She was just going to lie down again when something made her look up at the top of the rock that shielded them on the side they had made their beds. It might have been ten or twelve feet--hardly more--and perpendicular, but a broken surface mostly grown over with the coarse grey tinted moss that deer eat in winter.
At the top, directly above the sleeping-place, shone two pale green lights. They were close together, and terribly bright and evil. They glared out of pitch darkness on the rock top, and Nell felt a shock as she met fully the utter malevolence of the stare. Like the eyes in a picture that seem to follow the person who looks at them, these eyes appeared to meet Nell’s horrified gaze, but a moment after she realised that they were most likely watching something else. Then she saw the something else, and that startled her almost as much as the eyes.
Attracted perhaps by the smell of food and the warmth of the glowing embers, another creature of the forest was peering cautiously round the end of the upturned sled. Probably it had been creeping about the silent camp for some time, and hearing no sound ventured to inspect farther.
When Nell had moved to sit up, she had done so with the ease and swift silence of any other woodland dweller. Now she remained as still as sleeping David, except that she shifted one hand very, very gently on to Robin’s head--as a check; by the twitch of his forehead she _felt_ his eyes watching. So they stayed, frozen as it were, while the searcher came round the end of the sled and stood still.
It looked very big against the snow, but the girl knew how to allow for the dimness and the uncertain jumps of light from the wood sparks. She was not sure if it was an opossum, a fox, or a big wild cat. Either of the two last would be likely to be hunting at night. Then she saw as it drew nearer that it was carrying some animal in its jaws. It had been hunting in the river bank close by and caught a rabbit, or perhaps a musk-rat, and the warmth had attracted it into the circle of the little camp. It was a cat. A wild cat, of course, one of the great strong specimens that the trappers called catamounts, and quite possibly mate to the one that had bitten Andrew Lindsay. It carried its prey with head held rather high, as a household cat carries a mouse, and it stepped with the same wonderfully cautious delicacy, the big bushy tail drooping. Body close to the ground it crawled forward, and presently crouched, growling over its catch, as a cat growls.