The feet braced themselves.

The cat was gauging its distance and making ready for a murder-spring.

Cyril, his head turned the other way, was still peering up along the cliff-edge for sight of Lad.
This was what Lad's scent and hearing,--and perhaps something else,--had warned him of, in that instant of the wind's eddying shift.
And this was the scene he looked down upon, now, from the ravine-lip, five feet above.
The collie brain,--though never the collie heart,--is wont to flash back, in moments of mortal stress, to the ancestral wolf.

Never in his own life had Sunnybank Lad set eyes on a wildcat.

But, in the primal forests, wolf and bob-cat had perforce met and clashed, a thousand times.