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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41880 ***
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 41880-h.htm or 41880-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41880/41880-h/41880-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41880/41880-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://archive.org/details/wildfol00scov
+
+
+
+
+
+WILD FOLK
+
+
+[Illustration: THE PINCUSHION OF THE WOODS]
+
+
+WILD FOLK
+
+by
+
+SAMUEL SCOVILLE, JR.
+
+Author of "Everyday Adventures"
+
+With Illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull and Carton Moorepark
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Atlantic Monthly Press
+Boston
+
+Copyright, 1922, by
+Samuel Scoville, Jr.
+
+Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+    _To my Son Gurdon Trumbull Scoville who has learned to know and
+    love so many of our Lesser Brethren of Earth and Air and Water
+    this book is dedicated_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+       I. THE CLEANLYS               1
+      II. BLACKBEAR                 24
+     III. THE SEVENTH SLEEPER       51
+      IV. HIGH SKY                  74
+       V. THE LITTLE PEOPLE         85
+      VI. THE PATH OF THE AIR      107
+     VII. BLACKCAT                 122
+    VIII. LITTLE DEATH             137
+      IX. BLACKCROSS               150
+       X. SEA OTTER                 71
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+    _The Pincushion of the Woods_       Frontispiece
+    _The First Journey_                            4
+    _Bull Moose and Blackbear_                    44
+    _The Thief_                                   62
+    _The Safe Rabbit_                            130
+    _The Killers_                                140
+    _The Fox Family_                             154
+    _Death in the Dark_                          158
+
+
+
+
+WILD FOLK
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE CLEANLYS
+
+
+All winter long the Barrens had slept still and white. Rows and
+regiments of low pitch-pine trees, whose blue-green needles grow in
+threes instead of the fives of the white or the twos of the Virginia
+pines, marched for miles and miles across the drifted snow. Through
+their tops forever sounded the far-away roar of the surf of the upper
+air, like the rushing of mighty wings, while overhead hung a sky whose
+cold blue seemed flecked with frost. The air tingled with the spicery
+of myriads of pine trees. Grim black buzzards, on fringed, motionless
+wings, wheeled and veered over this land of silence.
+
+Then, with the suddenness of the South, spring came. The woods became
+a shimmering pool of changing greens. The down-folded leaves of the
+little lambskill stood erect again, like rabbits' ears, over
+claret-colored flowers, and the soft warm air was sweet with the heavy
+perfume of cream-white magnolia blossoms. On jade-green pools gleamed
+the buds of yellow pond-lilies, like lumps of floating gold, and the
+paler golden-club, whose blossoms look like the tongues of calla
+lilies. Everywhere, as if set in snow, gleamed the green-and-gold of
+the Barrens' heather above the white sand, which had been the bed of
+some sea, forgotten a million years ago. In the distance, at the edges
+of the Barrens, were glimpses of far-away meadows, all hazy with blue
+toad-flax and rimmed with the pale gold of narrow-leaved sundrops with
+their deep orange centres.
+
+Through the woods wound a deep creek, whose water was stained brown
+and steeped sweet with a million cedar roots. Unlike the singing
+streams of the North, this brook ran stilly, cutting its deep way
+through gold-and-white sand, and meeting never rock nor stone to make
+it murmur. On its bank in the deepest part of the woods grew a vast
+sweet-gum tree, covered with star-shaped leaves. Tangles of barbed
+greenbrier set with fierce curved thorns, and stretches of sphagnum
+bogs guarded the tree from the land side. In the enormous hollow
+trunk, some fifty feet above the ground, a black hole showed.
+
+There, one May afternoon, as the sun was westering far down the sky, a
+small face appeared suddenly, framed in the dark opening. It was a
+funny little face, surmounted by broad, pricked-up, pointed ears, and
+masked by a black band, which stretched from above a pair of twinkling
+golden eyes clear down to a small pointed muzzle. As the owner of the
+face came out of the hollow and began to creep slowly and cautiously
+down the side of the great tree, his fur showed in the sunlight a dull
+brownish-gray, with black-tipped hairs on the back, while those on the
+round little belly had white ends. Last of all appeared the
+black-ringed, cylindrical tail which is the hall-mark of the aracoun,
+raccoon, or coon, as red, white, and black men have variously named
+the owner of said tail.
+
+This particular little coon was the youngest of four fuzzy, cuddly,
+blind babies, which had appeared in the old den-tree early in March.
+His father was a wary, battle-scarred giant among his kind, who
+weighed thirty pounds, measured three feet from the tip of his pointed
+nose to the end of his ringed tail, and was afraid of nothing that
+crawled, ran, swam, or flew.
+
+As the little coon walked carefully, head-first, down the tree, he
+showed his kinship to the bears by setting the naked black soles of
+his little hind feet flat, instead of walking on his toes as most of
+the flesh-eaters do. His forepaws were like tiny black hands, with a
+very short little finger and the thumb the same length as the other
+three long, supple fingers.
+
+It was the first time that this particular youngster had ever ventured
+out of the home-nest. A great bump in the middle of the trunk was his
+undoing. He crept over the edge, but in reaching down for a safe grip
+beyond, lost his hold and, with a wail of terror, fell headlong.
+Fortunately for him, the gum was surrounded on three sides by shallow
+pools of standing water. Into one of these the young climber fell with
+a splash, and a second later was swimming for dear life back to his
+family tree.
+
+At the very first sound of that little SOS the head of Mother Coon
+appeared in the opening, with three other small heads peering out from
+behind her. Seeing the little coon struggling in the water, she
+hurried down the tree, followed in procession by the rest of the
+family, who had evidently resolved not to miss anything. By the time
+she came to the bump, however, the small adventurer had reached the
+trunk from which he had fallen. Fixing his sharp claws into the bark,
+he climbed up the tree, bedraggled, wet, and much shocked at the
+manifold dangers of life.
+
+Seeing him safe, Mrs. Coon at once turned back. The three little coons
+turned with her, and the reversed procession started up to the hole.
+The littlest of the family climbed slowly and painfully as far as the
+bump, whimpering all the time. There his feelings overcame him. He was
+positive that never had any little coon suffered so before. He was wet
+and shaken and miserable and--his mother had deserted him.
+
+"Err, err, err," he began to cry, softly, but exceeding sorrowfully.
+
+It was too much even for Mother Coon's stern ideals of child-training.
+Once again she crept down the tree and, stopping on the bump, fixed
+her claws firmly into the bark. Stretching far over the edge, she
+reached down and gripped the little coon firmly but gently by the
+loose skin of his neck and, turning around, swung him safely up in
+front of her between her forepaws. Then, urging him on with little
+pokes from her pointed nose, she convoyed him up the tree toward the
+den, from which three little heads looked down. At times the memory
+of his grief would be too bitter to be borne, and he would stop and
+whimper and make little soft, sobbing noises. Then Mother Coon would
+pat him comfortingly with her slim, graceful paws and urge him on
+until at last he was safely home again. So ended well, after all, the
+first journey into the world of any of this little family.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST JOURNEY]
+
+By this time the sun was set, and the old coon climbed down the tree
+to the nearest pool, for a bit of supper. As she approached, there
+were squeaks and splashes, and several cricket frogs dived into the
+water ahead of her. Wading in, she looked around at the woods and the
+tree-tops in the darkening light, in a vacant way, as if frogs were
+the very last thing she had in mind; but under the water her slim
+fingers were exploring every inch of the oozy bottom with such
+lightning-like speed, that in less than a minute three frogs had been
+caught, killed by a skillful nip, and thrown up on the dry bank.
+Convinced that there were no more left in the pool, she approached her
+supper-table; but before she would eat came the ceremony and ritual of
+her tribe and blood.
+
+No raccoon, in winter or summer, by night or by day, at home or in
+captivity, will willingly eat any unwashed food except green corn. One
+by one the dead frogs were plunged under the water from which they had
+just been taken, and were washed and re-washed and rubbed and
+scrubbed, until they were clean enough to suit Mrs. Coon. Then, and
+not until then, were they daintily eaten. Thereafter soft little
+chirring calls from the tree-top said that her babies were ready for
+their supper, too; and she climbed back to the nest, where they
+snuggled against her and nuzzled and cuddled and drank of the warm
+milk which would not flow much longer for them, since mother raccoons
+wean their children early.
+
+While they were still at supper, there sounded from the black depths
+of the pine forest a long whickering "Whoo-oo-oo-oo," much like the
+wailing call of the screech-owl. It was Father Coon on his way home
+from where he had been spending the night in one of his outlying
+hunting-lodges, of which he had several within a radius of a few
+miles; and a little later he joined the family. He brought Mother Coon
+a little tidbit in the shape of a fresh-water mussel, which, although
+the shell was still dripping, she climbed down and washed before she
+cracked and ate it like a nut.
+
+After supper, the two started off on a hunting-trip, while the babies
+curled up in a round ball, to sleep until they came back. The gray
+hour just before dawn found the hunters crouched in the long marshy
+grass at the very tip of a point of land that ran into a little pond,
+which was ringed around with the stunted pines of the Barrens. Just as
+the first light showed in the sky, a flock of mallards, headed by a
+magnificent drake with a bright green head, swung in to feed. Never a
+sign nor sound betrayed the presence of the ambushers until the drake
+reached the edge of the shore. The startled bird had not even time for
+one quack before there was a splash, and old Father Coon had twisted
+that gay and gallant neck and was back on the shore again, with the
+quivering body thrown over his shoulder.
+
+Part of the duck was washed and eaten then and there, and the rest was
+carried back to the den-tree, where the four little coons were taught
+to tear off little strips of the rich, dark meat, and to wash them
+repeatedly before eating. That first taste of flesh and blood forever
+barred them from the warm milky fountain which had been theirs before.
+From this time on, they had to hunt for themselves.
+
+The very next night their education began. In the warm fragrant dusk,
+the whole family trotted in a long, leisurely procession through the
+underbrush, until they came to a broad bank of warm, white sand that
+overhung the deep waters of the stream which wound its silent way like
+a brown snake through the Barrens. Here, in a half-circle, the whole
+family crouched and dozed comfortably, with their pointed, striped
+noses on their forepaws, while the dusk deepened into the
+soft-scented, velvet blackness of a summer night. For long they stayed
+there, in the still patience which only the wild folk possess.
+
+At last, over the tips of the pointed cedars the moon rose, and turned
+the white beach to silver. All at once, from where a sand spit sloped
+gradually into the water, sounded a tiny splash, and out into the
+moonlight crawled a monstrous, misshapen object. From under a vast
+black shell ridged with dull yellow a snaky neck stretched this way
+and that, surmounted by a fierce head, with a keen, edged beak and
+gleaming, cruel eyes which stared up and down the whole beach. It was
+a snapper, one of the largest of its kind, which weighed perhaps
+half-a-hundred pounds and would have filled a small washtub.
+
+As the great turtle crawled slowly up the bank, the little coons
+crouched tensely, and turned their heads to see how the veteran
+hunters of the family proposed to attack this demon of the stream. As
+if asleep, both of them crouched motionless; for long ago they had
+learned that watchful waiting is the best policy when Mrs. Snapper
+comes out of the water of a spring night. Back and forth the monster
+crawled heavily, stopping to look and listen for minutes at a time.
+Satisfied at last that no danger threatened her on that lonely beach,
+she chose a little ridge of loose sand not ten feet from the raccoon
+family, and scrabbling with her hind legs and thrusting with her
+thick, strong tail in the warm sand, dug herself in. There she stayed
+all the night through, until she had laid a couple of hundred
+parchment-covered, cylindrical eggs, the greatest delicacy on the
+whole bill of fare of the hunting folk.
+
+Just before dawn, she pulled herself heavily out of the hole she had
+dug, and the loose sand poured in after her, filling the cavity and
+covering the eggs that were hidden there. Not until the turtle had
+smoothed over the displaced sand and waddled back into the stream did
+the head of the raccoon family make a movement. He was no coward, but
+he knew too much to trust his slim paws or his pointed nose anywhere
+near Mrs. Snapper's shearing jaws. When the brown water at last
+closed over her monstrous body, Father Coon led his waiting family to
+the bank and deftly uncovered the newly laid eggs, on which they
+feasted until sunrise sent them back to bed.
+
+As the freshness of spring melted into the hot, green sweetness of
+summer, the education of the little Cleanlys went on rapidly. They
+soon became experts in breakfast-botany, and learned to dig for the
+nutty tubers of the wild bean, with its brown purple blossoms, the
+spicy roots of the wild sarsaparilla, with its five ashlike leaves and
+fuzzy ball of white blossoms, the wild ginger, the spatterdock, and a
+score or so of other pleasant-tasting wild vegetables. They learned,
+too, how to hunt frogs, and to grub up mussels, and to catch those
+little fresh-water lobsters, the crawfish, without getting their
+fingers nipped.
+
+The Cleanly children made few mistakes, and hardly ever disobeyed
+their parents. There was a reason. Disobedience among the wild folk
+means death, and he who makes one mistake often never gets a chance to
+make another. The sister of the littlest coon was a sad example of
+this fact. She decided to become a reformer. It seemed to her that it
+would be pleasanter to hunt by daylight than after dark, so she tried
+it--once. On her first (and last) trip she met old Sam Carpenter, a
+Piny, who always carried a shotgun with him.
+
+Of course, accidents will happen in wild-folk families just as among
+us humans, only in a wild-folk family, an accident is more apt to be
+fatal. It was the oldest of the three little Cleanlys, after the
+reformer had gone, who suffered first. He had been hunting in the
+wildest part of the five-mile circle, which the family used, and it
+was after sunrise when he scrambled out of the shallow pool where he
+had been frogging.
+
+Suddenly from a dry dense thicket near by, there was a fierce hiss
+like escaping steam, and from a tangle of fern darted the mottled
+brown-and-white length of a great pine snake. Its curious pointed
+head, with its golden, unwinking eyes, shot forward, and the next
+second a set of sharp teeth closed on the soft nose of the small coon.
+Unlike the poison people, the pine snake has no fangs, and its teeth
+are used only to hold its prey for the grip of its choking, crushing
+coils. This particular snake was nearly eight feet long, and as thick
+around as a big man's wrist. Luckily for the little coon, the thick
+bushes guarded him for an instant against the smothering coils.
+
+Dragging back from the dreadful glare of the fixed, lidless eyes, he
+tried to tear loose, and squalled with all his might for his mother.
+Fortunately for him, she was not far away. Anyone who had ever watched
+Mrs. Coon climb carefully down a tree-trunk, or move deliberately
+through the thickets, would never have identified her with the furious
+figure which flashed through the bushes at the very first cry of the
+little coon. Before the great snake had time to draw its coils clear
+of the branches, or even to disengage its head to meet the attack,
+the raccoon was upon it, and sank her sharp teeth through the
+reptile's spine just back of its head. At once the shut jaws gaped,
+and the little coon sprang back from the heavy body, which writhed and
+twisted and beat the bushes horribly in its death agony.
+
+Mother Coon was always practical, with an open mind in regard to
+matters of diet, and while her cub whimperingly licked, with a long,
+pink tongue, a much-abused little nose, she began to strip off the
+speckled skin of her late opponent, and to convert it into lengths of
+firm, white meat on which the whole raccoon family fed full that
+night.
+
+It was the youngest of the family who was the next victim. Again it
+was Mother Coon whose love and wisdom and courage outweighed chance on
+the scales of life and death. He had been exploring the shallows of
+the stream near a deserted cranberry bog. All the raccoon people like
+to follow the shallows of a stream, on the chance of picking up frogs,
+mussels, crawfish, and other water-food. A solitary rock off a tiny
+island, in shallow water close to the bank, is always a favorite spot
+for a hunting coon. Old Sam Carpenter knew all about raccoon habits,
+and also about one of their weaknesses.
+
+On this night the latest-born of the family came splashing down the
+warm shallows, and half waded and half swam out to a tiny sandbar some
+six feet from the bank. There he crouched and scanned the water in the
+moonlight, on the chance that he might catch a sluggish, red-finned
+sucker as it winnowed the water through its long wrinkled tube of a
+mouth. Suddenly, against the yellow sand, he saw three or four
+gleaming, silver disks, brighter even than the silver-scaled shiners
+which he had often tried vainly to catch. Old Sam had begged from a
+traveling tinker a few scraps of bright tin and strewn them near the
+little islet.
+
+No raccoon can help investigating anything that glistens in the water,
+and this one felt that he must have his hands on that treasure-trove.
+Wading carefully out into the shallows, he dabbled in the sand with
+his slim forepaws, trying to draw some of the shining pieces in to
+shore. Suddenly there was a snap that sent the water flying, a
+horrible grinding pain, and the slender fingers of his right forepaw
+were caught between the wicked jaws of a hidden steel trap.
+
+"Oo-oo-oo-oo!" he cried, with the sorrowful wail of a hurt baby coon.
+
+But this time Mother Coon was far away, around two bends of the
+crooked stream, investigating a newly found mussel bed. The little
+coon tried in vain to pull away from the cruel jaws, but they held him
+unrelentingly. Then he attempted to gnaw his way loose, but only broke
+his keen little teeth on the stubborn iron.
+
+At first, he was easily able to keep himself above the water; yet, as
+the minutes went by, the unremitting weight of the trap forced him
+under more and more often, to rest from the weary, sagging pain. Each
+time that he went down, it seemed easier and easier to stay there,
+and to slip into oblivion under the glimmering water and forget the
+torture that racked every nerve in his struggling little body. Yet, in
+spite of his funny face and quiet ways, the little coon came of a
+battling breed which never gives up. Once more he struggled up from
+the soothing coolness of the water, and for the last time his cry for
+help shuddered faintly across the Barrens. At last and at last, far
+away down the stream, he heard the snap of a broken branch, and a
+minute later the rapid pad-pad of flying feet along the sand, as he
+fought weakly to stay above the surface, sure that the coming of his
+mother meant rescue from all the treacheries that beset him.
+
+In another minute she had reached the bank, and with a bound, her fur
+bristling, was beside her cub, ready to fight for him to the last drop
+of blood in her lithe, powerful body. Fortunately for her cub, the
+years had brought to Mother Coon wisdom as well as courage. Once
+certain as to what had happened, she decided instantly upon the stern
+and only answer which the wild folk have for the snares of their cruel
+human brethren. She waded out so that her back was under the exhausted
+little body of her cub, and, ducking under, gripped the trap with one
+of her flexible hands, strained the little paw away from it with the
+other and with a few quick slashes of her sharp teeth severed the
+three black, slim little fingers that the bitter jaws held fast.
+
+As she cut off one after the other, she could feel the warm furry body
+that rested upon hers thrill and quiver with the pain; but never a
+sound nor a struggle came from the littlest of the coons. Another
+minute, and slowly and limpingly he was creeping back to the den-tree.
+Better, alas, for any child of the wild folk to go maimed and halt
+through life than to fall alive into the hands of us humans!
+
+The weeks went by. Summer waxed, until the Barrens were green waves,
+starred and spangled with flowers, and echoing with bird-songs. All
+through the long, warm, flower-scented nights the raccoon family
+feasted and frolicked, and the little ones grew apace. One velvety
+warm night, when the crescent moon had sunk in the west, Father Coon
+led his family toward the farm lands, which year by year crept farther
+into the Barrens. Beyond the woods they came to a field of towering
+stalks, whose rustling leaves overshadowed plump ears of creamy corn,
+swathed in green husks and wound with soft silk. At the sight the
+leaders for once seemed to forget all their caution.
+
+Into the field they rushed, like mad things, and, pulling down stalk
+after stalk, they stripped off the husks from an ear, and took a bite
+or so of the angel-food beneath, only to cast it aside and grasp
+another. The little coons followed their parents' example, and pulled
+and hauled and tore and chanked among the standing corn, until it
+looked as if a herd of hungry cows had been there. The feasting kept
+on until every coon, big and little, was brimming full of melting,
+creamy corn.
+
+As they ambled contentedly back toward the dense woods, there came a
+sound which made Father Coon hurry them forward. Scarcely had they
+reached the edge of the first thicket, when across the field dashed
+three mongrel hounds, which belonged to Sam Carpenter, and were out
+hunting to-night on their own account. There was no time to gain the
+shelter of the trees. Just ahead of them one edge of the stream
+touched the cleared country, while its farther bank was deep in the
+Barrens. Following their leader, the whole family took to the water.
+They had hardly reached the middle of the wide stream when, with a
+splash, the dogs plunged in, only a few yards behind. Immediately
+Father Coon dropped back, for when it comes to matters of life and
+death it is always Father Coon who fights first. To-night, in spite of
+numbers, the odds were all in his favor; for the raccoon is the second
+cousin of those great water-weasels, the mink and the otter, and it is
+as dangerous to attack him in the water as to fight a porcupine in his
+tree or a bear in his den.
+
+The first of the pack was a yellow hound, who looked big and fierce
+enough to tackle anything. With a gasping bay, he ploughed forward,
+open-mouthed, to grip that silent, black-masked figure which floated
+so lightly in front of him--only to find it gone. At his plunge the
+raccoon had dived deep, a trick which no dog has yet learned. A second
+later, from behind, a slim sinewy hand closed like a clamp on the
+dog's foreleg, too far forward to be reached by his snapping jaws. As
+the hound lowered his head, vainly trying to bite, the raccoon
+reached across with his other paw, and gripped his opponent
+smotheringly by the muzzle.
+
+Slowly, inexorably, he threw his weight against the dog's head, until
+it sank below the surface. As the other dogs approached, the coon
+manoeuvred so that the struggling body was always between himself
+and his attackers. Never for an instant did he allow his prisoner's
+head to come to the surface. Suddenly he released it, and flashed back
+into the shadows. The body of the great hound floated on the surface,
+with gaping jaws and unseeing eyes.
+
+Once more the coon dived and dragged down, with the same deadly grip,
+the smaller of his remaining opponents. This time he went under water
+with him. The dog struggled desperately, but paws have no chance
+against hands. Moreover, a raccoon can stay under water nearly five
+minutes, which is over a minute too long for any dog. When the coon at
+last appeared on the surface, he came up alone.
+
+At that moment old Sam, aroused by the barking and baying of his dogs,
+hurried to the bank and called off his remaining hound, who was only
+too glad to swim away from the death in the dark, which had overtaken
+his pack mates. A moment later the victor was on his way back to the
+den-tree. The next morning, in a little inlet, where an eddy of the
+stream had cast them, Sam found the bodies of the dogs who had dared
+to give a raccoon the odds of the stream; and he swore to himself to
+kill that coon before snow flew.
+
+Many and many a time he tried. Everywhere the old Piny saw the tracks
+of the family, the front paws showing claw-marks, while the hind paws,
+set flat like those of a bear, made a print like a baby's bare foot.
+One track always showed three claws missing. Yet, hunt as he would, he
+could never surprise any of them again by day or night, while the many
+traps he sowed everywhere caught nothing.
+
+One September night summer passed on, and the next morning there was
+the tang of frost in the air. The leaves of the sour-gum, the first
+tree to turn, showed blood-red. Day by day the woods gleamed, as the
+frost-fire leaped from tree to tree. The blueberry bushes ran in waves
+of wine along the ground, the sassafras was all sunshine-yellow, the
+white oaks old-gold, while the poison-ivy flaunted the regal red and
+yellow of Spain.
+
+Before long, the Hunter's Moon of October was in the sky; and the
+night it was full, assembled the first coon-hunt of the season. Sam
+Carpenter was there, and Mose Butler came with his Grip, while Charlie
+Rogers brought Pet--famous coon dogs, which had never been known to
+run on a false scent. Came also old Hen Pine, with his famous gun. It
+had a barrel only about a foot long, for once, while hunting, the old
+man had slipped into a bog, plugging the muzzle of his gun with mud.
