Kagax had slept too much, and was mad with the world.  The night before, he had killed from sunset to sunrise, and much tasting of blood had made him heavy.  So he had slept all day long, only stirring once to kill a partridge that had drummed near his den and waked him out of sleep.  But he was too heavy to hunt then, so he crept back again, leaving the bird untasted under the end of his own drumming log.  Now Kagax was eager to make up for lost time; for all time is lost to Kagax that is not spent in killing.  That is why he runs night and day, and barely tastes the blood of his victims, and sleeps only an hour or two of cat naps at a time—­just long enough to gather energy for more evil doing.

As he stretched himself again, a sudden barking and snickering came from a giant spruce on the hill just above.  Meeko, the red squirrel, had discovered a new jay’s nest, and was making a sensation over it, as he does over everything that he has not happened to see before.  Had he known who was listening, he would have risked his neck in a headlong rush for safety; for all the wild things fear Kagax as they fear death.  But no wild thing ever knows till too late that a weasel is near.

Kagax listened a moment, a ferocious grin on his pointed face; then he stole towards the sound.  “I intended to kill those young hares first,” he thought, “but this fool squirrel will stretch my legs better, and point my nose, and get the sleep out of me—­There he is, in the big spruce!”

Kagax had not seen the squirrel; but that did not matter; he can locate a victim better with his nose or ears than he can with his eyes.  The moment he was sure of the place, he rushed forward without caution.  Meeko was in the midst of a prolonged snicker at the scolding jays, when he heard a scratch on the bark below, turned, looked down, and fled with a cry of terror.  Kagax was already halfway up the tree, the red fire blazing in his eyes.

The squirrel rushed to the end of a branch, jumped to a smaller spruce, ran that up to the top; then, because his fright had made him forget the tree paths that ordinarily he knew very well, he sprang out and down to the ground, a clear fifty feet, breaking his fall by catching and holding for an instant a swaying fir tip on the way.  Then he rushed pell-mell over logs and rocks, and through the underbrush to a maple, and from that across a dozen trees to another giant spruce, where he ran up and down desperately over half the branches, crossing and crisscrossing his trail, and dropped panting at last into a little crevice under a broken limb.  There he crouched into the smallest possible space and watched, with an awful fear in his eyes, the rough trunk below.