Graytail was some distance up the hill, and suddenly caught sight of a new foe close at hand, the yellow cur, coming right on.  Redruff, much farther off, could not see him for the bushes, and Graytail became greatly alarmed.

‘Kwit, kwit’ (Fly, fly), she cried, running down the hill for a start. ‘Kreet, k-r-r-r’ (This way, hide), cried the cooler Redruff, for he saw that now the man with the gun was getting in range.  He gained the great trunk, and behind it, as he paused a moment to call earnestly to Graytail, ‘This way, this way,’ he heard a slight noise under the bank before him that betrayed the ambush, then there was a terrified cry from Graytail as the dog sprang at her, she rose in air and skimmed behind the shielding trunk, away from the gunner in the open, right into the power of the miserable wretch under the bank.

Whirr, and up she went, a beautiful, sentient, noble being.

Bang, and down she fell—­battered and bleeding, to gasp her life out and to lie a rumpled mass of carrion in the snow.

It was a perilous place for Redruff.  There was no chance for a safe rise, so he squatted low.  The dog came within ten feet of him, and the stranger, coming across to Cuddy, passed at five feet, but he never moved till a chance came to slip behind the great trunk away from both.  Then he safely rose and flew to the lonely glen by Taylor’s Hill.

One by one the deadly cruel gun had stricken his near ones down, till now, once more, he was alone.  The Snow Moon slowly passed with many a narrow escape, and Redruff, now known to be the only survivor of his kind, was relentlessly pursued, and grew wilder every day.

It seemed, at length, a waste of time to follow him with a gun, so when the snow was deepest, and food scarcest, Cuddy hatched a new plot.  Right across the feeding-ground, almost the only good one now in the Stormy Moon, he set a row of snares.  A cottontail rabbit, an old friend, cut several of these with his sharp teeth, but some remained, and Redruff, watching a far-off speck that might turn out a hawk, trod right in one of them, and in an instant was jerked into the air to dangle by one foot.

Have the wild things no moral or legal rights?  What right has man to inflict such long and fearful agony on a fellow-creature, simply because that creature does not speak his language?  All that day, with growing, racking pains, poor Redruff hung and beat his great, strong wings in helpless struggles to be free.  All day, all night, with growing torture, until he only longed for death.  But no one came.  The morning broke, the day wore on, and still he hung there, slowly dying; his very strength a curse.  The second night crawled slowly down, and when, in the dawdling hours of darkness, a great Horned Owl, drawn by the feeble flutter of a dying wing, cut short the pain, the deed was wholly kind.

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