+The result was that the next time Hen fired it off, half the barrel
+disappeared. He claimed, however, that, barrel or no barrel, it was
+the best gun in the country, bar none. Anyway, a gun was only needed
+to frighten a treed coon into coming down, since the etiquette of a
+coon-hunt is the same as that of a fox-hunt--only the dogs must do the
+killing.
+
+It was just before midnight when the party reached the dense woods
+where Sam Carpenter had so often seen the tracks of the Cleanlys.
+Early in the evening the little family had found a persimmon tree
+loaded down with sweet, puckery, orange-red fruit, and were ambling
+peacefully toward one of their father's hunting-lodges in an old
+crow's nest. They happened to pass the neck of woods nearest Sam's
+cabin just as the whole party entered it. Lanterns waved, men shouted,
+and dogs yipped and bayed among the trees, as they ran sniffing here
+and there, trying to locate a fresh trail.
+
+The fierce chorus came to the hunted ones like a message of death and
+doom. If they scattered, some of the little coons would inevitably be
+overtaken by this pack of trained dogs, directed by veteran hunters.
+If they kept together, sooner or later they would be treed, and
+perhaps all perish. Once again the leader faced the last desperate
+duty of the father of a raccoon family. He dropped back to meet and
+hold the ranging pack until Mother Coon could hurry the little ones
+home by the tree-top route.
+
+In another minute Nip, the last remaining dog of Sam's pack, caught
+the scent, and with a bay that echoed through the tangled thickets and
+across the dark pools of the marshland woods, dashed along the fresh
+trail. Then happened something which had never before befallen the
+luckless Nip in all his days and nights of hunting. From out of the
+thickets toward which the trail led rushed a black-masked figure,
+hardly to be seen in the gloom. Nip's triumphant bay changed to a
+dismayed yelp, as a set of sharp claws dug bloody furrows down his
+face and ripped his long silky ears to ribbons.
+
+Before he could come to close grips his opponent had disappeared into
+the depths of a thicket, and Nip decided to wait for the rest of the
+pack. In a moment they joined him, with Grip and Pet leading. As they
+approached the thicket they, too, had the surprise of their lives.
+Contrary to all precedent a hunted coon, instead of running away,
+attacked them furiously. It was very irregular and disconcerting. Even
+as they were disentangling themselves from the clinging greenbrier and
+matted branches, they were gashed and slashed by an enemy who flashed
+in and out from the bit of open ground where he had waited for them.
+The leaders of the pack yelped and howled, and stopped, until
+reinforced and pressed forward by the slower dogs as they came up.
+
+Little by little the old raccoon was forced back and compelled to make
+desperate dashes here and there, to avoid being surrounded. At last,
+he found himself driven beyond the area of the tangled thickets and
+into a stretch of open ground. Spreading out, the dogs hemmed him in
+on every side except one. Guarded on his flank by a long swale of the
+spiked greenbrier, he rushed along the one line left open to him, only
+to find himself in the open again. Just beyond him the cranberry
+growers had left a great sweet-gum tree which, with the lapse of
+years, had grown to an enormous size. As the pack closed around him,
+the coon made a dash for his refuge and scuttled up the trunk, while
+the dogs leaped high in the air, snapping at his very heels.
+
+By the time the hunters came up, the whole clamoring pack, in a
+circle, was pawing at the tree. When the men saw that Pet and Grip and
+Nip, whose noses had never yet betrayed them, had their paws against
+the trunk with the rest, they decided that the coon had been treed,
+and was still treed, which did not always follow. The vast tree was
+too large around either to climb or to cut. Raising the lighted
+lantern which he carried, old Hen held it back of his head and stared
+straight up into the heart of the great gum. At last, sixty feet above
+the ground, against the blackness of the trunk showed two dots of
+flaming gold. They were the eyes of the raccoon, as it leaned out to
+stare down at the yellow blotch of light below.
+
+Posting the dogs in a wide circle around the tree, the men built up a
+roaring fire and sat down to wait for the coming dawn. For long they
+talked and smoked and dozed over the fire, until at last a ghostly
+whiteness seemed to rise from the ground. Little by little the shadows
+paled, and the spectral tree-trunks showed more distinctly against the
+brightening sky, while crimson bars gleamed across the gateway of the
+east.
+
+At the shouts of the men and the yelps and barks of the dogs below,
+the old coon stiffened and stared down at them unflinchingly. Hen
+Pine produced his cherished weapon. Aiming carefully above the treed
+animal he fired, and the heavy load splashed and crashed through the
+upper branches of the tree. Grimly the great raccoon faced his fate,
+as the scattering shot warned him that his only chance for life was on
+the ground. Slowly but unhesitatingly he moved down the side of the
+tree, while the dogs below bayed and howled and leaped high in the
+air. Beyond the dogs stood the men. In their faces showed no pity for
+the trapped animal, who must fight for his life against such fearful
+odds.
+
+For a moment the coon looked down impassively at his foes. Then, just
+as the golden rim of the rising sun showed above the tree-tops, he
+turned like lightning and sprang out into mid-air, sideways, so that
+he would land close to the trunk of the tree. As he came through the
+air, spread out like a huge flying squirrel, his keen claws slashed
+back and forth as if he were limbering up for action. He struck the
+ground lightly and was met by a wave of dogs which swept him against
+the tree. There with his back guarded by the trunk he made his last
+stand.
+
+At first, it seemed as if he would be overwhelmed as the howling pack
+dashed at him, but it was science against numbers. Perfectly balanced,
+he ducked and sidestepped like a lightweight champion in a
+street-fight, slashing with his long, keen claws so swiftly that not
+one of the worrying, crowded pack escaped. With flashing, tiny,
+imperceptible movements he avoided time and again the snaps and
+rushes of the best hounds there. Occasionally he would be slashed by
+their sharp teeth, and his grizzled coat was flecked here and there
+with blood; but it was difficult to secure a firm grip on his tough
+loose hide, and none of the hounds were able to secure the fatal
+throat-hold, or to clamp their jaws on one of those slender flashing
+paws.
+
+For the most part, the old champion depended upon his long claws,
+which ripped bloody furrows every time they got home. Only in the
+clinches, when held for a moment by one or more of his opponents, did
+he use the forty fighting teeth with which he was equipped. When this
+happened, the dog who exchanged bites with him invariably got the
+worst of the bargain. The fighting was as fast as it was furious. In
+less than a minute two or three of the pack limped out of the circle
+with dreadful gashed throats or crunched and shattered paws. Then
+nothing could be seen but a many-colored mass, with the gray and black
+always on top. Suddenly it broke, and the great raccoon, torn and
+bleeding, but with an air of grim confidence, was alone with his back
+against the tree, while around him in an ever-widening circle the
+hounds backed away, yelping with pain.
+
+The raccoon recovered his wind and, wily fighter that he was, changed
+his tactics. Without giving the dogs time to get back their lost
+courage, he suddenly dashed forward with a grating, terrifying snarl,
+the first sound that had come from him throughout the battle. As he
+rushed at them, his hair bristled until he seemed to swell to double
+his size.
+
+For a second the ring held. Then with a yelp the nearest dog dived out
+of the way and scuttled off. His example was too much for the others.
+A second more, and the ring was broken and the dogs scattered. In vain
+the men tried to rally them again. They had resolved to have no
+further part or lot with that coon, who, without a backward look,
+moved stiffly and limpingly toward the nearest thicket.
+
+Not until he had plunged into a tangle of greenbrier, where no dog
+could follow, did that pack recover its morale. Then indeed, safe
+outside the fierce thorns, they growled and barked and raved and told
+of the terrible things they would do to that coon--when they caught
+him.
+
+Half an hour later, and half a league farther, from a great gum tree
+on the edge of a black silent stream, came the sound of soft,
+welcoming love-notes.
+
+Father Coon was home again.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+BLACKBEAR
+
+
+It was the high-water slack of summer. Up on Seven Mountains the woods
+were waves of deep lush green; and in the hot September sunshine the
+birds sang again, now that the moulting-moon of August had set. Yet
+there was an expectancy in the soft air. Shrill, sweet insect-notes,
+unheard before, multiplied. When the trees and the grass were all
+dappled with patches of dark and moonshine, the still air throbbed
+with the pulsing notes of the white tree-crickets; while above their
+range the high lilt of their black brethren thrilled without a pause,
+the unnoticed background of all other night-notes. From the bushes,
+which dripped moonlight in the clearings, a harsh voice occasionally
+said, solemnly, "Katy _did_!" A week later, all the open spaces on the
+fringe of the woods would be strident with the clicking choruses of
+the main host of the filmy green, long-winged insects, of which these
+stragglers were but the advance-guard.
+
+One morning, from the emerald-green of a swamp maple, a single branch
+flamed out a crimson-red. The ebb of the year had begun. As the days
+shortened, imperceptibly the air became golden, and tasted of frost.
+Then through the lengthening nights the frost-fires began to blaze.
+The swamp maples deepened to a copper-red and ended a yolk-yellow. On
+the uplands, the sugar maples were all peach-red and yellow-ochre, and
+the antlers of the staghorn sumac were badged with old-gold and
+dragon's-blood red. The towering white ashes were vinous-purple, with
+an overlying bloom of slaty-violet, shading to a bronze-yellow. The
+scented trefoil leaves of the sassafras were all buttercup-yellow and
+peach-red, and the sturdy oaks were burnt-umber.
+
+Richest of all were the robes of the red oaks. They were dyed a dull
+carmine-lake, while the narrow leaves of the beeches drifted down in
+sheaves of gamboge-yellow arrow-heads. Closer to the ground was the
+arrow-wood, whose straight branches the Indians used for arrow-shafts
+before the days of gunpowder. Its serrated leaves were a dull garnet.
+Lower still, the fleshy leaves of the pokeberry were all
+carmine-purple above and Tyrian rose beneath. Everywhere were the
+fragrant Indian-yellow leaves of the spice-bush, sweeter than any
+incense of man's making; while its berries, which cure fevers, were a
+dark, glossy red, quite different from the coral-red and orange
+berries of the bittersweet, with its straw-yellow leaves. The fierce
+barbed cat-brier showed leaves varying from a morocco-red to the
+lightest shade of yolk-yellow, at times attaining to pure scarlet, the
+only leaf of the forest so honored.
+
+Through this riot of color, and along a web of dim trails, a great
+animal passed swiftly and soundlessly, dull black in color, save for a
+brownish muzzle and a white diamond-shaped patch in the centre of its
+vast chest. This color, the humped hind quarters, and the head
+swinging low on a long neck could belong to none other than the
+blackbear, the last survivor of the three great carnivora of our
+Eastern forests. It moved with a misleading loose-jointed gait, which
+seemed slow. Yet no man can keep ahead of a bear, as many a hunter has
+found to his cost.
+
+Not so wise as the wolf, nor so fierce as the panther, the blackbear
+has outlived them both. "When in doubt, _run_!" is his motto; and,
+like Descartes, the wise blackbear founds his life on the doctrine of
+doubt. As for the unwise--they are dead. To be sure, even this saving
+rule of conduct would not keep him alive in these days of repeating
+rifles, were it not for his natural abilities. A bear can hear a
+hunter a quarter of a mile away, and scent one for over a mile if the
+wind be right. He may weigh three hundred pounds and be over two feet
+wide, yet he will slip like a shadow through tangled underbush, and
+feed all day safely in a berry-patch, with half a dozen hunters
+peering and hiding and lurking and looking for him.
+
+To-day, as this particular bear faced the wind, it was evident from
+her smaller size and more pointed head that she was of the attractive
+sex. Her face was neither concave, like the grizzly bear, nor convex,
+like the polar bear, but showed almost straight lines; and as she
+stood there, black against the glowing background of the changing
+leaves, her legs, with their flat-set feet, seemed comically like the
+booted legs of some short fat man. The only part of the naming
+color-scheme which appealed to her was that which she could eat.
+Purple plums of the sweet-viburnum, wild black bitter cherries,
+thick-skinned fox-grapes, shriveled rasping frost-grapes,
+huckleberries with their six crackling seeds, blueberries whose seeds
+are too small to be noticed--Mrs. Bear raked off quarts and gallons
+and barrels of them all with her great claws, yet never swallowed a
+green or imperfect one among the number. The fact that the bear is one
+of the Seven Sleepers accounted for the appetite of this one. Although
+the blackbear wears a fur coat four inches thick, and a waistcoat of
+fat of the same thickness, it has found that rent is cheaper than
+board, and spends the winter underground, living on the fat which it
+has stored up during the fall. Some of the Sleepers, like the
+chipmunk, take a light lunch to bed with them, in case they may be
+hungry during the long night, and fill a little storehouse before they
+turn in for their long winter nap. The bear and the woodchuck,
+however, prefer to act the part of the storehouse personally; all of
+which accounted for the appetite of this bear through the crisp fall
+days. Ordinarily a creature of the twilight and the early dawn, yet
+now she hunted through the broad daylight and far into the night, and
+devoured with the utmost enthusiasm food of all kinds by the
+hundredweight. Some of the selections on her menu-card would have been
+impossible to any other animal than the leather-lined blackbear, the
+champion animal sword-swallower.
+
+One warm September morning, she began her day with a gallon of berries
+which about exhausted the blueberry-patch where she had been feeding.
+Thereupon she started to wander along her fifteen-mile range, in
+search for stronger food. She found it. In a damp part of the woods
+she dug up, and swallowed without flinching, many of the wrinkled flat
+bulbs of the wild arum or Jack-in-the-pulpit. The juice of these roots
+contains a multitude of keen microscopic crystals, which affect a
+human tongue like a mixture of sulphuric acid and powdered glass;
+nor does water assuage the pain in the least. Beyond the
+Jacks-in-the-pulpits grew clumps of the broad juicy, ill-smelling
+leaves of the skunk-cabbage, which bears the first flower of the year.
+Mrs. Bear ate these greedily, although the tiniest drop of their
+corroding juice will blister the mouth of any human.
+
+Beyond the skunk-cabbage patch, on a limb of a shadbush, she
+discovered a gray cone somewhat larger than a Rugby football, made of
+many layers of pulpy wood-fibre paper. In and out of an opening in the
+smaller end buzzed sullenly a procession of great, flat-faced,
+black-and-white hornets. No insect is treated with more respect by the
+wild folk than the hornet. Horses, dogs, and even men, have been
+killed by enraged swarms. Unlike the single-action bee, whose barbed
+sting can be used but once, the hornet is a repeater. It can and will
+sting as early and as often as circumstances demand, and is most
+liberal in its estimate. Moreover, every sting is as painful as a
+bullet from a small-calibre revolver. Yet the bear approached the
+nest without any hesitation and, rearing up on her hind quarters, with
+one scoop of her paw brought the oval to the ground and was instantly
+enshrouded in a furious, buzzing, stinging cloud. Unmoved by their
+attacks, the imperturbable animal proceeded to gobble down both the
+nest and its contents, licking up grubs, half-grown hornets, and
+full-armed fighters alike, with her long flexible tongue, and
+swallowing great masses of the gray soft paper. When at last only a
+few scattered survivors were left, she lumbered off and followed a
+path which, like all bear-trails, led at last to one of the dry,
+pleasant, wind-swept hillsides that the bear-people love so well.
+There she spent a happy hour before a vast ant-hill erected by fierce
+red-and-black soldier ants. Sinking first one forepaw and then the
+other deep into the loose earth, she would draw them out covered with
+swarming, biting ants, which she carefully licked off, evidently
+relishing their stinging, sour taste.
+
+Thereafter, filled full of berries, bulbs, skunk-cabbage, hornets, and
+ants, Mrs. Bear decided to call it a day, and curled herself up to
+sleep under the roots of a fallen pine.
+
+Another day she discovered groves of oak trees loaded down with
+acorns. Better than any botanist she knew which were sweetest; and for
+a week she ate acorns from the white oaks, the tips of whose leaves
+are rounded, and the chestnut-oaks, whose leaves are serrated like
+those of the chestnut tree. Then came a morning when, from a far-away
+valley, floated a sound which sent her hurrying down from her tree,
+although it was only the bell-like note of the flappy-eared hound
+which belonged to Rashe Weeden, the trapper, who lived in the Hollow.
+Yet the bear knew that a hound meant a hunter, and that a hunter meant
+death. Only a straightaway run for miles and hours could save her, if
+the hound were on her trail. Weeks of feasting had left her in no
+condition for any such Marathon work.
+
+Yet somewhere, during the hard-earned years of her long life, she had
+learned another answer to this attack of the trailing hound. Down the
+mountainside, straight toward the approaching dog she hurried,
+following a deeply marked path. It led directly under the overhanging
+branch of a great red oak. She followed it beyond the tree, and then
+doubled and, directly under the limb, circled and confused the trail.
+Then, still following her back track, she passed the tree and,
+returning to it by a long detour, climbed it from the farther side,
+and in a moment was hidden among the leaves. Nearer and nearer came
+the tuneful note of the hunting dog who had betrayed so many and many
+of the wood-folk to their death. Suddenly, as he caught the fresh
+scent, his voice went up half an octave, and he rushed along the faint
+path until he reached the red-oak tree. There he paused to puzzle out
+the tangled trail. As he sniffed back and forth under the overhanging
+limb, there was a tiny rustle in the leaves above him, hardly as loud
+as a squirrel would make. Then a black mass shot down like a
+pile-driver, a sheer twenty feet. The hound never knew what struck
+him, and it was not until an hour later that Rashe Weeden found his
+flattened carcass.
+
+"Looked as if he'd been stepped on by one of them circus elephants,"
+he confided afterwards to old Fred Dean, who lived over on the
+Barrack, near him.
+
+"Elephants be mighty scurce on Seven Mountains," objected the old man;
+and the passing of that hound remains a mystery on the Barrack to this
+day.
+
+One bitter gray afternoon, when the flaming leaves had died down to
+dull browns and ochres, word came to the wild folk that winter was on
+its way to Seven Mountains. Little flurries of stinging snow whirled
+through the air, and the wind shrieked across the marshland where the
+bear was still hunting for food. As the long grass of the tussocks
+streamed out like tow-colored hair, she shambled deep into the nearest
+wood, until behind the massed tree-trunks she was safe from the fierce
+fingers of the north wind, which howled like a wolf overhead. From
+that day she stopped the search for food and started house-hunting.
+Back and forth, up and down the mountains, in and out of the swamps,
+across the uplands and along the edges of the hills, she hurried for
+days at a time.
+
+At last, on a dry slope, she found what she wanted. Deep in the
+withered grass showed a vast chestnut stump. Starting above this on
+the slope, in the very centre of a tangled thicket she dug a slanting
+tunnel. The entrance was narrow, like the neck of a jug, and was so
+small that it did not seem possible that the bear could ever push her
+huge shoulders through. When it reached the stump, however, it widened
+out into an oval chamber partly walled in by buttressed roots. Against
+the slope she dug a wide flat shelf, which she covered deep with dry
+leaves and soft grass, and sank beside the stump a small air-hole,
+which led into the lower end of the burrow. With the same skill with
+which she had picked and sorted berries, with her huge paws she
+removed every trace of the fresh earth displaced by her digging. Then
+she piled loose brush neatly around the entrance to the burrow, and
+crawled in. Turning around at the foot of the tunnel, she crept back
+head-first and, reaching out her paw, carefully corked the jug with
+the brush which she dragged deep over the opening. Then, six feet
+underground, on her dry warm bed, she curled up for a four months'
+nap.
+
+As the winter days set in, the driving snow drifted deep against the
+stump, until even the thicket above it was hidden. Then came the
+bitter cold. There were long days and nights when there was not a
+breath of wind, and the mercury went down below all readings in the
+settlements. In the forests and on the mountains great boulders burst
+apart, and in places the frozen ground split open in narrow cracks a
+hundred feet long. Life was a bitter, losing fight against cold and
+hunger for many of the wood-dwellers; but, six feet underground, the
+bear slept safe, at truce with both of these ancient foes of the wild
+folk, while the warm vapor of her breath, freezing, sealed the sides
+of her cell with solid ice. Not until spring unlocked the door, would
+she leave that little room again.
+
+Yet, in January, although the door was still locked by the snow and
+barred by the ice, two tiny bearlings found their way in. They were
+blind and bare, and both of them could have been held at once on the
+palm of a man's hand. Yet Mrs. Bear was convinced that there had never
+been such a beautiful and talented pair. She licked their pink little
+bodies and nursed them and cuddled them, and the long freezing months
+were all too short to show the full measure of her mother-love. As the
+weeks went by, they became bigger and bigger. When they were hungry,
+which was most of the time, they whimpered and nuzzled like little
+puppies, and pushed and hurried and crowded, lest they might starve to
+death before they could reach those fountains of warm milk which
+flowed so unfailingly for them. When they were both full-fed, Mother
+Bear would arch her vast bulk over them, and they would sleep through
+the long dreamy, happy hours, wrapped up warm in her soft fur.
+
+Then, one day--the fortieth after their arrival--a great event
+occurred. Both the cubs opened their eyes. There was not much to see,
+but the old bear licked them ecstatically, much impressed by this new
+proof of their genius. From that time on, they grew apace, and every
+day waxed stronger and friskier. Sometimes they would stand up and box
+like flyweight champions, and clinch and wrestle and tumble around and
+over the old bear, until she would sweep them both off their feet
+with one turn of her great paw, and they would all cuddle down
+together for a long nap.
+
+Then came the Call. Perhaps it was the contralto note of the bluebird
+from mid-sky, or the clanging cry of the wild geese going north; or it
+might have been the scent of the trailing arbutus that came through
+the solid walls of that little room. At any rate, deep underground,
+beneath snow and ice and frozen brush, the little family knew that
+spring had come. The cubs began to sniff and claw at the ice-bound
+walls, and the old bear heaved her great bulk up and circled the
+little cell uneasily.
+
+Then, all in an hour, came the thaw. The ice melted and the snow
+disappeared, until, one April day, with a slash of her paw the old
+bear opened the door, and the whole family stumbled out into the blue
+dawn of a spring day. Around then sounded the sweet minor notes of the
+white-throated sparrows, and the jingling songs of the snowbirds;
+while over on a sun-warmed slope a flock of tree-sparrows, on their
+way to the Arctic Circle, sang a chorus like the tinkling of icicles.
+
+The old bear stood long in the bright sunlight, sniffing and staring
+with unseeing eyes--then lurched down to a little mountain stream a
+hundred yards away, followed in small procession by her cubs. Once
+arrived at the brook, she drank and drank and drank, until it seemed
+as if her legs would double under her. After she had filled herself to
+the bursting-point, the cubs had their first taste of water. It
+seemed to them thin, cold, unstable stuff compared with what they had
+been drinking. Their birthplace once abandoned, they never returned to
+it. Thereafter they slept wherever and whenever the old bear was
+sleepy, cuddled in her vast arms and against her warm fur.
+
+That day, as they turned away from the brook, Mother Bear stopped and
+stared long at the larger of her two cubs. Unlike the dull black of
+his smaller sister, he was a rich cinnamon-brown in color. In years
+past there had been a red cub in her family, and once even a
+short-lived straw-yellow youngster; but this was her first experience
+with a brownie, and the old bear grunted doubtfully as she led the way
+up the mountainside.
+
+At last and at last came the golden month of the wild
+folk--honey-sweet May, when the birds come back, and the flowers come
+out, and the air is full of the sunrise scents and songs of the
+dawning year. The woods were white with the long snowy petals of the
+shad-blow, and purple with amethyst masses of rhodora, when the old
+bear began the education of her cubs. Safety, Food, More Food
+comprised the courses in her curriculum. Less and less often did she
+nurse them, as she taught them to find a variety of pleasant foods.
