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otherwise, guilty or not, were fair game.
    He lay like a huge house cat, his cool green eyes resting balefully on the quiet rural scene before him. Two children. He hadn’t seen any on the Island before.
    The Clydesdales began to tremble in real alarm, so, slinking on his belly, One-ear crawled deeper into the bushes until he came to a game path that led to the forest.
    He flung himself down in his shady nook, a sob-like cough escaping him, and self-pity dimmed his frosted mint eyes as he brooded on his terrible history.
    Wherever he went, persecuted. He placed his big head on his outstretched paws and blinked.
    An old scar, as large as a man’s fist, was just above the joint of his massive shoulder. People.
They
had done that. Next to dogs, he hated people more than anything in the world. Rotten to the core, all of them! Did cougars go after men with guns and dogs? Did forty cougars tree a man, wound him, and tear him to bits if they could?
    He had committed the unpardonable crime and they had hunted him for four days, no food, no water and on the run. They trapped him up a tree on the edge of a ravine, and the dogs were waiting at the foot of the tree, barking, barking, barking.
    His eyes became stony as he mused. After they had shot him, he fell a hundred feet into the ravine, on branches and rocks. Over and over he tumbled. The ravine was so steep that even the dogs could not climb down, and thinking they had finished him, they left him.
    For three days he lay there, and if it had not been for a trickle of water near him, he would have died. He’d broken most of the ribs on his left side, and of course, he’d been shot as well. How he had suffered, every breath a torment. And then he got that awful cold in his lungs. It was, he reflected, a miracle that he had survived. On the fourth day he had managed to crawl out, but he could not hunt. After two weeks he was a hundred pounds lighter and every bone in his pain-ridden body could be counted. Even now, his ribs ached when it was damp.
    It had been in January, with two feet of snow on the ground, and he had been dying of hunger. He hadn’t eaten in three weeks.
    There was a logging camp near by, so he went there at night, to the cookhouse, to see if there were any scrapsabout. Something hot and steaming was hanging on the porch rail, and, starving, he gulped it down. It was a dishcloth. A wet dishcloth.
    When the cook came out carrying a shotgun, One-ear was so weak the cook nearly outran him. The cook shot off his ear.
    He stretched his right front foot before him. From that huge velvet paw sprang talons, two inches long and as sharp as razors. One was missing, caught in one of
their
traps. He’d had to bite it off at the root to free himself.
    A piteous life, he thought moodily, blameless and piteous. Indignation choked him as he rose from his forest bower and lashed his long, black-tipped tail. Like an enchanted beast, he sprang into the bushes, looking for a nice plump deer.

L ADY SYDDYNS left a message at the store for Sergeant Coulter to call at her home at his earliest convenience.
    He found her in her storybook garden, where the scent of dianthus hung heavy and roses ruled. Though the air was languid with the pulse of bees, a hummingbird darted about in rapier haste, fearful of missing one blossom.
    Surrounded by nymphs and plaster gnomes, Lady Syddyns was pruning her prize bushes. She took off her floppy-brimmed leghorn hat and switched on her hearing aid when she saw Sergeant Coulter approach.
    ‘Albert, how nice to see you. My, it’s warm today. You must stop for tea. How is your father, dear?’
    Albert smiled.
    ‘He passed away some time ago, Lady Syddyns. You wanted to see me?’
    ‘Why, Albert, I’m always happy to see you.’
    She handed him her pruning shears and began brushing leaves from the faded velvet dressing gown that was her usual gardening costume.
    ‘Where’s my cane, dear?’
    Seeing it hooked over the extended arm of a marble