Presently he stooped down and stroked the huddle of shining fur. Blind babies though they were, the youngsters knew the touch for an alien one, the unknown smell for the smell of an enemy. Their tails and the ruffs of their necks bristled instantly, and, with a feeble spitting, they turned and clawed savagely at the intruding hand. The little claws drew blood, and John Hatch withdrew his hand with a laugh that had a touch of admiration in it.
"Gosh, but ye're spunky little devils!" he muttered. "But ye ain't a-goin' to grow up to use them claws on my sheep nur my dawg, an' don't ye fergit it!" For a moment he thought of wringing their necks, as the simplest way of getting the matter off his hands. But his kindly disposition shrank from the barbarity of the process; and, after all, to his mind they were kittens of a kind, and therefore entitled to a more gracious form of taking off. For all their spitting and clawing, he picked them up by the scruffs of their necks, stuffed two of them into his capacious pockets, carried the other two in his fist, and made his way hastily down the mountain, keeping a watchful eye over his shoulder, lest the mother-lynx should happen back from her hunting and attempt a rescue. He made his way to a little well-like pool, a sort of pocket of black water in a cleft of the granite, which he had passed and noted curiously on his upward climb. Into this icy oblivion he dropped the baby lynxes in a bunch, with a stone tied to them, as he was wont to do with the superfluous kittens at home. "Good riddance to that rubbish!" he muttered, as he strode on down the mountain.
But, underestimating the strength of these wild kittens, he had tied the string carelessly. In their drowning struggles, the string had come undone, and the victims, freed from the stone, had risen to the surface. But by this time they were too weak for any effectual effort at escape, and in their blindness they could not find the shore. Two, by chance, drifted upon a lip of rock, where they sprawled half-awash and were presently dead of the chill. The other two sank again into the black depths.
Their puny struggles had not long been stilled--five minutes, perhaps, or ten--when the mother-lynx arrived at the edge of the pool. Returning to her den and finding her little ones gone, the footprints and the trail of the woodsman had told her the story. Crouching flat, with ears back and teeth bared to the sockets, she had glared about her with terrible eyes, as if thinking that the ravisher might yet be within reach. Then, after one long, agonized sniff at the spot where her young had lain, she had sped away noiselessly down the steep, running with nose to the blatant trail and wild eyes peering ahead through the tangle of the brush.