+Because Mother Bear knew that disobedience was death, she was a stern
+disciplinarian. On their very first walk, Blackie, the littlest of the
+family, found it difficult to keep up with the old bear's swinging
+gait. Little bears that fall behind often disappear. Accordingly, when
+Blackie finally caught up, she received a cuff which, although it
+made her bawl, taught her not to lag.
+
+Brownie erred in the opposite direction. Big and strong and confident,
+he once pushed ahead of his mother, along a trail that led up a
+mountain-gorge where the soft deep mosses held the water like green
+sponges. Suddenly, just as he was about to put his small paw into a
+great bear-print in the moss, he received a left-hand swing which sent
+him spinning off the trail into a tree-trunk, with the breath knocked
+clear out of his small body. Then the old bear showed him what may
+happen to cubs who think they know more than their mothers. From deep
+under the moss, she had caught a whiff of the death-scent of man.
+Reaching out beyond the trail, she raised without an effort, on a
+derrick-like forepaw, a section of a dead tree-trunk, a foot in
+diameter, and sent it squattering down full upon the paw-print. As the
+end of the log sank in the moss, there was a fierce snap, and a series
+of sharp and dreadful steel teeth clamped deep into the decayed wood.
+Rashe Weeden, the trapper, who trapped bears at all seasons of the
+year, had dug up a section of moss containing the bear-imprint, and
+underneath it had set a hellish double-spring bear-trap. Let man or
+beast step ever so lightly on the print which rested on the broad pan
+of the trap, and two stiff springs were released. Once locked in the
+living flesh, the teeth would cut through muscle and sinew, and crush
+the bones of anything living, while the double-spring held them
+locked. A vast clog chained to the trap kept the tortured animal from
+going far, and a week later the victim would welcome the coming of the
+trapper and the swift death he brought.
+
+A few days later the little family saw an object lesson of what humans
+do to bears, and what such a trap meant to them. They were following
+one of the bear-paths which always lead sooner or later to hillsides
+where there are berries and a view and no flies. Suddenly the wind
+brought to the ears of the old bear the sound of sobbing. She stopped
+and winnowed the air carefully through her sensitive nose. There was
+the scent of bear, but no taint of man in the breeze, and she followed
+the trail toward where the strange noises came from, around a bend in
+the path. More and more slowly, and with every caution, she moved
+forward, while her two cubs kept close behind like little shadows. As
+the path opened into a little natural clearing, all three of them saw
+a horrifying sight. There in front of them lay another smaller,
+younger mother-bear. The cruel fanged jaws of a trap were sunk deep
+into her shattered left fore-shoulder, while the clog was caught under
+a stump. The prisoned animal had tugged and dragged and pulled,
+evidently for long days and nights, as the ground was torn up for
+yards and yards around her. At last, worn out by exhaustion and the
+unceasing, fretting, festering pain of the gripping jaws, the captive
+had sunk down hopelessly to the ground, and from time to time cried
+out with a shuddering sobbing note. Her glazed, beseeching eyes had a
+bewildered look, as if she wondered why this horror had come to her.
+At her knees a little cub stood, and whimpered like a sorrowful baby
+and then raised his little paws trustingly against the huge bulk of
+his mother, who could help him no more. Another cub had climbed into a
+little tree overhead, and looked down in wonder at the sorrowful sight
+below.
+
+The old bear took one long look while her cubs, terrified, crowded
+close up against her. Then she turned, and plunged into the depths of
+the nearest thicket. There was nothing to be done for the trapped one,
+and she knew that, soon or late, death would stalk along the trail
+which she had just left. Later that afternoon, when they were miles
+from the place, the old bear's keen ear heard two distant shots from
+far away across the mountain-ridges. As the twilight deepened, she led
+her little family out in a search for food. All at once there came
+from below them a strange little distress-note, which made Mother Bear
+stop and look anxiously around to see if both of her cubs were safe.
+Again it sounded, much nearer, and then from among the trees a small
+dark animal hurried toward them. It was one of the cubs they had seen
+earlier in the afternoon, escaped from the death which had overtaken
+the others, running wailing and lonely through the darkening woods,
+looking for its lost mother. At the sight of Mother Bear, it gave a
+little whicker of relief and delight, and ran straight to her and
+nuzzled hungrily under her warm fur, quite as if it had a right to be
+there. Although the old bear growled a little at first, she was not
+proof against the entreating whines of the little newcomer. As for
+her own cubs, after carefully sniffing this new sister over and
+finding her blacker even than Blackie, with a funny white spot near
+the end of her small nose, they decided to recognize her as part of
+the family. In another minute Spotty was feeding beside Blackie, and
+from that day forward the old bear was trailed by three cubs instead
+of two.
+
+As summer approached, Mother Bear weaned her family and showed them
+how to get their living from the land, as she did. She taught them all
+about ants' nests and grubs, and showed them a score or so of sweet
+and succulent roots. Only the root of the water-hemlock, with its
+swollen, purple-streaked stem which tastes so sweet and is so deadly,
+she taught them to avoid, as well as those fierce and fatal sisters
+among the mushrooms, the death-angel and the fly-mushroom, whose stems
+grow out of a socket, the danger-signal of their family.
+
+Teaching the cubs to enjoy yellow-jackets' nests, one of the
+delicacies on bear-menus, was a more difficult affair. At first,
+Blackie and Spotty, after being stung on their soft little noses,
+would have no further traffic with any such red-hot dainties. Brownie
+was made of sterner stuff. After he had once learned how good
+yellow-jacket grubs were, he hunted everywhere for the nests. When he
+found one, he would dig it out, while the yellow-jackets stung his
+nose until the pain became unendurable. Then he would sit up and rub
+the end of it with both paws and bawl with all his might, only to
+start digging again when the smart became bearable. Sometimes he
+would have to stop and squeal frantically three or four times, to
+relieve his feelings--but he always finished the very last grub.
+
+When the weather grew warmer, the old bear took all the cubs down to
+the edge of a hidden mountain-lake, and there taught them, one by one,
+to swim, hiding the others safely on the bank. At first, Mother Bear
+would allow each little swimmer to grip the end of her five-inch tail,
+and be towed through the water. As soon, however, as they learned the
+stroke, they had to paddle for themselves. One warm afternoon lazy
+Brownie swam with her to the middle of the lake, and then tried to get
+a tow back, only to receive a cuff that sent him two feet under water.
+When he came to the surface again, he swam beside his mother as
+bravely as if he had been born an otter and not a bear-cub.
+
+When they were still a long distance from the shore, the old bear
+raised her big black head out of the water and stared over toward a
+little bay half a mile away. Her keen nostrils had caught the scent of
+man across the still waters. Then, to his surprise, Brownie was again
+given the privilege of a tow, and found himself whirling shoreward at
+a tremendous rate. From the far-away inlet a lean, lithe canoe flashed
+toward them as fast as Steve O'Donnell, the lumberjack, could paddle.
+Steve had come over to the lake to estimate on some lumber, and had
+seen the swimming bears. Hurriedly pitching into the canoe the long,
+light, almost straight-handled axe, which was the article of faith of
+all the woodcutters of that region, he started out to overtake the
+fugitives.
+
+Steve was not learned in bear-ways, or he would never have started in
+a canoe after a swimming bear, without a rifle. As he came nearer and
+nearer, and it became evident to the old bear that she would be
+overtaken before she could reach shore, she turned and swam
+unhesitatingly toward the canoe, while Brownie made the best of his
+way ashore. Steve dropped his paddle and seized his axe, and when the
+great head was close beside his craft, struck at it with all his
+strength. He had yet to learn that the bear is an unsurpassed boxer,
+and that few men are able to land a blow on one, even when swimming.
+As his axe whizzed downward, it was suddenly deflected by a left turn,
+given with such force that the axe was torn from the man's hands and
+disappeared in the deep water. The next instant both the bear's paws
+clutched the gunwale of the canoe, and a second later Steve was
+swimming for his life in the cold water. Mrs. Bear paid no further
+attention to him, but started again for the nearest shore. Overtaking
+Brownie, she gave him another tow, and by the time Steve, chilled to
+the bone, reached the farther shore, the whole bear family was miles
+away.
+
+By midsummer the cubs were half-grown, although they looked mostly
+legs. One summer twilight a strange thing happened. The family had
+reached one of their safe and pleasant hillsides, when there loomed up
+before them a vast black figure among the trees, and out into the
+open strode a blackbear of a size that none of the three little cubs
+had ever seen before. In their wanderings they had met many other
+bears. Most of these the old bear passed unseeingly, in accordance
+with bear etiquette. Sometimes, if the stranger came too close, the
+hair on Mother Bear's back would begin to bristle, and a deep,
+threatening rumble, that seemed to come from underground, would warn
+against any nearer approach.
+
+To-night, however, when this newcomer lumbered up to the cubs, who
+shrank behind their mother, Mother Bear made no protest. He sniffed at
+them thoughtfully, and then said loudly, "Koff--koff--koff--koff."
+Mother Bear seemed entirely satisfied with this sentiment, and from
+that time on the stranger led the little band, and the cubs came to
+know that he was none other than Father Bear. Bears mate only every
+other year; but often a couple will join forces in the odd year, and
+wander together as a family until winter.
+
+Father Bear was a giant among his kind. He would tip the scales at
+perhaps five hundred pounds, and stood over three feet high at his
+foreshoulders, and was between six and seven feet long. In all the
+emergencies and crises of everyday life, he showed himself always a
+very present help in every time of trouble. Warier and wiser even than
+Mother Bear, he piloted his little family into the wildest and
+loneliest corners of all that wild and lonely land. Not for many years
+had the old giant met his match. Of panther, Canada lynx, porcupine,
+wolf, wolverine, and all the bears, black and brown, for a hundred
+miles around, he was the acknowledged overlord. This sense of power
+gave him a certain grim confidence, and he hunted and foraged for his
+family, with none to hinder save only man, the king of beasts. Crafty
+as he was powerful, the old bear fled into his most inaccessible
+fastnesses at the slightest taint or trace of that death-bringer.
+
+One curious custom he had. Whenever he approached certain trees in his
+usual fifteen-mile range, he would examine them with great care for
+several minutes. These trees always stood in a prominent place, and
+were deeply scarred and furrowed with tooth-marks and claw-marks.
+Father Bear, after looking them all over carefully, would sniff every
+recent mark gravely. With his head on one side, he seemed to be
+receiving and considering messages from unseen senders. Occasionally
+the news that the tree brought seemed to enrage him profoundly.
+Thereupon he would claw and chew the unoffending tree frothingly, and
+then trot away growling deep in his throat. At other times, he would
+raise his ears politely, as if recognizing a friend; or wrinkle his
+nose doubtfully but courteously, as a well-bred bear might do who met
+a stranger. Always, however, before leaving, he would stand up on his
+hind quarters and claw the tree as high as he could reach, at the same
+time drawing his teeth across it at right angles to the vertical
+claw-marks. The cubs soon learned that these lone, marked trees were
+bear-postoffices and that it was the duty of every he-bear of any
+real bearhood to leave a message there, with tooth and claw, for
+friend and foe to read.
+
+When September came again, the family found themselves ranging far to
+the north, in a country which the cubs had never seen before. There
+they saw in the soft moss the deep marks of great splay hoofs; while
+here and there the bark of the striped maple was torn off in long
+strips seven or eight feet from the ground, and always on only one
+side, so that the half-peeled tree never died, as did the girdled
+trees attacked by the porcupine. One of the slow migrations of the
+moose-folk, which take place only at intervals of many years, had set
+in. Drifting down from the Far North, scattered herds had invaded the
+old bear's northernmost range. Like the witch-hazel, which blooms last
+of all the shrubs, the love-moon of the moose rises in the fall. The
+males of that folk take hardly the stress and strain of courtship.
+Bad-tempered at the best, a bull-moose is a devil unchained in
+September. As the hunter's moon waxes in the frosty sky, he neither
+rests, eats, or sleeps, but wanders night and day through the woods in
+search of a mate. Woe be to man or beast who meets him then!
+
+As the afterglow died out at the end of one of the shortening
+September days, the bear family heard faintly from a far-away hillside
+a short bellowing "Oh-ah! oh-ah! oh-ah!" Suddenly, not two hundred
+yards away, on a hardwood ridge, came back a long ringing, mooing
+call, which sounded like "Who-are-you! who-are-you!" It was the
+answer of the cow-moose to her distant would-be lover. At the sound,
+the ears of the great bear pricked up, and his deep-set, little eyes
+twinkled fiercely in the fading light. Without a sound, he shambled
+swiftly into the swamp toward the call. Hesitating for a moment,
+Mother Bear followed him, and close behind her trailed the usual
+procession. The frost in the air and the call, vibrant and pulsing
+with warm life, had made the old bear hungry for fresh meat.
+Unfortunately for him, as he approached the little ridge, a tiny
+breeze sprang up. As the sensitive nostrils of the young cow-moose
+caught the scent of danger, she drifted away into the woods like a
+shadow, and was gone.
+
+[Illustration: BULL MOOSE AND BLACKBEAR]
+
+When the bear reached the ridge, he could not be convinced that she
+had escaped. Everywhere lingered the warm delicious scent, so fresh
+that his great jaws dripped as he glided silently and swiftly through
+the thickets. Then, as he hunted, suddenly, silently, a vast bulk
+heaved into view, looming high and huge and black above the saplings
+and against the last red streak of the darkening sky. The cubs shrank
+close to their mother, and she discreetly retired into the far
+background, as into the clearing strode an enormous black beast with a
+brown head and white legs, and with a long tassel of hair swinging
+from its throat. Seven feet high at the shoulder, and more than ten
+feet from tail to muzzle, stood the great bull-moose. The antlers
+measured seven feet from tip to tip. With their vast, flat, palmated
+spread, with eight curved, sharp prongs in front, a strong man could
+not have carried them. Yet the moose switched them as easily as a girl
+might settle her hat with a toss of her head.
+
+At the sight of the prowling blackbear, all the devilish temper of the
+thwarted, seeking, brooding bull broke loose. His deep-set, wicked
+little eyes burned red, and with a roaring bellow he whirled up his
+vast bulk over the bear. Ordinarily the bear would not have waited for
+any trouble with a bull-moose in the month of September. To-night,
+however, he was on his own range. Behind him watched his mate and his
+cubs. The moose was a stranger and a trespasser. Morever, the
+blood-hunger had seized upon the bear, and a bear that sees red is one
+of the most dangerous opponents on earth. Throwing himself back upon
+his massive haunches, he prepared for a fight to the finish. A moose
+more experienced in bear-ways would have relied chiefly on his
+antlers, whose sharp, twisted prongs would cut and tear, while the
+immense flat plates of spreading horn were shields against any
+effective counter-stroke. This particular bull-moose, however, had
+never before met any opponent other than a moose who would await his
+attack, and he did not know what a deadly infighter a bear is. His
+only thought was to settle the battle before the other could escape.
+With a bellowing squeal of rage, he pivoted on his hind legs and
+struck two pile-driving blows, one after the other, with his ponderous
+keen-edged hoofs. Such a blow would have disemboweled a wolf, or
+killed a man, or even have shattered the huge bulk of another moose,
+if once they had landed full and fair.
+
+Just as the moose struck, the bear slipped forward and, sudden as the
+smashing leads came, they were not so swift as the lightning-like
+parries. As each fatal hoof came whizzing down, it was met at its side
+by a deft snap of a powerful shaggy forearm, and glanced harmlessly
+off the bear's mighty shoulders. The force of the leads and the drive
+of the parries threw the bull off his balance, and for a moment he
+staggered forward on his knees, pushing against the ground with
+antlers and forelegs, to regain his balance.
+
+That tiny tick of time, however, was all that the old bear needed.
+With the dreadful coughing roar that a bear gives when fighting for
+his life, he pivoted toward the right on his humped-up haunches.
+Swinging back his enormous left paw, armed with a cestus of steel-like
+claws, he delivered the crashing, smashing swing that only a bear can
+give, one of the most terrible blows known to beasts or man. Every
+ounce of strength in the ridged forepaw, every atom of force and
+spring from the coiled masses of humped muscles of the enormous hind
+quarters, went into that mighty blow. It landed full and fair on the
+long neck, just back of the flat cheek-bone. The weight of the moose
+approached a ton. Yet that dreadful shattering smash whirled the great
+head around like a feather. There was a snap, a rending crack, and
+the whole vast beast toppled over on his side, and, with one long
+convulsive shudder, lay dead, his neck broken under the impact of that
+terrible counter. The old bear rolled forward, but the black bulk
+never quivered as he towered over his fallen foe, still the king of
+his range.
+
+All that fall the five kept together. Then, one day in November, their
+leader disappeared. Mother Bear showed no anxiety, for she knew that
+late to bed and early to rise is the motto of all he-bears, and that
+her mate had left her only because he intended to stay up for weeks
+after his family were asleep for the winter. Far up on the
+mountainside the four found a dry cave with a tiny entrance, and spent
+the winter there together.
+
+When spring came again, the cubs were cubs no longer. Without Mother
+Bear's bulk or shagginess, yet all three of them were sleek, powerful,
+full-grown bears instead of the sprawly, leggy cubs of the season
+before. Brownie was still the largest, but Spotty, the starved,
+whimpering little cub of a year ago, was a close second to him. Not so
+massive nor so powerful, yet she had a supple, sure swiftness that
+made her his equal in their unceasing hunts for food. Hurry as he
+would, a slim black nose with a silver spot near the end would often
+be thrust in just ahead of him. There must have been some charm about
+that spot, because Brownie never got angry, although usually any
+interference with a bear's food is a fighting act.
+
+As the weeks wore on toward summer, Blackie became every day more
+snappish. She growled if Brownie came near her. Mother Bear also began
+to develop a temper. Then came a warm night in late spring, when both
+Blackie and Spotty disappeared. Brownie sniffed and searched and
+hunted but no trace of either of them could he find. As the days
+lengthened into June, the old bear became restless and more and more
+irritable. One day in the middle of the month, she wandered back and
+forth, feeding but little, and so cross that Brownie followed her only
+at a safe distance. He, too, was uneasy and unhappy. Something, he
+knew not what, was lacking in his life. As the late twilight faded, a
+great honey-colored moon came up and made the woods so bright that the
+veeries began to sing again their strange rippling chords, as if the
+night-wind were blowing across golden harp-strings.
+
+There before them, in a little glade, suddenly towered the black
+figure of a giant bear. With a little whicker Mother Bear moved
+forward to meet her mate, and a moment later led the way toward the
+dim green fastnesses of the forest. Poor, untactful, unhappy Brownie
+started to follow as of old. Both of them growled at him so fiercely
+that he stopped in his tracks. As he watched them disappear into the
+fragrant dark, he felt that the whole Round Table was dissolved. Never
+again would the little family that had been so happy together be
+united.
+
+He turned and plunged into a near-by thicket, and hurried away lonely
+and unhappy. For long he followed a faint trail, until it widened
+into a green circle where some forgotten charcoal-pit had stamped its
+seal forever upon the forest. The air was heavy with the drugged
+perfume of chestnut tassels and the fragrance of wild grape, sweetest
+of all the scents of earth. Then, under the love-moon of June, in the
+centre of the tiny circle, there was standing before him a lithe,
+black figure with a silver spot showing at the end of her slim tilted
+nose--and all at once Brownie knew what his life had lacked. For long
+and long the two looked at each other, and he was lonely and unhappy
+no more.
+
+Then slowly, slowly, the silver spot moved away, ahead of him, toward
+the soft scented blackness of the deep woods. As he followed, he
+stopped and rumbled out dreadful warnings to a large number of
+imaginary bears, to beware that silver spot. While the veeries, whose
+heartstrings are a lute, sang in the thicket, and a little owl crooned
+a love-song from overhead, and the last of the hylas piped like pixies
+from far away, the two followed the path of their honeymoon, until it
+was lost in the depths of that night of love.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE SEVENTH SLEEPER
+
+
+In a far northwestern corner of Connecticut, the twenty-one named
+hills of Cornwall slept deep under the snow. At the north lay the
+Barrack, a lonely coffin-shaped hill, where, in the deep woods on the
+top, lived old Rashe Howe and his wife, snowbound from December until
+March. Never since the day that he journeyed to New York to hear Jenny
+Lind sing, a half-century ago, had she spoken to him.
+
+Two miles beyond, Myron Prindle and Mrs. Prindle lived on the bare top
+of Prindle Hill, where in summer the hermit thrushes sang, and in
+hidden bogs bloomed the pink-and-white lady-slipper, loveliest and
+loneliest of all of our orchids. Then there were Lion's Head, and
+Rattlesnake Mountain, where that king of the dark places of the forest
+had a den. Beyond towered the Cobble, a steep cone-shaped hill, which,
+a century ago, Great-great Uncle Samuel Sedgwick used to plough clear
+to the top. He relied upon three yoke of oxen and the Sedgwick temper;
+and on calm mornings could be heard discoursing to said oxen from the
+top of the Cobble in three different towns.
+
+Over beyond the Cobble was Dibble Hill, with its lost settlement of
+five deserted houses crumbling in the woods. Coltsfoot, Green
+Mountain, and Ballyhack stretched away to the south and the west; and
+in the northwest was Gold Mountain, with its abandoned gold-mine, from
+which Deacon Wadsworth mined just enough gold to pay for sinking the
+shaft. Then came Blakesley Hill, climbed by a winding road three miles
+long, and Ford Hill, populated by Silas Ford and twelve little Fords,
+and Bunker Hill, traversed by the Crooked S's, which drove motorists
+to madness.
+
+Beyond them all was Great Hill, where grew the enormous tree which
+could be seen against the sky-line for ten miles around. Six
+generations of Cornwall people had planned to walk or drive or motor,
+on some day, that never dawned, and look at that tree and find out
+what it was. Some claimed that it was an elm, like the vast Boundary
+Elm which marked a corner where four farms met. Others believed it to
+be a red oak; while still others claimed the honor for a button-ball.
+But no one yet has ever known for certain. In the very centre and
+heart of all the other hills was Cream Hill, greenest, richest, and
+roundest of them all. On its flanks were Cornwall Plains, Cornwall
+Centre, and Cornwall Hollow; and at its foot nestled Cream Pond, with
+Pond Hill sloping straight skyward from its northern shore.
+
+Ever since November, Cream Hill had been in the clutch of winter.
+There had been long nights when the cold stars flared and flamed in a
+black-violet sky, and the snow showed cobalt-blue against the dark
+tree-trunks. Then came the storm. For three days the north wind swept,
+howling like a wolf, down from the far-away Catskills, whirling the
+lashing, stinging snow into drifts ten feet deep. Safe and warm in
+great white farmhouses, built to stand for centuries, human-folk
+stayed stormbound. In the morning, again at noon, and once more in the
+gray twilight, the men would plough their way through the drifts to
+the barns, and feed and water the patient oxen, the horses stamping in
+their stalls, the cows in stanchions, and the chickens, which stayed
+on their roosts all through the darkened days. In field and forest the
+Seven Sleepers slept safe and warm until spring, but the rest of the
+wild folk were not at truce with winter but, hunger-driven, must play
+at hide-and-seek with foe and food. Everywhere on the surface of the
+snow the writings of their foot-prints appeared and reappeared, as
+they were swept away by the wind or blotted out by the falling flakes.
