Now, if there was one thing more than another about which the colonel prided himself in his bird sanctuary, it was the presence of the bittern.  I don’t know where the bittern came from, nor does the colonel.  Perhaps the head-keeper knew.  Bitterns migrate sometimes, but—­well, that keeper was no fool, and knew his master’s soft spot.

It was a night or two later that Pharaoh surmounted the limit, so to speak, and “sprung all mines in quick succession.”  He had been curled up all day in his furze fortress, that vast stretch of prickly impenetrability which, even if a dog had been found with pluck enough to push through to its heart, would still, in its massed and tangled boughs, have given a cat with Pharaoh’s fighting prowess full chance to defy any dog.

He was beautifully oblivious of the stir his previous doings had kicked up, and of the winged words the colonel had used to the head-keeper; of the traps set all about, of the gins doubled and trebled in the wood and round the park, and of the under-keepers who, with guns and tempting baits, took up their positions to wait for him as night fell.

No one seemed to have suspected the furze a mile away, and still less the marsh and the coverless bleak shore of the estuary, as his home.  Indeed, no one looks for a cat on a wind-whipped marsh when woods are near at all.  Yet this open, wet country seemed to be a peculiarly favorite hunting-ground of Pharaoh’s.

It was a night of rain-squalls and moonlit streaks when Pharaoh, wandering devious among the reeds, first became aware of the bittern, in the shape of reptilian green eyes steadily regarding him from the piebald shadows.  Possibly the cat’s whiskers first hinted at some new presence by reason of the “ancient and fish-like smell” which pervaded this precise reed jungle.

Pharaoh stopped dead.  Pharaoh, with cruel, thin ears pressed back, sank like a wraith into the soft ground.  Pharaoh ceased to be even a grayish-yellow, smoky something, and became nothing but eyes—­eyes floating and wicked.  A domestic cat, after one frozen interval, would have crept away from the foe it could not fathom, but Pharaoh had other blood in his veins.

To begin with, he was wondering what manner of beast the owner of those saurian-like orbs might be.  To go on with, he was hungry, and—­smelt fish.  But though he was looking full at the big bird, he could not see it, which is the bittern’s own private little bit of magic.

Nature has given him a coat just like a bunch of dried reeds and the shadows between, and he does the rest by standing with his bead stuck straight up and as still as a brass idol.  Result—­invisibility.

None know how long those two sought to “outfreeze” the “freezer,” while the rain-showers came up and passed hissing, and the moon played at hide-and-seek.  None knew when Pharaoh, flat as a snake, first began that deadly, silent circling, which was but acting in miniature the ways of the lion.  None knew, either, at what point of bittern first begun to sink and sink, till he crouched, and puffed, his neck curved on his back like a spring ready set, his beak, like a sharpened assegai, upright.