Then he started downward, his whitish belly was turned upward, while he continued to beat and claw the air in his death struggles.
As is the tendency of falling bodies, the carcass of the cougar showed an inclination to revolve.

It began slowly turning over as it descended, and it must have completed several revolutions when it struck the rocky ground below like a limp bundle of rags, and lay motionless.
The boy, from his lofty perch, watched the form below him for several minutes, but could detect no sign of life, and rightly concluded there was none.
"I wonder whether there are any more there," he exclaimed, hesitating to go backward, while he scrutinized the branches with the keenest kind of anxiety.

"I do n't see any chance where one could hide, and yet I did n't see that other fellow." It was hardly possible that he should find a companion to the one he had just slain, and he resumed his hitching forward, making it as deliberate and careful as he could.

Clutching the branches, he hurried forward and was soon upon the other side of the chasm which had come so nigh witnessing his death.

Without pausing longer he hastened on and was not long in placing himself upon the top of the elevation from which he was so confident of gaining his view of the promised land, as the pass had become to him, now that it seemed so difficult to find, and was so necessary to anything like progress.
But another disappointment awaited him.