+
+Finally, the storm raged itself out, and by the afternoon of the third
+day, the white unwritten page of the snow lay across hill and lake and
+valley. The next morning it was scribbled and scrawled all over with
+stories of the life which had pulsed and ebbed and passed among the
+silent trees and across the snowbound meadows. Wherever the
+weed-stalks had spread a banquet of seeds, there were delicate trails
+and traceries. Some of them were made up of tiny, trident tracks where
+the birds had fed--juncos with their white skirts and light beaks,
+tree-sparrows with red topknots and narrow white wing-bars, and flocks
+of redpolls down from the Arctic Circle, whose rosy breasts looked
+like peach-blossoms scattered upon the white snow. Hundreds of larger
+patterns showed where the mice-folk had feasted and frolicked all the
+long night through. Down under the snow, their tunnels ran in mazes
+and labyrinths, with openings at every weed-stalk up which they could
+climb in hurrying groups into the outside world. Some of the trails
+were lines of little paw-prints separated by a long groove in the
+snow. These were the tracks of the deer-mice, whose backs are the
+color of pine-needles, and who wear white silk waistcoats and silk
+stockings and have pink paws and big flappy ears and lustrous black
+eyes. The groove was the mark of their long slender tails. Near them
+were lines of slightly larger paw-prints, with only occasional
+tail-marks--the trail of the sturdy, short-tailed, round-headed
+meadow-mouse.
+
+Here and there were double rows of tiny exclamation points, separated
+by a tail-mark. Wherever this track approached the mazes of the mice
+paw-prints, the latter scattered out like the spokes of a wheel. This
+strange track was that of the masked shrew, the smallest mammal in the
+world, a tiny, blind death, whose doom it is to devour its own weight
+in flesh and blood every twenty-four hours. Another track showed like
+a tunnel, with its concave surface stamped with zigzag paw-marks. It
+was the trail of the blarina shrew, which twisted here and there as if
+a snake had writhed its way through the powdered snow. Again, all
+other tracks radiated away from it; for the blarina is braver and
+bigger and fiercer than its little blood-brother, the masked shrew.
+
+Everywhere, across the fields and through the swamps and in and out of
+the woods, was another track, made up of four holes in the snow, two
+far-apart and two near-together. Overhead at night in the cold sky,
+below those star-jewels, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnita, which gleam in
+the belt of Orion, the same track appears where four stars form the
+constellation of Lepus the Hare. Down on Connecticut earth, however,
+the mark was that of the cottontail rabbit.
+
+Among the many snow-stories which showed that morning was one tragedy
+written red. It began with the trail of one of the cottontails. At
+first, the near-together holes were in front of the others. That
+marked where Bunny had been hopping leisurely along, his short
+close-set forepaws making the near-together holes and his long
+far-apart hind paws the others. At times, where the trail led in the
+lee of thick bushes, a fifth mark would appear. This was the print of
+the powder-puff that the rabbit wears for a tail, and showed where he
+had sat down to rest or meditate in the snow. Suddenly, the wide-apart
+marks appeared far in front of the other two. For some reason the
+rabbit had speeded up his pace, and with every spring his long hind
+legs had thrust themselves beyond and outside of the short forepaws. A
+little farther along, the tracks of the two forepaws showed close to
+each other, in a vertical instead of a horizontal line. This meant to
+him who could read the writing that the rabbit was running at a
+desperate speed. At the end of every bound he had twisted each
+forepaw inward, so as to thrust them out with the greatest possible
+leverage.
+
+The trail zigzagged here and there and doubled back upon itself and
+crossed and turned and circled. The snow said that the rabbit had been
+running for his life, and every twist and turn told of the desperation
+and dumb despair of his flight. Yet nowhere was there the print of any
+pursuer. At last, in a little opening among the bushes, the trail
+ended in a circle of trampled, ridged, and reddened snow. At the very
+edge of the blood-stains a great X was stamped deep. Farther on was
+the end of that snow-story--the torn, half-eaten body of the rabbit,
+which had run a losing race with death. Again, to him who could read
+the writing on the snow the record was a plain one. The X is the sign
+and seal of the owl-folk, just as a K is the mark of the hawk-people.
+On silent, muffled wings, the great horned owl, fiercest of all the
+sky-pirates, had hunted down poor Cottontail. All his speed, his
+twistings and turnings and crafty doublings, availed him not against
+the swift flight and cruel, curved talons of this winged death.
+
+Around the trees were other series of tracks, which went in fours,
+something like the rabbit-tracks in miniature, except that they showed
+tiny claw-marks. These were where the gray squirrels had ventured out
+to dig under the snow, to find nuts which they had buried in the fall,
+or where their more thrifty cousins, the red squirrels, had sallied
+forth to look up hidden hoards in the lee of rocks and in hollow
+trees. Crossing and recrossing fields and forests in long straight
+lines were the trails of hunting foxes. The neat, clearly stamped
+prints, with never a mark of a dragging paw, and the fact that they
+did not spraddle out from a straight line, distinguished them from
+dog-tracks. Along the brooks were the four- and five-fingered prints
+of the muskrat, showing on either side of a tail-mark; and
+occasionally the double foot-prints of that killer, the weasel, and
+the rarer trail of his cousin, the mink. Only the signatures of the
+Seven Sleepers were absent from the smooth page. The bear and the bat,
+the woodchuck and the chipmunk, the raccoon, the jumping-mouse, and
+the skunk were all in bed.
+
+As the sun rose higher and higher on the first day after the storm,
+the sky showed as blue and soft as in June, and at sunset the whole
+western heavens seemed to open in a blaze of fiery amber. There were
+strips of sapphire-blue and pools of beryl-green, while above was a
+spindrift of flame the color of the terrible crystal. That night the
+mercury crept up higher and higher in the thermometer that hung
+outside of Silas Dean's store at Cornwall Centre. A little screech-owl
+thought that spring had come, and changed his wailing call to the
+croon which belongs to the love-month of May, and the air was full of
+the tinkle and drip and gurgle of the thaw.
+
+The next morning, in the wet snow a new trail appeared--a long chain
+of slender delicate close-set tracks, like a pattern of intricate
+stitches. The last of the Sleepers was awake, for the close-set
+paw-prints were none other than those of the unhasting skunk. "Don't
+hurry, others will," is his motto. It was just at dawn of the second
+day of the thaw that he appeared in the sunlight. All night long he
+had wandered slowly and sedately in and out of a circle not over two
+hundred yards in diameter. In spite, however, of his preoccupied
+manner and unhurried ways, there was not much that was edible which he
+had overlooked throughout his range; and now, at sunrise, which was
+his bedtime, he was on his way home.
+
+The rays of the rising sun blazoned to the world the details of his
+impressive personality. His most noticeable and overshadowing feature
+was his huge, resplendent tail. It waved like a black and white banner
+over his broad back. Throughout its long dark hair, coarse as tow,
+were set bunches of white hairs, some of them so long that, when they
+floated out to their full extent, the width of that marvelous tail
+exceeded its length. At the very tip was a white tuft which could be
+erected. Wise wild folk, when they saw that tuft standing straight up,
+removed themselves elsewhere with exceeding rapidity. As for the
+unwise--they wished they had. Between the small eyes, which were set
+nearer to the pointed nose than to the broad ears, was a fine white
+stripe running back to a white ruff at the back of the neck. From this
+a wide white stripe extended across the shoulders, and branched down
+either flank.
+
+As he ambled homewards in the sunlight, the skunk had such an air of
+innocence and helplessness, that a young fox, coming down the
+hillside after a night of unsuccessful hunting, decided that the
+decorative stranger must be some unusual kind of rabbit, and dashed
+forward to catch it with a quick sidelong snap of his narrow jaws.
+Unfortunately for him, the skunk snapped first. His ancestors had
+learned the secret of the gas-attack a million years before the Boche.
+As the fox rushed upon him, the skunk twisted its tail to one side
+bringing into action two glands near the base of its tail which
+secrete a clear golden fluid filled with tiny floating bubbles of a
+devastating gas, against which neither man nor beast can stand.
+Moreover, the skunk's accurate breech-loading and repeating weapon has
+one other improvement not as yet found in any human-made artillery.
+Each gland, beside the hole for long-range purposes, is pierced with a
+circle of smaller holes, through which the deadly gas can be sprayed
+in a cloud for work at close quarters.
+
+Just as the jaws of the fox were opened to seize him, the skunk
+compressed the mat of powerful muscles that encircled the two conical
+scent-glands. From the circle of tiny openings a cloud of choking,
+blinding, corrosive gas poured full into the fox's astonished face. To
+human nostrils the very odor of the gas is appalling. A mixture of
+garlic, sewer-gas, sulphur-matches, musk, and a number of other
+indescribable smells only faintly defines it. A fox, however, is by no
+means squeamish about smells. Many odors which are revolting and
+unbearable to human nostrils arouse only pleasurable sensations in a
+fox. What sent him rolling backwards over and over, and stiffened and
+contracted his throat-muscles in spasms, was the choking acrid gas
+itself. It strangled him just as the fumes of chlorine or ammonia gas
+will choke a man. Only one thought remained in that fox's mind. Air,
+air, fresh untainted air, preferably miles away. He departed to find
+it, at an initial velocity of something less than a mile a minute,
+while his adversary lowered his plumed tail and regarded him
+forgivingly. Then, with mincing, deliberate steps, the skunk started
+leisurely back to his home on the hillside, which had once been the
+property of a grizzled old woodchuck.
+
+On a day, however, the woodchuck had come back to his burrow, only to
+find that he had been dispossessed. The woodchuck is a surly and
+dogged fighter, and always fully able and disposed to protect his
+rights. Yet it took but a single sniff to make this one abandon his
+lands, tenements, and hereditaments, with all easements of ingress,
+egress, and regress. From thenceforth, to the skunk belonged the whole
+complicated system of tunnels and galleries. To him belonged the two
+public entrances and a third concealed from sight in a little thicket.
+To him came the cozy nest, with its three exits in the centre of a
+maze of passages, the storehouses, the sand-piles, and the sun-warmed
+slope where the former owner had been accustomed to take his ease.
+From that day forward he occupied them all in undisturbed possession.
+
+After the rout of the fox, the skunk slept until late in the
+afternoon, and an hour before sunset was out again. Here and there,
+through the bushes and among the trees, he tacked and zigzagged in an
+apparently absent-minded way. Yet nothing that he could eat escaped
+those small deep-set eyes or that long pointed nose. Near the edge of
+the woods he passed under a sugar-maple tree. On a lower limb sat
+Chickaree, the irritable, explosive red squirrel, nibbling away at a
+long cylindrical object which he held tightly clasped in his forepaws.
+As the skunk passed underneath, the squirrel stopped to scold at him
+on general principles, and became so emphatic in his remarks that he
+lost his hold of what he had been eating, and it fell directly in
+front of the plodding skunk. It was only an icicle, but after one
+sniff the skunk proceeded to crunch it down eagerly while the red
+squirrel raved overhead. The day before, the squirrel had nibbled a
+hole in the bark of one of the maple limbs, to taste the sweet sap
+which the thaw had started flowing; and during the night the running
+sap had frozen into a long sweet icicle, the candy of the wild folk,
+which heretofore only the squirrels had enjoyed.
+
+The last bit of frozen sweetness swallowed, the skunk ambled up the
+hillside. Suddenly he stopped, and sniffed at a little ridge in the
+snow which hardly showed upon the surface. Hardly had he poked his
+pointed nose into the hummock, before it burst like a bomb, and out
+from the snow started a magnificent cock grouse. During the storm he
+had plunged into the drift for shelter, and the warmth of his body
+had melted a snug little room for him under the snow. There, safe and
+warm, he had feasted on the store of rich, spicy seeds that he found
+on the sweet fern under the snow, and for long days and nights had
+been safe from cold and hunger. The thaw, however, had thinned his
+coverlet so that the fine nose of the skunk had scented him through
+the white crystals.
+
+As the partridge broke from the snow, his magnificent, iridescent,
+black-green ruff stood out a full three inches around his neck, and
+his strong wings began the whirring flight of his kind. The skunk shed
+his slowness like a mask and, with the lightning-like pounce of the
+weasel family, caught the escaping bird just back of the ruff and
+snapped his neck asunder. There was a tremendous fluttering and
+beating of brown mottled feathers against the white snow, and a minute
+later he was feeding full on the most delicious meat in the world.
+
+Before he had finished, there came an interruption. Down from the top
+of the hill trotted another skunk, an oldtimer whose range marched
+next to that of the first. As the newcomer caught sight of the dead
+partridge, he hurried down to join in the feast. The other skunk
+stopped eating at the sight of this unbidden guest, and made a kind of
+chirring, complaining noise, with an occasional low growl. According
+to skunk-standards that was a tremendous exhibition of rage, but the
+second skunk came on unmoved. Under the Skunk Geneva Convention, the
+use of aerial bombs or any form of gas-attack against skunk-kind is
+barred. In a battle between skunk and skunk the fighters must depend
+upon tooth and claw. Accordingly, when the stranger sniffed
+approvingly at the half-eaten bird, he was promptly nipped by the
+owner of the same, just back of the forepaw. He, in turn, secured a
+grip on the first skunk's neck, and in a moment the atmosphere was
+full of flying snow and whirling fur. The teeth of each fighter were
+so fine and their fur so thick, that neither one could do much damage
+to the other; but they fought and rolled and chirred and growled,
+until they looked like a great black-and-white pinwheel.
+
+[Illustration: THE THIEF]
+
+The contest caught the eyes of an old red fox, who was loping around a
+ten-mile circle in search of any little unconsidered trifle that might
+come his way. He was a seasoned old veteran and, unlike the novice of
+the day before, was well acquainted with skunk-ways. Not for any prize
+that the country round about held would he have attacked either one of
+that battling pair. His was a purely sporting interest in the fight,
+until he happened to catch a glimpse of the partridge half-covered by
+the loose snow. On the instant, he nobly resolved to play the
+peacemaker and remove the cause of all the trouble. Step by step, he
+stole up closer to the fighters, all set to turn and run for his life
+if either one of them saw him. At last he was poised and taut on his
+tiptoes not six feet from the prize. As an extra whirl of the
+contestants carried them to the farthest circumference of the circle
+of which the partridge was the centre, the fox started like a
+sprinter from his marks, and reached the grouse in one desperate
+bound.
+
+Just at that instant a disengaged eye of the first of the skunks came
+to the surface, in time to see his grouse departing toward the
+horizon, slung over the shoulder of the fox, nearly as fast as if it
+had gone under its own wing-power. Instantly the skunk released his
+hold. His opponent did the same, and the two scrambled to their feet
+and for a long moment stood sombrely watching the vanishing partridge.
+Then, without a sound, they turned their backs on each other and
+trotted away in opposite directions.
+
+A week later the thaw was over, and all that hill-country was once
+more in the grip of winter. When the temperature went down toward the
+zero-mark, the skunk went back to bed. Rolled up in a round ball of
+fur, with his warm tail wrapped about him like a fleecy coverlet, he
+slept out the cold in the midmost chamber of his den on a bed of soft,
+dry grass. At the first sign of spring he was out again, the latest to
+bed and the earliest to rise of all the Sleepers.
+
+At last the green banners of spring were planted on all the hills.
+Underneath the dry leaves, close to the ground, the fragrant
+pink-and-white blossoms of the trailing arbutus showed here and there;
+while deeper in the woods leathery trefoil leaves, green above and
+dark violet beneath, vainly tried to hide the blue-and-white-porcelain
+petals of the hepatica. In bare spots the crowded tiny white blossoms
+of the saxifrage showed in the withered grass, and the bloodroot,
+with its golden heart and snowy, short-lived petals, and gnarled root
+which drips blood when broken. A little later the hillsides were blue
+with violets, and yellow with adder's-tongue with its drooping
+blossoms and spotted fawn-colored leaves. Then came days of feasting,
+which made up for the long lean weeks that had gone before. There were
+droning, blundering June-bugs, crickets, grubs, grasshoppers,
+field-mice, snakes, strawberries, and so many other delicacies that
+the skunk's walk was fast becoming a waddle.
+
+It was on one of those late spring days that the Artist and the Skunk
+had their first and last meeting. Said artist was none other than
+Reginald De Haven, whose water-colors were world-famous. Reginald had
+a rosy face, and wore velvet knickerbockers and large chubby legs, and
+made the people of Cornwall suspect his sanity by frequently
+telescoping his hands to look at color-values. This spring he was
+boarding with old Mark Hurlbutt, over on Cream Hill. On the day of the
+meeting, he had been sketching down by Cream Pond and had taken a
+wood-road home. Where it entered one of Mark's upper pastures, he saw
+a strange black-and-white animal moving leisurely toward him, and
+stood still lest he frighten it away. He might have spared his fears.
+The stranger moved toward him, silent, imperturbable, and with an
+assured air. As it came nearer, the artist was impressed with its
+color-scheme. The snowy stripe down the pointed black nose, the mass
+of white back of the black head, and, above all, the resplendent,
+waving pompon of a tail, made it a spectacular study in blacks and
+whites.
+
+With tiny mincing steps the little animal came straight on toward him.
+It seemed so tame and unconcerned, that De Haven planned to catch it
+and carry it back to the farm wrapped up in his coat. As he took a
+step forward, the stranger seemed for the first time to notice him. It
+stopped and stamped with its forepaws, in what seemed to the artist a
+playful and attractive manner. This, if he had but known it, was
+signal number one of the prescribed three which a well-bred skunk
+always gives, if there be time, even to his bitterest enemies.
+
+As De Haven moved toward the animal, he was again interested to see
+the latter hoist aloft the gorgeous black-and-white banner of its
+clan. Rushing on to his ruin, he went unregardingly past this second
+danger-signal. By this time, he was within six feet of the skunk,
+which had now come to a full stop and was watching him intently out of
+its deep-set eyes. As he approached still nearer, he noticed that
+the white tip of the tail, which heretofore had hung dangling,
+suddenly stiffened and waved erect. "Like a flag of truce," he
+observed whimsically to himself. Never was there a more dreadful
+misapprehension. That raising of the white tail-tip is the skunk's
+ultimate warning. After that, remains nothing but war and carnage and
+chaos.
+
+If even then the artist had but stood stony still, there might have
+been room for repentance, for the skunk is long-suffering and loath to
+go into action. No country-bred guardian angel came to De Haven's
+rescue. Stepping quickly forward, he stooped to seize the motionless
+animal. Even as he leaned forward, his fate overtook him. Swinging his
+plumed tail to one side, the skunk bent its back at the shoulders, and
+brought its secondary batteries into action. A puff of what seemed
+like vapor shot toward the unfortunate artist, and a second later he
+had an experience in atmospheric values which had never come into his
+sheltered life before. From the crown of his velour hat with the
+little plume at the side, down to his suede shoes, he was Maranatha
+and Anathema to the whole world, including himself. Coughing,
+sneezing, gasping, strangling, racked by nausea and wheezing for
+breath, his was the motto of the Restless Club: "Anywhere but here."
+His last sight of the animal which had so influenced his life showed
+it demurely moving along the path from which it had never once
+swerved.
+
+The wind was blowing toward the farmhouse, and although it was half a
+mile away, old Mark Hurlbutt soon had advance reports of the battle.
+
+"A skunk b'gosh!" he remarked to himself, stopping on his way to the
+barn; "and an able-bodied one, too," he continued, sniffing the
+breeze.
+
+A minute later he saw someone running toward him, and recognized his
+boarder. Even as he saw him, a certain aura which hung about the
+approaching figure made plain to Mark what had happened.
+
+"Hey! stop right where you be!" shouted the old man. "Another step an'
+I'll shoot," he went on, aiming the shovel which he had in his hand
+directly at the distressed artist's head, and trying not to breathe.
+
+De Haven halted in his tracks.
+
+"But--but--I require assistance," he pleaded.
+
+"You sure do," agreed his landlord; "somethin' tells me so. Hustle
+over back of the smoke-house and get your clothes off an' I'll join
+you in a minute."
+
+Mark hurried into the house, and was out again almost immediately with
+a large bottle of benzine, a wagon-sponge, a calico shirt, and a pair
+of overalls. As he came around the corner, the sight of the artist
+posing all pink and white against the smoke-house, with a pile of
+discarded clothes at his feet, was too much for the old man, and he
+cackled like a hen.
+
+"Darned if you don't look like one of them fauns you're all the time
+paintin'," he gasped.
+
+"Shut up!" snapped the artist. "You fix me up right away, or I'll put
+these clothes on again and walk through every room in your house."
+
+This threat brought immediate action, and a few moments later an
+expensive and artistic suit of clothes reposed in a lonely grave back
+of Mark's smoke-house, where they remain even to this day. Thereafter
+the artist, scrubbed with benzine until he smelt like a garage, left
+Cornwall forever. He was wearing a mackintosh of his own. Everything
+else belonged to Mark.
+
+"It's lucky for you that he went when he did," said old Hen Root the
+next evening, when the story was told at Silas Dean's store at the
+Centre. "You're gettin' on, Mark," he continued solemnly. "If he'd a'
+stayed you might have got some kind of a stroke or other from
+over-laughin' yourself. I didn't dare to do any work for nigh a week
+after I first saw him telescopin' round in them velvet short pants."
+
+"That's right," agreed Silas Dean heartily; "an' you ain't done any
+since--nor before," he concluded, carefully closing the cracker-barrel
+next to Hen.
+
+It was, perhaps, the meeting with an eminent artist that aroused a new
+ambition in the skunk's mind. At any rate, from that day he began to
+haunt the farmyard. The first news that Mark had of his presence was
+when a motherly old hen, who had been sitting contentedly on twelve
+eggs for nearly a week, wandered around and around her empty nest
+clucking disconsolately. During the night some sly thief had slipped
+egg after egg out from under her brooding wings, so deftly that she
+never even clucked a protest. In the morning there were left only
+scattered egg-shells and a telltale track in the dust.
+
+"Blamed old rascal," roared Mark. "First he loses me a good boarder
+an' now he's ate up a full clutch of pedigree white Wyandotte eggs.
+I'm goin' to shoot that skunk on sight."
+
+Mark was mistaken. Early the next morning he opened the spring-house
+to set in a pail of milk. There, right beside the magnificent spring
+which boiled and bubbled in the centre of the cement floor, a
+black-and-white stranger was contentedly drinking from a pan of milk
+that had been placed there to cool. As Mark opened the door, the skunk
+looked at him calmly, and then quietly raised the banner which had
+waved over many a bloodless victory. Whereupon the owner of the
+spring-house backed away, and waited until his visitor had finished
+his drink and disappeared in a patch of bushes back of the milk-house.
+
+"What about all that talk of shootin' that skunk at sight?" queried
+Jonas, the hired man, that evening at supper.
+
+"The trouble was, Jonas," returned Mark confidentially, "he got the
+drop on me. If I'd shot I'd of lost one spring, six gallons of milk,
+an' a suit of clothes."
+
+"You men are a lot of cowards," scolded his wife. "I'd of found some
+way to stop that skunk a-drinkin' up a whole pan of good milk right in
+front of my eyes. He'd not bluff me."
+
+"Mirandy," said Mark solemnly, "you take it from me that skunk ain't
+no bluffer. If you don't believe it, telegraph Mr. De Haven."
+
+In spite of her threat, it was Miranda herself who afterwards insisted
+that the skunk should continue to live on the farm without fear or
+reproach. Late one afternoon she had been coming down Pond Hill on a
+search for a new-born calf which, as usual, had been hidden by its
+mother somewhere in the thick woods. The path was sunken deep between
+banks covered with the yellow blossoms of the hardhack. At one spot,
+where the way widened into a rude road, a crooked green stem stretched
+out across the pathway, and from it swayed a great rose-red flower
+like some exquisite carved shell. It was the moccasin flower, the most
+beautiful of our early orchids. Miranda bent down to pick it with a
+little gasp of delight.
