, for he was living alone that winter.
Nowhere in the world was any voice calling him; on no hearth was there a
waiting dish. He was quite free except for his own desires, which
tyrannized over him when unsatisfied as now. The Cat was very
hungry--almost famished, in fact. For days the weather had been very
bitter, and all the feebler wild things which were his prey by
inheritance, the born serfs to his family, had kept, for the most part,
in their burrows and nests, and the Cat's long hunt had availed him
nothing. But he waited with the inconceivable patience and persistency
of his race; besides, he was certain. The Cat was a creature of absolute
convictions, and his faith in his deductions never wavered. The rabbit
had gone in there between those low-hung pine boughs. Now her little
doorway had before it a shaggy curtain of snow, but in there she was.
The Cat had seen her enter, so like a swift grey shadow that even his
sharp and practised eyes had glanced back for the substance following,
and then she was gone. So he sat down and waited, and he waited still in
the white night, listening angrily to the north wind starting in the
upper heights of the mountains with distant screams, then swelling into
an awful crescendo of rage, and swooping down with furious white wings
of snow like a flock of fierce eagles into the valleys and ravines. The
Cat was on the side of a mountain, on a wooded terrace. Above him a few
feet away towered the rock ascent as steep as the wall of a cathedral.
The Cat had never climbed it--trees were the ladders to his heights of
life. He had often looked with wonder at the rock, and miauled bitterly
and resentfully as man does in the face of a forbidding Providence. At
his left was the sheer precipice. Behind him, with a short stretch of
woody growth between, was the frozen perpendicular wall of a mountain
stream. Before him was the way to his home. When the rabbit came out she
was trapped; her little cloven feet could not scale such unbroken
steeps. So the Cat waited. The place in which he was looked like a
maelstrom of the wood. The tangle of trees and bushes clinging