+
+Suddenly, from just beyond, came a warning hiss, and in front of her
+reared the bloated swollen body of a fearsome snake. The reptile's
+head was flattened out until it was half as wide as her hand, and it
+swelled and hissed rhythmically like the exhaust of a steam-pipe, and
+repeatedly struck out in her direction, the very embodiment of blind,
+venomous rage. Half paralyzed with fear, Miranda moved backward and
+began to wonder what she would do. Night was coming on, and if she
+went back over the hill, it would be dark before she could reach home.
+As for going around, no power on earth would have persuaded her to
+step into the thick bushes on either side of the path, convinced as
+she was that they must be swarming with snakes.
+
+At this psychological moment, ambling unconcernedly up the path, came
+the same black-and-white beast about which she had spoken so bitterly
+the day before. As it caught sight of the snake coiling and rearing
+and hissing, the skunk's gait quickened, and it approached the
+threatening figure with cheerful alacrity. The snake puffed and
+hissed and struck, but the skunk never even hesitated. Holding the
+reptile down with its slim paws it nibbled off the threatening head,
+neatly skinned the squirming body, and before Mrs. Hurlbutt's
+delighted eyes ate it up. Then, without apparently noticing her at
+all, it went on up the hill until lost to sight among the hardhacks.
+
+It would have been impossible to convince Miranda that the snake was
+nothing but a harmless puff-adder, and that, in spite of its bluffing
+ways, it had no fangs and never was known to bite. From that day on
+the skunk was envisaged in her mind as the guardian angel of the farm,
+and the edict went out that on no account was it to be molested. Not
+even when most of the bees from one of Mark's cherished swarms
+disappeared into its leather-lined interior, would Miranda permit any
+adverse action.
+
+"Some skunk that!" jeered Mark. "You let it get away with bees an'
+boarders an' milk an' eggs, an' never say a word. I wisht you cared as
+much for your husband."
+
+"I might, if he was as brave--an' good-looking," murmured Miranda.
+
+It was the sweet influences of the month of June which settled the
+dispute. Jonas had been down in the sap-works, where the vast
+sugar-maples grew below the milk-house meadow. As he came back up the
+slope, the great golden moon of June was showing its rim over Pond
+Hill. Ahead of him he saw a familiar black-and-white shape moving
+toward the woods. Even as he watched, a procession came down to meet
+him. At its head marched another full-grown skunk, while back of her
+was a long winding procession of little skunks. One, two, three, four,
+five, six--Jonas counted them up to ten, and the last one of all was
+jet-black except for a tiny stripe of white on its muzzle. There was a
+long pause as the lone skunk met the band. Then suddenly he was at the
+head of it, and the long procession trailed contentedly after him.
+Separated from him by a winter and a spring, Mrs. Skunk had rejoined
+her mate, bringing her sheaves with her. Away from the tame folk to
+return no more, the wild folk moved on and on into the heart of the
+summer woods.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HIGH SKY
+
+
+"Clang! Clang! Clang!"--the sound drifted down from mid-sky, as if the
+ice-cold gates of winter were opening. A gaggle of Canada geese,
+wearing white bibs below their black heads and necks, came beating
+down the wind, shouting to earth as they flew. Below them, although it
+was still fall, the tan-colored marsh showed ash-gray stretches of new
+ice, with here and there blue patches of snow. Suddenly, faint and far
+sounded other notes, as of a distant horn, and a company of
+misty-white trumpeter swans swept along the sky, gleaming like silver
+in the sun. Down from the Arctic tundras they had come, where during
+the short summer their great nests had stood like watchtowers above
+the level sphagnum bogs; for the trumpeter swan, like the eagle,
+scorns to hide its nest and fears no foe of earth or air.
+
+As their trumpet notes pealed across the marsh, they were answered
+everywhere by the confused cries and calls of innumerable waterfowl;
+for when the swan starts south, it is no time for lesser breeds to
+linger. Wisps of snipe and badlings of duck sprang into the air. The
+canvasback ducks, with their dark red heads and necks, grunted as they
+flew; the wings of the golden-eye whistled, the scaup purred, the
+black ducks, and the mallards with emerald-green heads, quacked, the
+pintails whimpered--the air was full of duck-notes. As they swept
+southward, the different families took their places according to their
+speed. Well up in the van were the canvasbacks, who can travel at the
+rate of one hundred and sixty feet per second. Next came the pintails,
+and the wood-ducks, whose drakes have wings of velvet-black, purple,
+and white. The mallards and the black ducks brought up the rear; while
+far behind a cloud of blue-winged teal whizzed down the sky, the
+lustrous light blue of their wings glinting like polished steel in the
+sunlight. Flying in perfect unison, the distance between them and the
+main flock rapidly lessened; for the blue-winged teal, when it settles
+down to fly, can tick off two miles a minute. A few yards back of
+their close cloud followed a single green-winged teal, a tiny drake
+with a chestnut-brown head brightly striped with green, who wore an
+emerald patch on either wing.
+
+In a moment the blue-wings had passed the quacking mallards and black
+ducks as if they had been anchored in the sky. The whistlers and
+pintails were overtaken next, and then, more slowly, the little flock,
+flying in perfect form, began to cut down the lead of the canvasbacks
+in front. Little by little, the tiny teal edged up, in complete
+silence, to the whizzing, grunting leaders, until at last they were
+flying right abreast of them. At first slowly, and then more and more
+rapidly, they drew away, until a clear space of sky showed between the
+two flocks, including the green-winged follower. Then, for the first
+time, the blue-wings spoke, voicing their victory in soft, lisping
+notes, which were echoed by a mellow whistle from the green-wing.
+
+The sound of his own voice seemed suddenly to remind the latter that
+he was one of the speed-kings of the sky. An inch shorter than his
+blue-winged brother, the green-winged teal is yet a hardier and a
+swifter bird. Unhampered by any flock-formation, the wing-beats of
+this lone flyer increased until he shot forward like a projectile. In
+a moment he was up to the leaders, then above them; and then, with a
+tremendous burst of speed, he passed and went slashing down the sky
+alone. Farther and farther in front flashed the little green-striped
+head, and more and more faintly his short whistles came back to the
+flock behind.
+
+Perhaps it was his call, or it might have been the green gleam of his
+speeding head, that caught the attention of a sky-pirate hovering in a
+reach of sky far above. Like other pirates, this one wore a curling
+black moustache in the form of a black stripe around its beak which,
+with the long, rakish wings and hooked, toothed beak, marked it as the
+duck-hawk, one of the fiercest and swiftest of the falcons. As the
+hawk caught sight of the speeding little teal, his telescopic eyes
+gleamed like fire, and curving down through the sky, in a moment he
+was in its wake. Every feather of the little drake's taut and tense
+body showed his speed, as he traveled at a two-mile-a-minute clip.
+
+Not so with the lithe falcon who pursued him. The movements of his
+long, narrow wings and arrowy body were so effortless that it seemed
+impossible that he could overtake the other. Yet every wing-beat
+brought him nearer and nearer, in a flight so swift and silent that
+not until the shadow of death fell upon the teal did the latter even
+know that he was being pursued. Then, indeed, he squawked in mortal
+terror, and tried desperately to increase a speed which already seemed
+impossible. Yet ever the shadow hung over him like a black shroud, and
+then, in a flash, the little green-wing's fate overtook him. Almost
+too quickly for eye to follow, the duck-hawk delivered the terrible
+slash with which falcons kill their prey, and in an instant the teal
+changed from a live, vibrant, arrow-swift bird to a limp mass of
+fluttering feathers, which dropped like a plummet through the air.
+With a rush, the duck-hawk swung down after his dead quarry, and
+catching it in his claws, swooped down to earth to feast full at his
+leisure.
+
+Far, far above the lower reaches of the sky, where the cloud of
+waterfowl were flying, above rain and storm and snow, was a solitude
+entered by only a few of the sky-pilgrims. There, three miles high,
+were naked space and a curved sky that shone like a great blue sun. In
+the north a cluster of black dots showed against the blue. Swiftly
+they grew in size, until at last, under a sun far brighter than the
+one known to the earthbound, there flashed through the glittering air
+a flock of golden plover. They were still wearing their summer suits,
+with black breasts and sides, while every brown-black feather on back
+and crown was widely margined with pure gold. Before they reached
+Patagonia the black would be changed for gray; for the Arctic summer
+of the golden plover is so short that he must moult, and even do his
+courting, on the wing.
+
+This company had nested up among the everlasting snows, and the
+mileage of their flight was to be measured by thousands instead of
+hundreds. To-day they were on their first lap of fifteen hundred miles
+to the shores of Nova Scotia. There they would rest before taking the
+Water Route which only kings of the air can follow. Straight across
+the storm-swept Atlantic and the treacherous Gulf of Mexico, two
+thousand four hundred miles, they would fly, on their way to their
+next stop on the pampas of the Argentine. Fainter-hearted flyers
+chose the circuitous Island Passage, across Cuba, Porto Rico, and
+the Antilles, to the northern shore of South America. The
+chuck-will's-widow of the Gulf States, cuckoos from New England,
+gray-checked thrushes from Quebec, bank-swallows from Labrador,
+black-poll warblers from Alaska, and hosts and myriads of bobolinks
+from everywhere took the Bobolink Route from Florida to Cuba, and the
+seven hundred miles across the Gulf to South America.
+
+Only a few of the highest-powered water-birds shared the Water Route
+with the plover. When this flock started, they had circled and wheeled
+and swooped in the wonderful evolutions of their kind, but had
+finally swung into their journey-gait--and when a plover settles down
+to straight flying, it would seem to be safe from anything slower than
+a bullet.
+
+Far above the flock floated what seemed a fleck of white cloud blown
+up from the lower levels. As it drifted swiftly down toward the
+speeding plover, it grew into a great bird sparsely mottled with
+pearl-gray, whose pointed wings had a spread of nearly five feet.
+Driven down from Greenland by cold and famine, a white gyrfalcon was
+haunting these solitudes like some grim ghost of the upper sky. His
+fierce eyes were of a glittering black, as was the tip of his blue
+hooked beak.
+
+As the plover whizzed southward on their way to Summer, some shadow of
+the coming of the falcon must have fallen upon them; for suddenly the
+whole flock broke and scattered through the sky, like a dropped
+handful of beads, each bird twisting and doubling through the air, yet
+still shooting ever southward at a speed which few other flyers could
+have equaled. Unluckily for the plover, the gyrfalcon is perhaps the
+fastest bird that flies, and moreover it has all of that mysterious
+gift of the falcon family of following automatically every double and
+twist and turn of any bird which it elects to pursue. This one chose
+his victim, and in a flash was following it through the sky. Here and
+there, back and forth, up and down, in dizzy circles and bewildering
+curves, the great hawk sped after the largest of the plover. As if
+driven in some invisible tandem, the white form of the falcon kept an
+exact distance from the plover, until at last the latter gave up
+circling and doubling for a stretch of straight flight. In an instant,
+the flashing white wings of the falcon were above it; there was the
+same arrowy pounce with which the lesser falcon had struck down the
+teal; and, a moment later, the gyrfalcon had caught the falling body,
+and was volplaning down to earth with the dead plover in its claws.
+
+For a time after this tragedy the sky seemed empty, as the scattered
+plover passed out of sight, to come together as a flock many miles
+beyond. Then a multitude of tiny black specks showed for an instant in
+the blue. They seemed almost like motes in the sunlight, save that,
+instead of dancing up and down, they shot forward with an almost
+inconceivable swiftness. It was as if a stream of bullets had suddenly
+become visible. Immeasurably faster than any bird of even twice its
+size, a flock of ruby-throated humming-birds, the smallest birds in
+the world, sped unfalteringly toward the sunland of the South. Their
+buzzing flight had a dipping, rolling motion, as they disappeared in
+the distance on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, whose seven hundred
+miles of treacherous water they would cover without a rest.
+
+As the setting sun approached the rim of the world, the lower clouds
+changed from banks of snow into masses of fuming gold, splashed and
+blotched with an intolerable crimson. Again the sky was full of birds.
+Those last of the day-flyers were the swallow-folk. White-bellied tree
+swallows; barn swallows, with long forked tails; cliff swallows, with
+cream-white foreheads; bank and rough-winged swallows, with brown
+backs--the air was full of their whirling, curving flight. With them
+went their big brothers, the purple martins, and the night hawks, with
+their white-barred wings, which at times, as they whirled downward,
+made a hollow twanging noise. With the flock, too, were the swifts,
+who sleep and nest in chimneys, and whose winter home no man yet has
+discovered.
+
+As the turquoise of the curved sky deepened into sapphire, a shadowy
+figure came toward the circling, flashing throng of swifts and
+swallows. The newcomer's great bare wings seemed made of sections of
+brown parchment jointed together unlike those of any bird. Nor did any
+bird ever wear soft brown fur frosted with silver, nor have wide
+flappy ears and a hobgoblin face. Miles above the ground this
+earth-born mammal was beating the birds in their own element. None of
+the swallows showed any alarm as the stranger overtook them, for they
+recognized him as the hoary bat, the largest of North American bats,
+who migrates with the swallows and, like them, feeds only on insects.
+
+As the sun sank lower, the great company of the bird-folk swooped down
+toward the earth, for swallows, swifts, and martins are all
+day-flyers. Not so with the bat. In the fading light, he flew steadily
+southward alone--but not for long. Up from earth came again the great
+gyrfalcon, his fierce hunger unsatisfied with the few mouthfuls torn
+from the plover's plump breast. As his fierce eyes caught sight of
+the flitting bat, his wings flashed through the air with the same
+speed that had overtaken the plover. No bird that flies could have
+kept ahead of the rush of the great hawk through the air.
+
+A mammal, however, is farther along in the scale of life than a bird,
+and more efficient, even as a flyer. As the pricked-up ears of the bat
+caught the swish of the falcon's wings, the beats of its own
+skin-covered pair increased, and the bird suddenly ceased to gain.
+Disdaining to double or zigzag, the great bat flew the straightaway
+race which the falcon loves, and which would have meant quick death to
+any bird who tried it. Skin, however, makes a better flying surface
+than feathers, and slowly but unmistakably the bat began to draw away
+from its pursuer. The gyrfalcon is the speed-king among birds, but the
+hoary bat is faster still. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed before
+the hawk realized that he was being outflown. Increase his speed as he
+would, the bat, in an effortless nonchalant manner, moved farther
+away. When only a streak of silver sky, with a shoal of little violet
+clouds, was left of the daylight the gyrfalcon gave up the chase. As
+he swooped down to earth like a white meteor, the brown figure of the
+bat disappeared in the violet twilight, beating, beating his way
+south.
+
+As the sky darkened to a peacock-blue, and a faint amber band in the
+west tried to bar the dark, suddenly the star-shine was full of soft
+pipings and chirpings. The night-flyers had begun their journey, and
+were calling back and forth heartening each other as they flew through
+the long dark hours. Against the golden disc of the rising moon a
+continuous procession of tiny black figures showed the whole sky to be
+full of these pilgrims from the north. The "chink, chink" of the
+bobolinks dropped through the stillness like silver coins; and from
+higher up came the "tsip, tsip, tsip" of the black-poll warblers, all
+the way from the Magdalen Islands. With them were a score or so of
+others of the great warbler family. Black-throated blues, Cape Mays,
+redstarts, golden-wings, yellow warblers, black-throated greens,
+magnolias, myrtles, and tiny parulas--myriads of this many-colored
+family were traveling together through the sky. With them went the
+vireos, the orioles, the tanagers, and four different kinds of
+thrushes, with a dozen or so other varieties of birds following.
+
+Most of them had put on their traveling clothes for the long journey.
+The tanagers had laid aside their crimson and black, and wore
+yellowish-green suits. The indigo bird had lost his vivid blue, the
+rose stain of the rose-breasted grosbeak was gone, along with the
+white cheeks of the black-poll warbler and the black throat of the
+black-throated green, while the bobolinks wore sober coats of
+olive-buff streaked with black, in place of their cream-white and
+velvet black.
+
+Once during the night, as the army crossed an Atlantic cape, a
+lighthouse flashed its fatal eye at them. Immediately the ranks of the
+flyers broke, and in confused groups they circled around and around
+the witch-fire which no bird may pass. For hours they flew in dizzying
+circles, until, weary and bewildered, some of the weaker ones began to
+sink toward the dark water. Fortunately for them, at midnight the
+color of the light changed from white to red. Instantly the prisoners
+were freed from the spell which only the white light lays upon them,
+and in a minute the air was filled with glad flight-calls, as the
+released ranks hurried on and away through the dark.
+
+All night long they flew steadily, and turned earthward only at
+sunrise. As the weary flyers sought the trees and fields for rest and
+food, overhead, against a crimson and gold dawn, passed the
+long-distance champion of the skies--the Arctic tern, with its
+snow-white breast, black head, curved wings, and forked tail. Nesting
+as far north as it can find land, only seven and a half degrees from
+the Pole, it flies eleven thousand miles to the Antarctic, and,
+ranging from pole to pole, sees more daylight than any other creature.
+For eight months of its year it never knows night, and during the
+other four has more daylight than dark. Scorner of all lands,
+tireless, unresting, this dweller in the loneliest places of earth
+flashed white across the dawn-sky--and was gone.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE LITTLE PEOPLE
+
+
+The swamp-maples showed rose-red and gold-green in the warm sunlight,
+and the woods were etched lavender-brown against a heliotrope sky. The
+bluebird, with the sky-color on his back and the red-brown of earth at
+his breast, called, "Far-away! far-away! far-away!" in his soft sweet
+contralto. From a wet meadow a company of rusty blackbirds, with short
+tails and white eyes, sang together like a flock of creaking
+wheelbarrows, with single split notes sounding constantly above the
+squealing chorus. Beyond the meadow was a little pool, where the air
+was vibrant with the music of the frogs. The hylas sang like a chest
+of whistles so shrill that the air quivered with their song. At
+intervals, a single clear flute-note rose above the chorus, the
+love-call of the little red salamander; while the drawling mutter of
+cricket-frogs, the trilled call of the wood-frogs, and the soft croon
+of the toad added delicate harmonies. Near-by a song-sparrow sang
+wheezingly from a greening willow tree, but its note sounded flat
+compared with the shrill, high sweetness of the batrachian chorus.
+
+Near the top of Prindle Hill was a dry warm slope, with stretches of
+underbrush, pasture, and ledges of rock rising to the patch of woods
+which crowned the crest of the hill. Beyond was a tiny lake.
+Everywhere along the sunny slope were small round holes bored through
+the tough turf. As the sun rose higher and higher, little waves of
+heat penetrated deep below the grass-roots.
+
+Suddenly, from out of one of the holes, a little pointed nose was
+thrust, and a second later the first chipmunk of the year darted above
+ground from the burrow where he had slept out the long winter. His
+dark pepper-and-salt colored back had a black-brown stripe down the
+centre and four others in pairs along either side, separated by strips
+of cream-white. His cheeks, flanks, feet, and the underside of his
+black fringed tail were of a light fawn-color, and he wore a silky
+white waistcoat. Erecting his white-tipped tail, he sat up on his
+haunches and tipping back his head, began to sing the spring song
+which every chipmunk must sing when he first comes above ground at the
+dawn of the year. "Chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck," he chirped
+loudly, at the rate of two chirps per second.
+
+At the very first note sharp noses and bright black eyes appeared at
+every hole, and in a second a score or more other singers had whisked
+out and joined in the spring chorus, each one bent on proving that his
+notes were the loudest and clearest of any on the hill. One of the
+last to begin was a half-grown chipmunk, who had been crowded out of
+the family burrow by new arrivals the autumn before. Fortunately for
+him, however, the next burrow was occupied by a chipmunk of an
+inquiring disposition. Said disposition caused him to wait to
+investigate the habits of a passing red fox. Thereafter his burrow was
+to let, and was immediately taken possession of by the young chipmunk
+aforesaid.
+
+This new tenant came out timidly, even when he felt the thrill of
+spring. Once above ground, however, he simply had to sing. At his very
+first note, he sensed a difference between his voice and those of all
+the others. Whereas they sang "Chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck," he sang
+"Chippy, chippy, chippy." To his delighted ear his own higher notes
+were far superior to those of his companions, and he shrilled away,
+ecstatically, with half-closed eyes. Ten minutes went happily by. Then
+a singer on the outskirts caught sight of a marsh-hawk quartering the
+hillside, and gave the alarm-squeal as he dove into his hole. The song
+broke in the middle, as every singer whisked underground and the
+annual spring song was over. Thereafter the customary caution of a
+chipmunk-colony was resumed.
+
+At first, Chippy ventured but seldom outside of his new burrow. Far in
+under the turf was the storehouse, filled by its first owner full of
+hazel-nuts, cherry-pits, wild buckwheat, buttercup seeds, maple-keys,
+and other chipmunk staples, all carefully cleaned, dried, and stored.
+On these he lived largely during the first few weeks of spring. Then
+came a day when he entered his front door with a flying leap, only to
+find a burly and determined stranger blocking his way. A bustling and
+lusty bachelor from another colony had spied the burrow from the
+stone wall, the broad highway of all chipmunks, and had decided to
+make it his own by right of conquest.
+
+In vain Chippy fought for his home, at first desperately and then
+despairingly. The other chipmunk had the advantage of weight,
+experience, and position, and Chippy was forced slowly out into the
+wide world. Squealing and chirping with rage, with his soft fur
+fluffed up all over his sleek body, he came out into the sunlight. He
+saw nothing, heard nothing, scented nothing, hostile. Yet, obeying the
+little alarm-bell that rings in every chipmunk's brain, he dashed
+desperately for the shelter of the stone wall. It was well for him
+that he did. As he crossed the wide stretch of turf like a tawny
+streak, there was a whirl of wing-beats, the flash of a gray-brown
+body balanced by a narrow black-barred tail, and the shadow of death
+fell upon him even as he neared his refuge. With a frightened squeal,
+Chippy put every atom of the force which pulsed through his little
+vibrant body into one last spring. Even as he disappeared headlong
+into a chink between two large stones, a set of keen claws clamped
+vainly through the long hairs of his vanishing tail, as a
+sharp-shinned hawk somersaulted with a backward sweep of its wings, to
+avoid dashing itself against the wall. For a moment it vibrated in the
+air with cruel, crooked beak half-open, searching the wall with
+unflinching golden eyes, and then skimmed sullenly away.
+
+In a minute a pointed nose was poked out from the stones and carefully
+winnowed the air. Satisfied that the coast was clear, Chippy at last
+scurried up to the top of the wall, where he could see on all sides,
+with a wide cranny conveniently near; for a chipmunk who desires to
+live out all his days must never be more than two jumps from a hole.
+Sitting up on the stone, he produced from one of the pockets which he
+wore in either cheek a large hickory nut, which had been pouched there
+all through his fight and flight. Holding it firmly in both his little
+three-fingered, double-thumbed forepaws, he nibbled an alternate hole
+in either side, through which he extracted every last fragment of the
+rich, brown kernel within. While he ate, there was never a second
+during which his sharp black eyes were not scanning every inch of the
+circumference of which his stone was the centre. There was not an
+instant that his sharp ears were not pricked up to catch the slightest
+sound, and his keen nostrils to sniff the faintest scent, that would
+indicate the approach of death in any of the many forms in which it
+comes to chipmunks.
+
+His meal finished, Chippy turned his instantaneous mind to the next
+most important item of life. On his list of necessities, _Home_ stared
+at him in capitals just under the item _Food_. A stone wall makes a
+good lodging-house but a poor home, for it has too many doors.
+Wherefore Chippy scampered along the top of the wall, his tail erect
+like a plume, scanning the hillside as he ran for a good
+building-site. At last, he came to a dry bank covered with short
+twisted ringlets of tough grass, which sloped up from the stone wall
+and ended in a clump of sweet fern. With a flying leap, he struck the
+middle of the bank, and with another bound was safe in the depths of
+the sweet fern.
+
+From there he commenced to dig. No one has ever yet found a fleck or
+flake of loose earth near the entrance to a chipmunk home. This is
+because he always starts digging at the other end. Working like a
+little steam-shovel, within a few days Chippy had dug a series of
+intersecting tunnels, of which the main one ended between two stones
+at the base of the wall. Far down among the roots of a rotting stump,
+he made a warm nest of leaves and grass. From this sleeping-room a
+twisted passage led to a rounded storeroom on the other side of the
+stump. No less than three emergency entrances and exits were made
+within a ten-foot circle; and beside the bedroom and storeroom he dug
+a kitchen midden, where all refuse and garbage could be deposited and
+covered with earth, in accordance with the custom of all properly
+brought-up chipmunks. When at last every grain of earth had been
+carried out through the first hole among the overshadowing ferns, he
+sealed it up from the outside, and covered the packed earth with
+leaves. Then he took a day off. Climbing to the top of the wall, he
+perched himself where a single bound would take him to the main
+entrance of his new home, and with his little nose pointed skyward
+told the world, at the rate of one hundred and thirty chirps per
+minute, what a wonderful home was his. Thereafter began an unending
+search for food. On the far side of the slope he found a thicket of
+hazel bushes, which had been overlooked by the rest of the colony.
+Thence he would return to his burrow, looking as if he had a bad
+attack of mumps. Really it was only nuts. Twelve hazel-nuts, or four
+acorns, were Chippy's tonnage.
+
+By the time the flood-tide of summer had set in, Chippy had reached
+the high watermark of his youth. Larger, stronger, and swifter than
+any of the younger members of the colony, he soon began to rival the
+elders of the community in wisdom. Then suddenly there came to the
+Little People of the Woods, a wandering demon of blood and carnage.
+One sunny afternoon, while every chipmunk on that hillside was abroad,
+playing, feasting, hoarding, singing, there flashed in among them a
+reddish animal, with a long black-tipped tail, white chin and cheeks,
+and a fierce pointed head. Sniffing here and there like a trailing
+hound, it darted down upon the little colony.
+
+It was the long-tailed, or great, weasel, whose movements are so swift
+as to baffle even the quickest eye. Caught too far from their burrows,
+the lives of four chipmunks went out like the puff of a candle. Then
+the high alarm-squeal ran up and down the hillside, and every chipmunk
+within hearing dived underground where they were all safe; for the
+great weasel is just one size too large to enter a chipmunk's burrow.
+Hither and there the weasel wound its way, like some fierce swift
+snake. With its flaming eyes, white cheeks dabbled red with blood, and
+flat triangular head swaying from side to side on a long neck, it
+looked the very personification of sudden death.
+
+Farthest from home of all the others, Chippy, the swift and wise,
+faced the death which had overtaken the slow and foolish. For the
+first time in his life he had climbed to the tiptop of an elm tree.
+There among the topmost slender sprays he was feasting on elm-seeds,
+and came hurrying down at the first alarm-note. Just as he had nearly
+reached the ground, around the foot of the tree trunk was thrust the
+bloody face of the killer. There is something so devilish and
+implacable in the appearance of a hunting weasel, that it cows even
+the bravest of the smaller animals. A gray old rat, ordinarily a grim
+cynical fighter with no nerves to speak of, will run squealing in
+terror from before a weasel; while a rabbit, when it sees the red
+death on his trail, forgets his swiftness and cowers on the ground.
+
+Something of the same spell came over Chippy as, for the first time,
+he faced the demon of his tribe. Yet he kept his head enough to
+realize that his only hope was aloft, and instantly whisked back up
+the great trunk. Unfortunately for him the versatile weasel is at home
+on, under, and above ground. The chipmunk had hardly reached the
+topmost branch, when he felt it sway under the quick, darting motions
+of his pursuer. Up and up he went, until he clung to the tiny swaying
+twigs at the very spire and summit of the elm, seventy-five feet from
+the ground.
+
+In a moment, the bloody muzzle of his pursuer was sniffing along his
+trail. Hunting by scent, like all of its kind, the weasel wound his
+way up through the twigs, nearer and nearer to the trembling chipmunk.
+Twelve inches away, the weasel stopped and, thrusting out its long
+neck, seemed for the first time to see the little animal just above. A
+green gleam showed in the depths of the malignant eyes.
+
+As it shifted its weight on the swaying twigs preparatory to the
+lightning-like pounce which would end the chase, the chipmunk, with a
+little wailing cry, let go his hold and fell like a stone down through
+the green screen of leaves and twigs that stretched between him and
+the ground far below. Even as he whirled through space, his little
+brain was alert to seize upon every chance for life. As he struck twig
+after twig, he clutched at them with his forepaws but could get no
+firm hand-hold. Fifty feet down, he managed to hook both of his little
+arms across a twig about the size of a man's thumb. A cross-twig kept
+his hold from slipping off, and swinging back and forth like a
+pendulum, he at last managed to clamber up into a crotch of this outer
+branch and crouched there, panting.
+
+In a moment there was a scratching noise along the tree trunk, and the
+weasel came down in long spirals instead of climbing straight down as
+would a squirrel. The branch at the end of which the chipmunk was
+perched ran out from the main trunk, then turned at right angles and
+grew down almost perpendicularly, making a sharp elbow. The weasel
+descended, weaving his broad, triangular head back and forth, with
+little looping movements of his long neck, and sniffing the air as he
+came. When he reached the branch where the chipmunk was, he stopped
+and crept along the limb to the elbow. This was too much for him,
+skillful climber as he was. The perpendicular drop of the branch, its
+small size and smooth bark, all combined against him. Three times he
+tried to follow it down. Each time he slipped so that it became
+evident to him that another step would break his hold and send him
+crashing to the ground.
+
+All this time the chipmunk was in full sight, yet the bloodshot eyes
+of his enemy seemed to overlook him entirely. Again and again the
+weasel sniffed the air, and repeatedly returned to the limb, evidently
+convinced that his intended prey was there.
+
+Throughout, the chipmunk clung to the branch, silent and motionless.
+Only the throbbing of his silky white breast showed how his heart
+pounded as he watched the trailing death approaching. At last, the
+weasel seemed to give up the hunt and reluctantly wound his way down
+the main trunk and disappeared behind the tree.
+
+For a full half-hour the chipmunk clung to his refuge without the
+slightest movement. Finally, when it seemed as if his pursuer were
+gone for good, the little animal moved cautiously up the branch, and
+managed to negotiate the elbow which had baffled his heavier pursuer.
+With the same caution he crept down the trunk and, after looking all
+around, finally leaped to the turf beyond. As he struck the ground,
+there was a rustle from the depths of a thicket a few rods away, and
+out darted the weasel, which, with the fierce patience of his kind,
+had been lurking there and came between the chipmunk and the scattered
+homes of the colony.
+
+Over the hilltop was the only way of escape. There lay a patch of deep
+woods, where the trees grew thick and dark over a ledge of rock which
+stretched up to the very summit. There, too, was hidden some mystery
+as black as the shade above that lonely ledge. Often there had been no
+return for chipmunks crossing that dark crest. Instinctively the
+fugitive avoided the woods and circled the hill hoping to find some
+refuge on the farther side.
+
+Long ago, the weasel-folk have learned that a straight line is the
+shortest distance between two points. Wherefore to-day the hunter
+followed the diameter of the circle that the chipmunk was making
+around the wooded hilltop. Like a flash, with tail up and head down,
+the weasel wound his way among the rocks and crowded trees which
+covered the hill's crest. As his triangular head thrust itself beyond
+a pointed rock which jutted out from the ledge, his quick nostrils
+caught a sinister, sickly scent, and he checked in his stride but--too
+late. His flaming red eyes looked directly into the fixed glare of two
+other eyes, black, lidless, with strange oval pupils, and set deep in
+a cruel heart-shaped head, which showed a curious hole between eye and
+nostril, the hall-mark of the fatal family of pit-vipers to which the
+rattlesnake, copperhead, and moccasin belong.
+
+For a second the fierce beast and the grim snake faced each other.
+The eyes of none of the mammals have a fiercer, more compelling gaze
+than those of the weasel-folk when red with the rage of slaughter. Yet
+no beast can outstare that grim ruler of the dark places of the
+forest, the timber rattlesnake, and in a moment the weasel started to
+dodge back. Not even his flashing speed, however, availed against the
+stroke of the snake. Faster than any eye could follow, the flat head
+shot forward, gaping horribly, while two keen movable fangs were
+thrust straight out like spear-points. They looked like crooked white
+needles, each with a hole in the side below the point, from which
+oozed the yellow venom. Before the darting weasel had time to gain the
+shelter of the rock, both fangs had pierced his side, and the great
+snake was back again in coil. Tottering as the deadly virus touched
+the tide of his fierce blood, and knowing that his life was numbered
+by seconds, the weasel yet sprang forward to die at death-grips with
+his foe. As he came, the great snake struck again, but as it snapped
+back into coil, the needle-like teeth of the other met in its brain.
+The great reptile thrashed and rattled, but the grip of the red killer
+remained unbroken long after both were still and stark.
+
+Beyond the black circle of the woods, away from the fatal ledge and
+through the sunlight, the chipmunk sped, expecting every minute to
+hear the fierce patter of his pursuer close behind. Little by little
+he circled, until at last, hardly able to believe in his own escape,
+he found himself once more in the depths of his own burrow.
+
+As the spring lengthened into summer, Chippy found himself strangely
+interested in another burrow which had been dug near to his own. So,
+too, were half a dozen other gay young bucks of the colony, who, with
+tails erect and with sleek and well-groomed fur, frequently tried to
+visit the owner of said burrow. She treated them all alike. Every
+chipmunk who passed her front door received such a succession of nips
+and scratches that he was only too glad to back out again in a hurry.
+
+As time went by, with every new experience and with every new escape,
+Chippy grew larger and wiser and stronger. Then came the glittering
+summer afternoon when he won the right to rank with the bravest and
+best of the colony. The heat eddied across the hill in shimmering
+waves as he started home from where he had been foraging, his
+cheek-pockets full of samples for his storehouse. As he neared his
+front door by the stone wall he saw Death itself entering his little
+neighbor's burrow. Black, sinuous, terrible, a giant blacksnake over
+six feet in length had found its way from its den on the other side of
+the hill to the chipmunk colony. Its smooth scales showed an absolute
+black in the sunlight, and made a crisp, rustling noise as it streamed
+over the dry leaves and grass of the hillside. Except for that sound,
+there was silence. At times the great snake would stop and, raising
+its head two feet from the ground and swaying back and forth, would
+stare here and there with fixed lidless eyes while the white patch on
+its lower jaw gleamed in the sun, and its long, black forked tongue
+played in and out like the flicker of a flame.
+
+Suddenly the snake shot into Chippy's burrow. Over a third of its
+length had disappeared from sight when Chippy showed a flash of that
+instantaneous, unreckoning courage which carries man or beast into the
+front ranks of his kind. Perhaps what he did was to save himself from
+future danger. Yet who can say that it was not a spark of the same
+divine fire which glows in the heart of man that made him risk his
+life for another? As he saw the fatal head disappear down the burrow,
+with a lightning-like spring he leaped upon the disappearing body,
+casting out his cherished nuts from his cheeks in mid-air. Opening his
+wide-set jaws, he clamped them shut where the supple, flexible spine
+of the snake ridged the smooth skin. The back of a blacksnake is a
+mass of tough muscles, and its spine has the strength of a steel
+spring. Yet the tremendous jaw-muscles of the chipmunk drove the
+needle-pointed teeth deep into the twisted, over-lapping fibres.
+
+The black column stiffened like an iron bar. Bracing his paws against
+the sides of the hole, the chipmunk gnawed away desperately. Suddenly
+the keen teeth grated, and then locked in the sinuous spine itself. As
+they met, the great body surged forward and dragged the chipmunk into
+the burrow. Once deep underground, there was danger that the snake
+might find space to double back on its length and gain a fatal
+head-hold with its sharp slanting teeth. Yet Chippy never loosed his
+grip for an instant. Dragging back with all his strength, he forced
+his clamped teeth deeper and deeper into the twisting spine. At last
+through the cold, bubbling blood, he felt the fibres of the vertebrae
+slowly give, until with a final rending tug he bit clear through the
+spinal cord.
+
+By this time he was well below ground, and only the snake's tail
+thrashed and writhed ineffectually on the surface. Suddenly, as Chippy
+still gnawed and tugged, the lashings of the tail lessened, and
+through his clenched teeth he could feel something tugging and biting
+at it. Little by little the struggles of the snake became fainter, and
+Chippy no longer felt himself dragged forward. When at last they had
+died down to convulsive twists and shudders, which would last for
+hours, the battling chipmunk unlocked his jaws and backed out of the
+burrow. Bloody, bruised and exhausted he found himself once more safe
+in the sunlight.
+
+Right in front of him was Nippy, worrying the wriggling tail with her
+sharp teeth like a little terrier. Aroused far underground by the
+sounds of the struggle she had rushed up toward the entrance. While
+still a long distance from it, her quick little ears caught the fierce
+hiss that the great snake gave at the first pang from the piercing
+teeth; and though this was her first year alone in the world, she knew
+that the sound meant death. Turning like a flash, she slipped into a
+by-passage and escaped to the upper air by an emergency exit concealed
+under a huckleberry bush. At her front door she found the tail of the
+crippled snake thrashing back and forth, and pouncing upon it, she
+helped her unseen ally by biting through the spine in two places at
+its narrowest point. When Chippy appeared, she let go, and by degrees
+the writhing body disappeared from the sight of the sun. Then, while
+Chippy lay and panted, the little owner of the burrow began to seal up
+the entrance of the haunted home in token that it was hers no longer.
+The front door once shut and locked, she moved slowly toward the top
+of the hill and--looked back.
+
+Then was the time for Chippy to follow. Instead, he stiffly and
+haltingly betook himself to his own burrow. When, two days later, he
+came out, there was no trace of the fair and fleeting Nippy. For weeks
+he sought her everywhere, in the woods and pastures, and even to the
+shore of the little lake that cupped the farther side of the hill.
+
+Then came a happening which drove all thoughts of anything but life
+and death from the minds of all the dwellers on the hillside. The doom
+which always hangs over the Little People fell upon them. In the gray
+hour just before the dawn, one fatal day, what looked like a brown
+squirrel, with a white throat and paws and a short tail, came to the
+chipmunk colony. Yet no squirrel ever had such bloodred eyes, such a
+serpent-like head, or a body so lithe and sinuous. The deadly visitor
+was none other than the lesser, or short-tailed, weasel, far more
+dangerous to the Little People than his larger kinsman, since he was
+small enough to enter their burrows.
+
+To-day he slipped like a shadow into the first burrow he found. It
+happened to be the very one of which the stranger chipmunk had
+dispossessed Chippy months before. This morning he had just waked up
+in his round sleeping-room when he heard the patter of the weasel down
+the long entrance tunnel. Out of one of his many exits the chipmunk
+dashed, but as he came above ground, the weasel was hard on his heels,
+and he turned to do battle for his life. As he was nearly as large as
+the weasel, the fight did not seem an unequal one; yet the chipmunk
+never had a chance. For a second the two faced each other, the
+chipmunk crouched low, the weasel with its swaying head raised high.
+Then the chipmunk lunged forward, desperately hoping to gain a grip
+with its two keen gnawing teeth. With a curve of its supple body, the
+weasel slipped the other's lead, and with almost the same motion gave
+that fatal counter which no animal has yet learned to parry. With a
+snap of the triangular muzzle, three of the long fighting teeth of the
+killer pierced with diabolical accuracy the chipmunk's skull at the
+exact point where it was thinnest, and crashed deep into its brain.
+
+Stopping only to lap a little of the warm blood of its victim, the
+weasel flashed into the next burrow, where a mother chipmunk slept
+with her five babies, all rolled up in a round warm ball. To them all,
+death came mercifully swift. Then into the next burrow and the next
+this Death-in-the-dark hastened. None of the Little People he met
+escaped. Some fought, others fled, but neither courage nor fleetness
+availed. When, at last, the brown killer approached the burrow where
+Chippy lived, it had left behind it a trail of nearly a score of dead
+and dying victims, and yet was as tireless and terrible as ever. Each
+time that it slaked its vampire-thirst with fresh blood, it seemed to
+gain new strength and speed.
+
+As the sun showed over Prindle Hill, Chippy started out of his front
+door. Even as he thrust his head into the open, he caught the sound of
+a faint squeal from a near-by burrow and saw the blood-stained muzzle
+of the weasel show in the early sunlight. As he dived back, his
+instantaneous brain seized upon the one way of escape remaining. The
+weasel could outrun him, and with his unerring nose unravel any tangle
+of tunnels. Yet the underground people have one last resource of their
+own, which a million years of being hunted to the death have taught
+them. To make use of this defense, however, the pursued must have a
+substantial start over the hunter, and to-day Chippy had but a few
+scant seconds, since the weasel had glimpsed the whisk of his tail as
+he plunged headlong down his front entrance, and had instantly started
+for his burrow.
+
+With back humped high at every pattering plunge of its short legs, the
+weasel looked like a great inch-worm measuring its way toward its
+prey. Yet, clumsy as its gait appeared, it was scarcely an instant
+before the bloody muzzle and red glaring eyes were thrust into the
+hole down which the chipmunk had disappeared. Much can be done,
+however, even in seconds, with a hair-trigger brain and nerves and
+muscles tensed by the fear of death. Like a flash, Chippy traversed
+the main passage of his burrow, dashed into a tunnel that forked off
+to the right, and then dived into a smaller branch, which angled off
+sharply from the larger tube. Then he suddenly doubled on his tracks,
+and popped into another passage, which ran in a long slant up to
+within a few inches of the surface of the hillside.
+
+Once beyond the entrance to this last tunnel, the chipmunk dug for his
+very life's sake. With flashing strokes of his forepaws, he dislodged
+the soft earth at the sides of the passage, sweeping it back with his
+hind feet; and, even as the weasel writhed his way along the main
+passage, Chippy had sealed the doorway to the last tube which he had
+entered, so carefully that the blocked entrance could not be told from
+the rest of the surface of the passage-wall. Then he hurried swiftly
+and silently toward the surface.
+
+Even as he dug his way up through the tough grass-roots, his fierce
+pursuer flashed into the tube from which the walled-up doorway led.
+With nose close to the ground, the weasel had followed the chipmunk's
+trail at full speed, nor had the branching and intersecting passages
+slowed his speed even for a moment. Only when he came to the spot
+where the chipmunk had doubled back to the sealed-up doorway, was he
+checked. Even his keen nostrils could not follow the trail through
+four inches of fresh earth.
+
+As he came to a standstill, his microphonic ears caught the sound of
+distant digging far above him. Instantly, without wasting any time in
+hunting for the sealed tunnel, he turned and raced back to the
+entrance-hole, with such speed that, just as the chipmunk pushed his
+way to the surface well up the hillside, the weasel burst out of the
+main entrance below and dashed after him.
+
+If the weasel's speed had not been slowed by slaughter, the chase
+would have been a short one. As it was, the chipmunk went over the
+crest of the hill a few rods ahead; but the gap lessened as his
+pursuer struck his gait and shot forward like an uncoiling spring.
+This time it seemed as if the chipmunk's last chance for life were
+gone. Above ground he was out-paced. To go underground again meant
+certain death. A miracle had saved him before from the other
+weasel--but nature seldom deals in miracles twice. Yet the little
+animal never weakened. A rabbit so close to death would have quit and
+cowered down, crying piteously until the weasel's teeth were in its
+throat. A rat would have lost its head and, running itself to a
+standstill, met its death frothing and squealing in mortal terror.
+
+Chippy, however, concealed under his gentle, sprightly exterior a cool
+little brain, nor did ever a braver heart beat than throbbed under his
+white waistcoat. Although he seemed to be running at full speed, he
+was really holding something in reserve and already his flash-like
+mind had seized upon the one chance of life that was left. Earth and
+air had betrayed him. Perhaps water would be kinder. Straight toward
+the little lake he headed. Little by little the space between him and
+the killer behind lessened. By the time he had reached the roots of a
+black willow tree which stretched far out over the water, the
+snake-head of the weasel was not six feet behind the fluffy tail which
+Chippy still flaunted, the unlowered banner of his courage. Out upon
+the tree trunk he rushed, until he reached the farthest fork. Then,
+gathering himself together, he sprang from all four feet as if driven
+by a released spring and struck far out in the still water.
+
+The sound of his splash had hardly died away before his brown pursuer
+launched himself into the air with a sort of double jump, starting
+with a spring from his short forelegs and ending with a tremendous
+drive from his squat hind legs. In spite of this clumsy take-off, the
+fierce force that shows in everything a weasel does, drove him a foot
+ahead of the chipmunk's mark. Followed a desperate race. Swimming high
+with jerky, uneven, rapid strokes, the weasel rushed through the water
+and foot by foot cut down the chipmunk's lead, until his teeth gnashed
+a scant yard back of the other's shoulder. There however the weasel
+hung. Swimming deeper, and with slower and more powerful strokes, the
+chipmunk refused to break his stroke by looking back. Only when the
+recurring ripples warned him that his pursuer was closing in on him
+did he put more power into the deep, regular beat of his strong little
+legs.
+
+Slowly, very slowly, the better stroke began to tell. At first the
+weasel only stopped gaining. Then, little by little, the gap between
+the two widened. When it had stretched out to ten feet, the chipmunk
+shot ahead as if the other were anchored. The weasel's strokes became
+slower, and at last stopped. Flesh and blood, however fierce, has its
+limitations. The weasel had risked everything on his first desperate
+sprint. That failing, his reserves were gone, and he turned and slowly
+and pantingly swam back to the shore and passed out of Chippy's life
+forever.
+
+Strongly and steadily the chipmunk swam on, until the farther shore, a
+quarter of a mile away, was reached. Wearily Chippy dragged himself up
+the beach to the dry hillside, staggering from exhaustion. There was
+no stone wall near, nor had he the strength to dig even the beginning
+of a burrow. Unprotected, in the open, he must take his chances until
+his strength came back. Then it was that nature relented, and once
+more another miracle was wrought for one of her loved Little People.
+Out of a hole on the hillside half-hidden by the pink blossoms of a
+steeple-bush, popped a small head, and for a golden moment Chippy
+gazed long and long into the eyes of Nippy. Then she turned back into
+her burrow, with a look that drew him totteringly after her. At the
+flood-tide of their lives they had met to become the founders of
+another colony, and to pass on undimmed the divine spark of courage
+and endurance and love.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE PATH OF THE AIR
+
+
+Deacon Jimmy Wadsworth was probably the most upright man in Cornwall.
+It was he who drove five miles one bitter winter night and woke up
+Silas Smith, who kept the store at Cornwall Bridge, to give him back
+three cents over-change. Silas's language, as he went back to bed,
+almost brought on a thaw.
+
+The Deacon lived on the tiptop of the Cobble, one of the twenty-seven
+named hills of Cornwall, with Aunt Maria his wife, Hen Root his hired
+man, Nip Root his yellow dog and--the Ducks. The Deacon had rumpled
+white hair and a serene clear-cut face, and even when working, always
+wore a clean white shirt with a stiff bosom and no collar.
+
+Aunt Maria was of the salt of the earth. She was spry and short, with
+a little face all wrinkled with good-will and good works, and had
+twinkling eyes of horizon-blue. If anyone was sick, or had unexpected
+company, or a baby, or was getting married or buried, Aunt Maria was
+always on hand, helping.
+
+As for Hen, he cared more for his dog than he did for any human. When
+a drive for the Liberty Loan was started in Cornwall, he bought a bond
+for himself and one for Nip, and had the latter wear a Liberty Loan
+button in his collar.
+
+Of course, the farm was cluttered up with horses, cows, chickens, and
+similar bric-a-brac, but the Ducks were part of the household. It came
+about this way: Rashe Howe, who hunted everything except work, had
+given the Deacon a tamed decoy duck, who seemed to have passed her
+usefulness as a lure. It was evident, however, that she had been
+trifling with Rashe, for before she had been on the farm a month,
+somewhere in sky or stream she found a mate. Later, down by the
+ice-pond, she stole a nest--a beautiful basin made of leaves and edged
+with soft down from her black-and-buff breast. There she laid ten
+blunt-ended, brown eggs, which she brooded until she was carried off
+one night by a wandering fox. Her mate went back to the wilds, and
+Aunt Maria put the eggs under a big clucking Brahma hen, who hatched
+out six soft yellow ducklings.
+
+They had no more than come out of the shell when, with faint little
+quackings, they paddled out of the barnyard and started in single file
+for the pond. Although just hatched, each little duck knew its place
+in the line, and from that day on, the order never changed. The old
+hen, clucking frantically, tried again and again to turn them back.
+Each time they scattered and, waddling past her, fell into line once
+more. When at last they reached the bank, their foster-mother scurried
+back and forth squawking warnings at the top of her voice; but, one
+after another, each disobedient duckling plunged in with a bob of its
+turned-up tail, and the procession swam around and around the pond as
+if it would never stop.
+
+This was too much for the old hen. She stood for a long minute,
+watching the ungrateful brood, and then turned away and evidently
+disinherited them upon the spot. From that moment she gave up the
+duties of motherhood, stopped setting and clucking, and never again
+recognized her foster-children, as they found out to their sorrow
+after their swim. All the rest of that day they plopped sadly after
+her, only to be received with pecks whenever they came too near. She
+would neither feed nor brood them, and when night came, they had to
+huddle in their deserted coop in a soft little heap, shivering and
+quacking beseechingly until daylight.
+
+The next day Aunt Maria was moved by the sight of the six, weary but
+still pursuing the indifferent hen, keeping up the while a chorus of
+soft sorrowful little quackings, which ought to have touched her
+heart--but didn't. By this time they were so weak that, if Aunt Maria
+had not taken them into the kitchen and fed them and covered them up
+in a basket of flannel, they would never have lived through the second
+night.
+
+Thereafter the old kitchen became a nursery. Six human babies could
+hardly have called for more attention, or have made more trouble, or
+have been better loved than those six fuzzy, soft, yellow ducklings.
+In a few days, the whole home-life on top of the Cobble centred around
+them. They needed so much nursing and petting and soothing, that it
+almost seemed to Aunt Maria as if a half-century had rolled back, and
+she was once more looking after babies long, long lost to her. Even
+old Hen became attached to them enough to cuff Nip violently when that
+pampered animal growled at the newcomers, and showed signs of
+abolishing them. From that moment Nip joined the Brahma hen in
+ignoring the ducklings completely. If any attention was shown them in
+his presence, he would stalk away majestically, as if overcome with
+astonishment that humans would spend their time over six yellow ducks
+instead of one yellow dog.
+
+During the ducks' first days in the kitchen, someone had to be with
+them constantly. Otherwise all six of them would go "Yip, yip, yip,"
+at the top of their voices. As soon as any one came to their cradle,
+or even spoke to them, they would snuggle down contentedly under the
+flannel, and sing like a lot of little tea-kettles, making the same
+kind of a sleepy hum that a flock of wild mallards gives when they are
+sleeping far out on the water. They liked the Deacon and Hen, but they
+loved Aunt Maria. In a few days they followed her everywhere around
+the house, and even out on the farm, paddling along just behind her,
+in single file, and quacking vigorously if she walked too fast.
+
+One day she tried to slip out and go down to the sewing-circle at Mrs.
+Miner Rogers's at the foot of the hill; but they were on her trail
+before she had taken ten steps. They followed her all the way down,
+and stood with their beaks pressed against the bay-window, watching
+her as she sat in Mrs. Rogers's parlor. When they made up their minds
+that she had called long enough, they set up such a chorus of
+quackings that Aunt Maria had to come.
+
+"Those pesky ducks will quack their heads off if I don't leave," she
+explained shamefacedly.
+
+The road up-hill was a long, long trail for the ducklings. Every now
+and then they would stop and cry with their pathetic little yipping
+note, and lie down flat on their backs, and hold their soft little
+paddles straight up in the air, to show how sore they were. The last
+half of the journey they made in Aunt Maria's apron, singing away
+contentedly as she plodded up the hill.
+
+As they grew older, they took an interest in everyone who came; and if
+they did not approve of the visitor, would quack deafeningly until he
+went. Once Aunt Maria happened to step suddenly around the corner of
+the house as a load of hay went past. Finding her gone, the ducks
+started solemnly down the road, following the hay-wagon, evidently
+convinced that she was hidden somewhere beneath the load. They were
+almost out of sight when Aunt Maria called to them. At the first sound
+of her voice, they turned and hurried back, flapping their wings and
+paddling with all their might, quacking joyously as they came.
+
+Aunt Maria and the flock had various little private games of their
+own. Whenever she sat down, they would tug at the neatly tied bows of
+her shoelaces, until they had loosened them; whereupon she would jump
+up and rush at them, pretending great wrath; whereupon they would
+scatter on all sides, quacking delightedly. When she turned back, they
+would form a circle around her, snuggling their soft necks against her
+gown until she scratched each uplifted head softly. If she wore
+button-shoes they would pry away at the loose buttons and attempt to
+swallow them. When she was working in her flower-garden, they would
+bother her by swallowing some of the smallest bulbs, and snatching up
+and running away with larger ones. At other times they would hide in
+dark corners and rush out at her with loud and terrifying quacks, at
+which Aunt Martha would pretend to be much frightened and scuttle
+away, pursued by the six.
+
+All three of the family were forever grumbling about the flock. To
+hear them, one would suppose that their whole lives were embittered by
+the trouble and expense of caring for a lot of useless, greedy ducks.
+Yet when Hen suggested roast duck for Thanksgiving, Deacon Jimmy and
+Aunt Maria lectured him so severely for his cruelty, that he was glad
+to explain that he was only joking. Once, when the ducks were sick, he
+dug angleworms for them all one winter afternoon, in the corner of the
+pigpen where the ground still remained unfrozen; and Deacon Jimmy
+nearly bankrupted himself buying pickled oysters, which he fed them as
+a tonic.
+
+It was not long before they outgrew their baby clothes, and wore the
+mottled brown of the mallard duck, with a dark steel-blue bar edged
+with white on either wing. The leader evidently had a strain of black
+duck in her blood. She was larger, and lacked the trim bearing of the
+aristocratic mallard. On the other hand, Blackie had all the wariness
+and sagacity of the black duck, than whom there is no wiser bird. As
+the winter came on, a coop was fixed up for them not far from the
+kitchen, where they slept on warm straw in the coldest weather, with
+their heads tucked under their soft, down-lined wings up to their
+round, bright eyes. The first November snowstorm covered their coop
+out of sight; but when Aunt Maria called, they quacked a cheery answer
+back from under the drift.
+
+Then came the drake, a gorgeous mallard with a head of emerald-green
+and a snow-white collar, and with black, white, gray, and violet
+wings, in all the pride and beauty of his prime. A few days and nights
+before he had been a part of the North. Beyond the haunts of men,
+beyond the farthest forests, where the sullen green of the pines
+gleamed against a silver sky, a great waste-land stretched clear to
+the tundras, beyond which is the ice of the Arctic. In this
+wilderness, where long leagues of rushes hissed and whispered to the
+wind, the drake had dwelt. Here and there were pools of green-gray
+water, and beyond the rushes stretched the bleached brown reeds,
+deepening in the distance to a dark tan. In the summer a heavy, sweet
+scent had hung over the marshland, like the breath of a herd of
+sleeping cattle. Here had lived uncounted multitudes of waterfowl.
+
+As the summer passed, a bitter wind howled like a wolf from the North
+with the hiss of snow in its wings. Sometimes by day, when little
+flurries of snow whirled over the waving rushes; sometimes by night,
+when a misty moon struggled through a gray wrack of cloud, long lines
+and crowded masses of water-birds sprang into the air, and started on
+the far journey southward. There were gaggles of wild geese flying in
+long wedges, with the strongest and the wisest gander leading the
+converging lines; wisps of snipe, and badlings of duck of many kinds.
+The widgeons flew with whistling wings, in long black streamers. The
+scaup came down the sky in dark masses, giving a rippling purr as they
+flew. Here and there scattered couples of blue-winged teal shot past
+groups of the slower ducks. Then down the sky, in a whizzing
+parallelogram, came a band of canvasbacks, with long red heads and
+necks and gray-white backs. Moving at the rate of a hundred and sixty
+feet a second, they passed pintails, black duck, and mergansers as if
+they had been anchored, grunting as they flew.
+
+When the rest of his folk sprang into the air, the mallard drake had
+refused to leave the cold pools and the whispering rushes. Late that
+season he had lost his mate, and, lonely without her and hoping still
+for her return, he lingered among the last to leave. As the nights
+went by, the marshes became more and more deserted. Then there dawned
+a cold, turquoise day. The winding streams showed sheets of sapphire
+and pools of molten silver. That afternoon the sun, a vast globe of
+molten red, sank through an old-rose sky, which slowly changed to a
+faint golden green. For a moment it hung on the knife-edge of the
+world, and then dipped down and was gone.
+
+Through the violet twilight five gleaming, misty-white birds of an
+unearthly beauty, glorious trumpeter swans, flew across the western
+sky in strong, swift, majestic flight. As the shadows darkened like
+spilt ink, their clanging notes came down to the lonely drake. When
+the swans start south, it is no time for lesser folk to linger. The
+night was aflame with its million candles as he sprang into the air,
+circled once and again, and followed southward the moon path which lay
+like a long streamer of gold across the waste-lands. Night and day and
+day and night and night and day again he flew, until, as he passed
+over the northwestern corner of Connecticut, that strange food sense
+which a migrating bird has, brought him down from the upper sky into
+the one stretch of marshland that showed for miles around. It chanced
+to be close to the base of the Cobble.
+
+All night long he fed full among the pools. Just as the first faint
+light showed in the eastern sky, he climbed upon the top of an old
+muskrat house that showed above the reeds. At the first step, there
+was a sharp click, the fierce grip of steel, and he was fast in one of
+Hen's traps. There the old man found him at sunrise, and brought him
+home wrapped up in his coat, quacking, flapping, and fighting every
+foot of the way. An examination showed his leg to be unbroken, and Hen
+held him while Aunt Maria with a pair of long shears clipped his
+beautiful wings. Then, all gleaming green and violet, he was set down
+among the six ducks, who had been watching him admiringly.
+
+The second he was loosed, he gave his strong wings a flap that should
+have lifted him high above the hateful earth, where tame folk set
+traps for wild folk. Instead of swooping toward the clouds, the
+clipped wings beat the air impotently, and did not even raise his
+orange, webbed feet from the ground. Again and again the drake tried
+to fly, only to realize at last that he was clipped and shamed and
+earthbound. Then for the first time he seemed to notice the six who
+stood by, watching him in silence. To them he quacked, and quacked,
+and quacked fiercely, and Aunt Maria had an uneasy feeling that she
+and her shears were the subject of his remarks. Suddenly he stopped,
+and all seven started toward their winter quarters; and lo and behold!
+at the head of the procession marched the gleaming drake, with the
+deposed Blackie trailing meekly in second place.
+
+From that day forth he was their leader; nor did he forget his wrongs.
+The sight of Aunt Maria was always a signal for a burst of impassioned
+quackings. Soon it became evident that the ducks were reluctantly
+convinced that the gentle little woman had been guilty of a great
+crime, and more and more they began to shun her. There were no more
+games and walks and caressings. Instead the six followed the drake's
+lead in avoiding as far as possible humans who trapped and clipped the
+people of the air.
+
+At first the Deacon put the whole flock in a great pen where the young
+calves were kept in spring, fearing lest the drake might wander away.
+This, of course, was no imprisonment to the ducks, who could fly over
+the highest fence. The first morning, after they had been penned, the
+ducks sprang over the fence and started for the pond, quacking to the
+drake to follow. When he quacked back that he could not, the flock
+returned and showed him again and again how easy it was to fly over
+the fence. At last he evidently made them understand that for him
+flying was impossible. Several times they started for the pond, but
+each time at a quack from the drake they came back. It was Blackie who
+finally solved the difficulty. Flying back over the fence, she found a
+place where a box stood near one of the sides of the pen. Climbing up
+on top of this, she fluttered to the top rail. The drake clambered up
+on the box, and tried to follow. As he was scrambling up the fence,
+with desperate flappings of his disabled wings, Blackie and the
+others, who had joined her on the top rail, reached down and pulled
+him upward with tremendous tugs from their flat bills, until he
+finally scrambled to the top and was safely over. For several days
+this went on, and the flock would help him out of and into the pen
+every day, as they went to and from the pond. When at last Aunt Maria
+saw this experiment in prison-breaking, she threw open the gate wide,
+and thereafter the drake had the freedom of the farm with the others.
+As the days went by, he seemed to become more reconciled to his fate
+and at times would even take food from Aunt Maria's hand; yet certain
+reserves and withdrawings on the part of the whole flock were always
+apparent, to vex her.
+
+At last and at last, just when it seemed as if winter would never go,
+spring came. There were flocks of wild geese beating, beating, beating
+up the sky, never soaring, never resting, thrusting their way north in
+a great black-and-white wedge, outflying spring, and often finding
+lakes and marshes still locked against them. Then came the strange,
+wild call from the sky of the killdeer, who wears two black rings
+around his white breast; and the air was full of robin notes and
+bluebird calls and the shrill high notes of the hylas. On the sides of
+the Cobble the bloodroot bloomed, with its snowy petals and heart of
+gold and root dripping with burning, bitter blood--frail flowers which
+the wind kisses and kills. Then the beech trees turned all
+lavender-brown and silver, and the fields of April wheat made patches
+of brilliant velvet green.
+
+At last there came a day blurred with glory, when the grass was a
+green blaze, and the woods dripped green, and the new leaves of the
+apple trees were like tiny jets of green flame among the pink and
+white blossoms. The sky was full of waterfowl going north. All that
+day the drake had been uneasy. One by one he had moulted his clipped
+wing-feathers, and the long curved quills which had been his glory had
+come back again. Late in the afternoon, as he was leading his flock
+toward the kitchen, a great hubbub of calls and cries floated down
+from the afternoon sky. The whole upper air was black with ducks.
+There were teal, wood-ducks, baldpates, black duck, pintails, little
+bluebills, whistlers, and suddenly a great mass of mallards, the green
+heads of the drakes gleaming against the sky. As they flew they
+quacked down to the little earthbound group below.
+
+Suddenly the great drake seemed to realize that his power was upon him
+once more. With a great sweep of his lustrous wings, he launched
+himself forth into the air in a long arrowy curve, and shot up through
+the sky toward the disappearing company--and not alone. Even as he
+left the ground, before Aunt Maria's astonished eyes, faithful,
+clumsy, wary Blackie sprang into the air after him, and with the
+strong awkward flight of the black duck, which ploughs its way through
+the air by main strength, she overtook her leader, and the two were
+lost in the distant sky.
+
+Aunt Maria took what comfort she could out of the five who remained,
+but only now that they had gone, did she realize how dear to her was
+Greentop, the beautiful, wild, resentful drake, and Blackie, awkward,
+wise, resourceful Blackie. The flock too was lost without them, and
+took chances and overlooked dangers which they never would have been
+allowed to do under the reign of their lost king and queen. At last
+fate overtook them one dark night when they were sleeping out. That
+vampire of the darkness, a wandering mink, came upon them. With their
+passing went something of love and hope, which left the Cobble a very
+lonely place for the three old people.
+
+As the nights grew longer, Aunt Maria would often dream that she heard
+the happy little flock singing like teakettles in their basket, or
+that she heard them quack from their coop, and would call out to
+comfort them. Yet always it was only a dream. Then the cold came, and
+one night a great storm of snow and sleet broke over the Cobble, and
+the wind howled as it did the night before the drake was found.
+Suddenly Aunt Maria started out of her warm bed, and listened. When
+she was sure she was not dreaming, she awakened the Deacon, and
+through the darkness they hurried down to the door, from the other
+side of which sounded tumultuous and familiar quackings.
+
+With trembling hands she lighted the lamp, and as they threw open the
+door, in marched a procession. It was headed by Greentop, resentful no
+more, but quacking joyously at the sight of light and shelter. Back of
+him Blackie's soft, dark head rubbed lovingly against Aunt Maria's
+trembling knees, with the little caressing, crooning noise which
+Blackie always made when she wanted to be petted. Back of her,
+quacking embarrassedly, waddled four more ducks who showed their youth
+by their size and the newness of their feathering. Greentop and
+Blackie had come back, bringing their family with them.
+
+The tumult and the shouting aroused old Hen, who hurried down in his
+night clothes. These, by the way, were the same as his day clothes
+except for the shoes; for, as Hen said, he could not be bothered with
+dressing and undressing except during the bathing season, which was
+long past.
+
+"Durned if it ain't them pesky ducks again," he said, grinning
+happily.
+
+"That's what it be," responded Deacon Jimmy, "I don't suppose now
+we'll have a moment's peace."
+
+"Yes, it's them good-for-nothin'--" began Aunt Maria; but she gulped
+and something warm and wet trickled down her wrinkled cheeks, as she
+stopped and pulled two dear-loved heads, one green and the other
+black, into her arms.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+BLACKCAT
+
+
+Above the afterglow gleamed a patch of beryl-green. Etched against the
+color was the faintest, finest, and newest of crescent moons. It
+seemed almost as if a puff of wind would blow it, like a cobweb, out
+of the sky. As the shifting tints deepened into the unvarying
+peacock-blue of a Northern night, the evening star flared like a lamp
+hung low in the west while the dark strode across the shadows of the
+forest, cobalt-blue against the drifted snow. As the winter stars
+flamed into the darkening sky, a tide of night-life flowed and
+throbbed under the silent trees. One by one the wild folk came forth,
+to live and love and die in this their day, even as we humans in ours.
+
+Long after the twilight had dimmed into the jeweled darkness,
+opalescent with the changing colors of the Northern Lights, from the
+inner depths of the woods there came a threat to the life of nearly
+everyone of the forest folk. Yet it seemed but the mournful wail of a
+little child. Only to the moose, the blackbear and the wolverine was
+it other than the very voice of Death.
+
+Fifty feet above the ground, from a blasted and hollow white pine, the
+plaintive sound again shuddered down the wind. From a hollow under an
+overhanging bough, a brownish-black animal moved slowly down the tree
+trunk, headfirst, which position marked him as a past-master among the
+tree folk. Only those climbers who are absolutely at home aloft go
+forward down a perpendicular tree trunk. As the beast came out of the
+shadow it resembled nothing so much as a big black cat, with a bushy
+tail and a round, grayish head. Because of this appearance the
+trappers had named it the blackcat. Others call it the fisher,
+although it never fishes, while to the Indians it is the _pekan_--the
+killer-in-the-dark. In spite of its rounded head and mild doggy face,
+the fisher belongs to those killers, the weasels. Next to the
+wolverine, he is the most powerful of his family, and he is far and
+away the most versatile.
+
+To-night, on reaching the ground, the pekan followed one of the many
+runways he had discovered in the ten-mile beat that formed his
+hunting-ground. Like most of the weasels, he lived alone. His brief
+and dangerous family life lasted but a few days in the fall of every
+year. When his mate tried to kill him unawares, the blackcat knew that
+his honeymoon was over, and departed again to his hollow tree, many
+miles from Mrs. Blackcat. To-night, as he moved at a leisurely pace
+across the snow, in a series of easy bounds, his lithe black body
+looped itself along like a hunting snake, while his broad forehead
+gave him an innocent, open look. If in the tree he had resembled a
+cat, on the ground he looked more like a dog.
+
+There was one animal who was not misled by the frank openness of the
+fisher's face. That one was a hunting pine marten, who had just come
+across a red squirrel's nest made of woven sticks thatched with
+leaves, and set in the fork of a moose-wood sapling some thirty feet
+from the ground. Cocking his head on one side, the marten regarded the
+swaying nest critically out of his bright black eyes. Convinced that
+it was occupied, with a dart he dashed up the slender trunk, which
+bent and shook under his rush.
+
+But Chickaree had craftily chosen a tree that would bend under the
+lightest weight, and signal the approach of any unwelcome visitor.
+Before the marten had covered half the distance, four squirrels boiled
+out of the nest and, darting to the end of the farthest twigs, leaped
+to the nearest trees and scurried off into the darkness. The marten
+had poised himself for a spring when he saw the fisher gazing up at
+him. Straightway he forgot that there were squirrels in the world.
+With a tremendous spring, he landed on the trunk of a near-by hemlock
+and slipped around it like a shadow.
+
+It was too late. With a couple of effortless bounds, the blackcat
+reached the trunk and slipped up it with the ease and speed of a
+blacksnake. The marten doubled and twisted and turned on his trail,
+and launched himself surely and swiftly from dizzy heights at arrowy
+speed. Yet, spring and dash as he would, there was always a pattering
+rush just behind him. Before the branches, which crackled and bent
+under the lithe golden-brown body, had stopped waving, they would
+crash and sag under the black weight of the fisher. With every easy
+bound the black came nearer to the gold. The pine marten is the
+swiftest tree-climber in the world, bar one. The blackcat is that one.
+As the two great weasels flashed through the trees, they seemed to be
+running tandem. Every twist and turn of the golden leader was followed
+automatically by the black wheeler, as if the two were connected by an
+invisible, but unbreakable bond.
+
+Under the strain it was the nerves of the marten which gave way first.
+Not that he stopped, and cowered, helpless and shaking, like the
+rabbit-folk, nor ran frothing and amuck as do rat-kind when too hardly
+pressed. No weasel, while he lives, ever loses his head completely.
+Only now the marten ran more and more wildly, relying on straight
+speed and overlooking many a chance for a puzzling double, which would
+have given him a breathing-space. The imperturbable blackcat noted
+this, and began to take short cuts, which might have lost him his prey
+at the beginning of the hunt.
+
+At last, the long and circling chase brought them both near an
+enormous white pine, which towered some forty feet away from the
+nearest tree. A bent spruce leaned out toward the lone pine. With a
+flying leap, the marten reached the spruce and flashed up the trunk,
+with never a look behind. His crafty pursuer saw his chance. Landing
+in a lower crotch of the spruce, with a flying take-off he launched
+himself outward and downward into mid-air, with every ounce and atom
+of spring that his steel-wire muscles held. It seemed impossible that
+anything without wings could cover the great gap between the two
+trees; but the blackcat knew to an inch what he could do, and almost
+to an inch did the distance tax his powers. In a wide parabola his
+black body whizzed through the air half a hundred feet above the
+ground, beginning as a round ball of fur, which stretched out until
+the fisher hung full length at the crest of his spring. If the tree
+had been a scant six inches farther away, the blackcat would never
+have made it. As it was, the huge clutching, horn-colored claws of his
+forepaws just caught, and held long enough to allow him to clamp down
+his hold with his hind paws.
+
+The marten, who had started fifty feet ahead of the blackcat and had
+lost his distance by having to climb up, jump, and then climb down,
+passed along the trunk of the pine on his way to the ground just as
+the blackcat landed, his lead cut down to a scant ten feet. Without a
+pause, the pekan deliberately sprang out into the air and disappeared
+in a snow bank full forty feet below. Not many animals, even with a
+snow buffer, could stand a drop of that distance, but the great black
+weasel burst out of the snow, his steel-bound frame apparently
+unjarred, and stood at the foot of the tree.
+
+As the marten reached the ground and saw what was awaiting him, his
+playful face seemed to turn into a mask of rage and despair. The round
+black eyes flamed red, the lips curved back from the sharp teeth in a
+horrible grin, and with a shrieking snarl and a lightning-like snap
+he tried for the favorite throat-hold of the weasel-folk. He was
+battling, however, with one quite as quick and immeasurably more
+powerful. With a little bob the blackcat slipped the lead of his
+adversary, and the flashing teeth of the marten closed only on the
+loose tough skin of the fisher's shoulder. Before he could strike
+again the blackcat had the smaller animal clutched in its fierce
+claws, with no play to parry the counter-thrust of the black muzzle.
+In another second, the golden throat was dabbled with blood, which the
+fisher drank in great gulps like the weasel that he was. According to
+human notions, the dreadful and uncanny part of the contest was that,
+throughout the whole fight and the blood-stained finish, the
+blackcat's face was the mild, reflective, round face of a gentle dog.
+
+His first blood-thirst slaked, the fisher slung the limp body of the
+marten over his shoulder with a single flirt of his black head, and
+winding his way up the tree trunk, cached it for a time in a
+convenient crotch, feeling sure that no prowler would meddle with a
+prey which bore upon its pelt the scent and seal of the blackcat.
+
+All through a two-day snowstorm, the fisher had kept to his tree, and
+his first kill that night only sharpened the blood-lust which swept
+raging through his tense body. Following the nearest runway, he came
+to the shore of a wide, rapid, little forest river, which at this
+point had a fall which insured current enough to keep it from
+freezing. Near its bank, the ranging blackcat came upon a fresh track
+in the soft snow. First there were five marks--one small, two large,
+and two small. The next track showed only four marks with the order
+reversed, the larger marks being in front, instead of behind the
+smaller. A little way farther on, and the smaller marks, instead of
+being side by side, showed one behind the other.
+
+The blackcat read this snow-riddle at a glance. The five marks showed
+where a northern hare, or snowshoe rabbit, had been sitting; the fifth
+mark being where its bobbed tail had touched the snow. The larger
+marks had been the marks of the fur snowshoes, which it wears in
+winter on its big hopping hind-legs, and the smaller the mark of the
+little forepaws which, when he was sitting, naturally touched the
+ground in front of the hind paws. When the hare hopped the position
+was reversed, as the big hind paws, with every hop, struck the ground
+in front of the others, the hare traveling in the direction of the
+larger marks. The last tracks showed that the hare had either scented
+or seen its pursuer; for a hare's eyes are so placed that it can see
+either forward or backward as it hops. As the little forelegs touched
+the ground, they were twisted one behind the other so as to secure the
+greatest leverage possible.
+
+The blackcat settled doggedly down to the chase. Although far slower
+in a straightaway run than either the hare or the fox, it can and will
+run down either in a long chase, although it may take a day to do it.
+To-night the chase came to a sudden and unexpected end. The hare
+described a great circle nearly half a mile in diameter, at full
+speed, and then, whiter than the snow itself, squatted down to watch
+his back trail and determine whether his pursuer was really intending
+to follow him to a finish. Before long, the squatting hare saw a black
+form on the other side of the circle, with humped back looping its way
+along. At such a sight the smaller cottontail rabbit would have run a
+short distance, and would then have crouched in the snow, squealing in
+fear of its approaching death. The hare is made of sterner stuff.
+Moreover, this one was a patriarch fully seven years old--a great age
+for any hare to have accomplished in a world full of foes.
+
+Wabasso, as Hiawatha named him, had not attained to this length of
+years without encountering blackcats. In some unknown way, probably by
+a happy accident, he had learned the one defense which a hare may
+interpose to the attack of a fisher, and live. Reaching full speed
+almost immediately, he cleared the snow in ten-foot bounds, four to
+the second, while the wide, hairy snowshoes, which nature fits to his
+white feet every winter, kept him from sinking much below the surface.
+
+The keen eyes of the blackcat caught sight of the hare's first bound
+in spite of his protective coloration, and he at once cut across the
+diameter of the circle. In spite of this short cut, the hare reached
+the bank of the open river many yards ahead. Well out in the midst of
+the rushing icy water lay a sand bar, now covered with snow. To the
+blackcat's amazement and disgust, and contrary to every tradition of
+the chase, this unconventional hare plunged with a desperate bound
+fully ten feet out into the icy water. Wabasso was no swimmer, and had
+evidently elected to travel by water in the same way which he had
+found successful by land. Kicking mightily with his hind legs he
+hopped his way through the water, raising himself bodily at every
+kick, only to sink back until but the top of his white nose showed.
+Nevertheless, in a wonderfully short time he had won his way through
+the wan water, and lay panting and safe on the sand bank. If pursued,
+he could take to the water again and hop his way to either shore,
+along which he could run and take to the water whenever it was
+necessary.
+
+To-night no such tactics were needed. The fisher, in spite of his
+name, hates water. He can swim, albeit slowly and clumsily, in the
+summer time. As for leaping into a raging torrent of ice-cold
+water--it was not to be considered. The blackcat raced up and down the
+bank furiously, and not until convinced that the rabbit was on that
+snow bank for the night, did he give up the hunt and go bounding along
+the bank of the river after other and easier prey. For the first time
+that night the mildness of his face was marred by a snarling curl of
+the lips, showing the full set of cruel fighting teeth with which
+every weasel, large or small, is equipped.
+
+As the blackcat followed the line of the river, his sharp ear caught a
+steady and monotonous sound, like someone using a peculiarly dull saw.
+Around a bend the still water was frozen. Against the side of the bank
+an empty pork-keg had drifted down from some lumberman's camp, and
+frozen into the ice. In front of the shattered keg crouched a
+large, blackish, hairy animal, gnawing as if paid by the hour. It was
+none other than the Canada porcupine--"Old Man Quillpig," as he is
+called by the lumberjacks, who hate him because he gnaws to sawdust
+every scrap of wood that has ever touched salt. The porcupine saw the
+blackcat, but never ceased gnawing. Many and many an animal has
+thought that he could kill sluggish, stupid Quillpig. The wolf, the
+lynx, the panther, and the wildcat all have tried--and died. So
+to-night the porcupine kept on with his gnawing, under the star-shine,
+convinced that no animal that lived could solve his defense.
+
+[Illustration: THE SAFE RABBIT]
+
+But the blackcat is one of two animals which have no fear of the
+quillpig. Blackbear is the other. With its swift, sinuous gait, the
+pekan came closer, whereupon Quillpig unwillingly stopped his sawing
+and thrust his head under the broken, frozen staves of the barrel. His
+belly hugged the ground, and in an instant he seemed to swell to
+double his normal size as he erected his quills and lashed this way
+and that with his spiked tail. Pure white, with dark tips, the quills
+were thickly barbed down to the extreme point, which is smooth and
+keen. The barbs are envenomed, and wherever they touch living flesh
+cause it to rankle, swell, and fester for all save the pekan, whose
+flesh is immune to the virus.
+
+To-night the blackcat wasted no time. Disregarding the bristling
+quills and the lashing tail, the crafty weasel suddenly inserted a
+quick paw beneath the gnawer, and with a tremendous jerk tipped him
+over on his bristling back. Before the quillpig could right himself,
+the fisher had torn open his unguarded belly, and proceeded to eat the
+quivering, flabby meat as if from the shell of an oyster, or to be
+more accurate, a sea urchin. Throughout these proceedings he
+disregarded the quills entirely. Many of them pierced his skin. Others
+were swallowed along with the mouthfuls of warm flesh, which he tore
+out and greedily devoured. By reason of some unknown charm, the barbed
+quills work out of a blackcat without harm, and pass through his
+intestines in clusters, like packages of needles, without any
+inconvenience, although in any other animal save the bear they would
+inevitably cause death.
+
+As the pekan ate and ate, the stars began to dim in the blue-black
+sky, and a faint flush in the east announced the end of his hunting
+day. With a farewell mouthful, he started back through the snow for
+his hollow tree, making a long detour, to bring in the cached marten.
+As he approached the tree from whose crotch the slim golden body
+dangled, his leisurely lope changed into a series of swift bounds. For
+the first time, a snarl came from behind the pekan's mask. The dead
+marten was gone from the tree. In an open space which the wind had
+swept nearly clear of snow, it lay under the huge paws of a shadowy
+gray animal, with luminous pale yellow eyes, a curious bob of a tail,
+and black tufted ears. For all the world, it looked like a gray cat,
+but such a cat as never lived in a house. Three feet long, and forty
+pounds in weight, the Canada lynx is surpassed in size only among its
+North American relatives by that huger yellow cat, the puma or
+panther.
+
+At the snarl of the fisher, the cat looked up, and at the sight of the
+gliding black figure gave a low spitting growl and contemptuously
+dropped his great head to the marten's bloody throat. For a moment the
+big black weasel and the big gray cat faced each other. At first
+sight, it did not seem possible that the smaller animal would attack
+the larger, or that, if he did, he would last long. The fisher was
+less than half the size and weight of the lynx, who also outwardly
+seemed to have more of a fighting disposition. The tufted ears alert,
+the eyes gleaming like green fire, and the bristling hair and arched
+back, contrasted formidably with the broad forehead and round, honest
+face of the fisher.
+
+So, at least, it seemed to young Jim Linklater, who, with his uncle
+Dave, the trapper, lay crouched close in a hemlock copse. Long before
+daylight, the two had traveled on silent snowshoes up the river bank,
+laying a trap-line, carrying nothing but a back-load of steel traps.
+At the rasping growl of the lynx, they peered out of their covert only
+to find themselves not thirty feet away from the little arena.
+
+"That old lucifee'll rip that poor, little, black innocent to pieces
+in jig-time," whispered young Jim.
+
+Old Dave shook his grizzled head. He pulled his nephew's ample ear
+firmly and painfully close to his mouth.
+
+"Son," he hissed, "you and that lucifee are both goin' to have the
+surprise of your lives."
+
+Unwitting of his audience, the weasel approached the cat swiftly.
+Suddenly with a hoarse screech, the lynx sprang, hoping to land with
+all his weight on the humped-up black back, and then bring into play
+his ripping curved claws, while he sank his teeth deep into his
+opponent's spine.
+
+It was at once evident that lynx tactics have not yet been adapted to
+blackcat service. Without a sound, the pekan swerved like a shadow to
+one side, and almost before the lynx had touched the ground, the
+fisher's fierce cutting teeth had severed the tendon of a hind leg,
+while its curved claws slashed deep into the soft inner flank.
+
+The great cat screeched with rage and pain and sheer astonishment. As
+he landed, the crippled leg bent under him. Even yet he had one
+advantage which no amount of courage or speed on the part of the pekan
+could have overcome. If only the lynx had gripped the dead marten, and
+sprung out into the deep snow, the fisher would have had to fight a
+losing fight. Like the hare, the lynx is shod with snowshoes in the
+winter, on which he can pad along on snow in which a fisher would sink
+deep at every step. In spite of his formidable appearance, however,
+the lynx has a plentiful lack of brains. As his leg doubled under his
+weight, this one in a panic threw himself on his back, the traditional
+cat attitude of defense, ready to bring into action all four of his
+sets of ripping claws, with his teeth in reserve.
+
+Against another of the cat tribe such a defense would have been good.
+Against the pekan it was fatal. No battler in the world is a better
+in-fighter than the blackcat, and any antagonist near his size, who
+invites a clinch, rarely comes out of it alive. The pekan first
+circled the spinning, yowling, slashing lynx more and more rapidly,
+until there came a time when the side of the gray throat lay before
+him for a second unguarded. It was enough. With a pounce like the
+stroke of a coiled rattler, the pekan sprang, and a double set of the
+most effective fighting teeth known among mammals met deep in the
+lynx's throat. With all of his sharp eviscerating claws, the great cat
+raked his opponent. But the blackcat, protected by his thick pelt and
+tough muscles, was content to exchange any number of surface slashes
+for the throat-hold. Deeper and deeper the crooked teeth dug; and then
+with a burst of bright blood, they pierced the jugular vein itself.
+The struggles of the lynx became weaker and weaker, until, with a last
+convulsive shudder, the gray body stretched out stark in the snow. The
+weasel lay panting and lapping at the hot, welling blood, while his
+own ran down his black fur in unconsidered streams.
+
+It was young Jim who first broke the silence.
+
+"Those pelt'll bring all of twenty-five dollars," he remarked,
+stepping forward.
+
+"Help yourself," suggested old Dave, not stirring, however, from where
+he stood.
+
+At the voices the black weasel sprang up like a flash. With one paw on
+the dead lynx and another on the marten, he faced the two men in
+absolute silence. The eyes under the mild forehead flamed red and
+horrible and the dripping body quivered for another throat-hold.
+
+"Seems like Mr. Blackcat wants 'em both," murmured the old man,
+discreetly withdrawing from the farther side of the copse. Jim gazed
+into the flaming eyes a moment longer and then followed his uncle.
+
+"He don't look so blame innocent after all," he observed.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+LITTLE DEATH
+
+
+For three long months the blue-white snow had lain over the gold-white
+sand among the dark-green pitch pines standing like trees from a
+Noah's Ark. To-day the woods were a vast sea of green, lapping at the
+white sand-land that had been thrust up, a wedge from the South, into
+the very heart of the North. A crooked stream had cut its course deep
+through the forest. On its high bank the ghost-like glory of a
+mountain laurel overhung the dark water. Close to the water's edge
+were clumps of the hollow, crimson-streaked leaves of the pitcher
+plant, lined with thousands of tiny teeth all pointing downward, traps
+for unwary insects. All the winter these pitchers had been filled with
+clear cone-shaped lumps of ice; but to-day, above the fatal leaves, on
+long stems, swung great blossoms, wine-red, crimson, aquamarine,
+pearl-white, and pale gold.
+
+From overhead came the trilling song of the pine warbler, like a
+chipping sparrow lost in the woods; and here and there could be caught
+glimpses of his pale yellow breast and white wing-bars. Below, among
+the tangled scrub oaks, flitted the brilliant yellow-and-black prairie
+warbler, while everywhere the chewinks called "Drink your tea," and
+the Maryland yellow-throat sang "Witchery, witchery, witchery," while
+jays squalled in the distance, and crimson-crested cardinals whistled
+from the thickets. In the sky, like grim black aeroplanes, wheeled the
+turkey buzzards, sailing in circles without ever a wing stroke. Gray
+pine-swifts, with brilliant blue patches on their sides, scurried up
+and down tree trunks and along fallen logs, and brown cottontail
+rabbits hopped across the paths, showing their white powder puffs at
+each jump. A huge, umber-brown-and-white pine snake, with a strange
+pointed head, crawled slowly through the brush while rows of painted
+turtles dotted the snags which thrust out here and there above the
+stream.
+
+Earth, air, and water, all swarmed with life at this dawn of the year.
+The underground folk were awake, too. Down below the surface, the
+industrious mole, with his plush fur and spade-like hands, dug
+incessantly his hunting-tunnels for earthworms. Above him, in wet
+places, his cousin, the star-nosed mole, whose nose has twenty-two
+little fingers, drove passages through the lowest part of the moss
+beds and the soft upper mould.
+
+Still nearer the surface, just under the leaf-carpet, sometimes
+digging his own way, sometimes using the tunnels of the meadow-mice
+and deer-mice, and occasionally flashing out into the open air, lived
+the smallest mammal. Of all the tribes of earth, of all the bat-folk
+who fly the air, or the water-people who swim the seas and rivers and
+lakes, no mammal is so little. From the tip of his wee pointed muzzle
+to the base of his tiny tail, he was just about the length of a man's
+little finger, or about two and a half inches. Nature had handicapped
+her smallest child heavily. Blind, earless, and tiny, yet every
+twenty-four hours he must kill and eat his own weight in flesh and
+blood; for so fiercely swift are the functions of his strange, wee
+body, that, lacking food for even six hours, the blind killer starves
+and dies.
+
+To-day, near the edge of the stream, in the soft, white sand, his
+trail showed. It looked like a string of tiny exclamation points.
+Suddenly, from a patch of dry leaves there sounded a long rustling,
+like the crawling of a snake. Nothing could be seen, yet the leaves
+heaved and moved here and there, as something pushed its way under the
+surface of the leaf-carpet. Then, the masked shrew--for so we humans
+have named this escape from Lilliput--flashed out into the open. His
+glossy, silky fur was brown above and whitish-gray underneath; and
+between the hidden, unseeing eyes and the holes which took the place
+of ears was a dark smoky-gray mark, like a mask. His head angled into
+a long whiskered snout, so pointed that from above the shrew looked
+like a big pen. This flexible muzzle he twisted here and there,
+sniffing uncertainly, for the shrew has but little sense of smell. In
+fact, he seems to have traded the greater part of his other senses for
+a double portion of two--touch and hearing. Not even the long-eared
+rabbit can detect the faintest shade of a sound quicker than the
+shrew, and only the bat equals his sense of touch. Like that flyer,
+the shrew can detect an obstacle in time to avoid it, even when
+running at full speed, by becoming conscious of some subtle change in
+the air-pressure.
+
+Among the great throng of little wild folk playing at hide-and-seek
+with death among the fallen logs, and in the labyrinth of passageways
+in the beds of sand and moss and fern, no one was swifter than this
+one, the smallest of them all. A flash here, a glimpse farther on, and
+he was gone, too fast to be followed by human eyes. In one of his rare
+pauses he might have been mistaken for a tiny mouse by reason of his
+general coloration; yet the shrew is as different from the mouse as a
+lynx from a wolf. No mouse has long, crooked, crocodile jaws, filled
+with perhaps the fiercest fighting teeth of any mammal; nor does any
+mouse have the tremendous jaw muscles which stood out under the soft
+fur of this beastling.
+
+To-day, as the shrew sniffed here and there, trying to locate trails
+which a weasel or a dog could have followed instantly, his quick ear
+caught some tiny sound from the near-by burrow of a meadow-mouse. With
+a curious pattering, burrowing run, unlike the leaps and bounds of the
+mice-people, he started unerringly toward a narrow opening almost
+hidden under an overhanging patch of yellow-green sphagnum moss.
+Disappearing down the tunnel, he dashed along furiously, while his
+long widespread whiskers gave him instant notice of the turns and
+twists of the tunnel, which he threaded at full speed.
+
+[Illustration: THE KILLERS]
+
+Ahead of him fled a young meadow-mouse, on his way to join other
+members of the family who were having a light lunch on what was left
+in the storehouse of their winter's supplies. Hearing the rapid
+pattering and sniffing behind him, the mouse made the fatal mistake of
+keeping on to the storeroom--a large chamber underground, where three
+grown mice were feasting. Confident in the fighting ability of his
+family, he had yet to learn that odds are nothing to a shrew. In spite
+of his speed, the mouse dashed into the round room only a little ahead
+of his pursuer. The storehouse was large enough to make a good
+battleground, but, unfortunately for the mice, contained only one
+entrance.
+
+Then followed a battle great and grim. The mice were on their own
+ground, four against one and that one only a tiny blind beastling less
+than half the size and weight of any one of them. It did not seem as
+if the shrew had a chance against the burly, round-headed
+meadow-voles, who are the best fighters of all the mice-folk. Yet the
+issue was never in doubt. The shrew attacked with incredible
+swiftness. No one of his four foes could make a motion that his quick
+ear and uncanny sense of touch did not at once detect. Moreover,
+throughout the whole fight, he never for an instant left the
+exit-tunnel unguarded. Time and again, from out of the whirling mass
+of entangled bodies, a meadow-mouse would spring to the door to
+escape. Always it ran against the fell jaws of the little blind death,
+and bounded back from the latter's rigid steel-like body. Again and
+again the mice leaped high, and like little boxers thrust the shrew
+away from them by quick motions of their forepaws. At times they would
+jump clear over him, slashing and snapping as they went, with their
+two pairs of long curved sharp teeth. The shrew's snout, however, was
+of tough leathery cartilage. Its tiny hidden and unseeing eyes needed
+no protection, while its thick fur and tough skin could be pierced
+only by a long grip, which he prevented by his tactics. Never using
+his forefeet like the mice, he stood with feet outspread and firmly
+braced, head and snout pointing up, and constantly darted his jaws
+forward and downward with fierce tearing bites. With each one he
+brought no less than six pointed fighting teeth into play. These,
+driven by the great muscles of the shrew's neck and jaws, made ghastly
+ripping cuts through the thin skins of the mice. The latter kept up a
+continual squeaking as they moved, but the little killer fought in
+absolute silence. His wee body seemed to have an inexhaustible store
+of fierce strength and endurance, and throughout the battle it was
+always the shrew who attacked and the mice who retreated. Like the
+raccoon, the shrew is perfectly balanced on all four feet, and can
+move forward, backward, or sidewise with equal readiness. With swift
+little springs this one constantly tried for a throat-hold; yet amid
+the tangle and confusion of the struggle, never once did he fail to
+guard the one way out.
+
+Round and round the storehouse the battle surged for a long half hour,
+with the shrew always between the doorway and his struggling, leaping
+opponents. The grain-fed mice lacked the blood-bought endurance of
+their opponent. The young mouse who had led the shrew to the
+storehouse was the first to go. In the very middle of a leap, he
+staggered and fell at the feet of his enemy. Instantly the long curved
+jaws closed on his head, and the fierce teeth of the shrew crunched
+into his brain.
+
+It was the beginning of the end. One by one the others fell before the
+automatic rushes and slashes of the little fighting-machine, until
+only one was left, a scarred, skilled veteran, who had held his own in
+many a fight. As he felt his strength ebbing, with a last desperate
+effort the mouse dodged one of the shrew's rushes, and managed to sink
+his two pairs of curved teeth into the tough muscles of the other's
+neck. Then a horrifying thing happened. Without even trying to break
+the mouse's grip, the shrew bent nearly double, and buried his pointed
+muzzle deep into the soft flesh below the other's foreleg. Driven by
+the cruel hunger which ruled his life, he ate like fire through skin
+and flesh and bone. The mouse fought, the shrew ate, and the outcome
+was certain, as it must be when a fighter who depends on four teeth
+dares the clinch with one who uses twelve. Even as the mouse unlocked
+his jaws for a better hold he tottered and fell dead under the feet of
+the other.
+
+For long days and nights the shrew stayed in the storeroom, until all
+that remained of the meadow-mice were four pelts neatly folded and
+four skeletons picked bare of even a shred of flesh. Moreover, the
+store of seeds left by the mice was gone, too.
+
+Finally, one morning, as the sun came up over the pines, the little
+masked death flashed out of the burrow with the same pattering rush
+with which he had entered, and hurried toward a near-by brook, to
+quench an overpowering thirst. As he approached the bank, he passed
+one of his larger brethren, the blarina, or mole shrew, whose track in
+the sand was like an uncovered tunnel filled with zigzag paw-prints.
+Although both were blind, each felt the other's presence, and it was
+fortunate for the smaller of the two that the blarina had also just
+fed, since shrews allow no ties of blood to interfere with their
+eminently practical appetites.
+
+Just before the little blind runner reached the bank, he encountered
+another wanderer, whom few of the smaller animals meet and live. It
+was that demon of the woods, the short-tailed weasel, going to and fro
+in the earth, seeking whom he might devour. Behind him, as always, was
+a trail of dead and dying animals. Into every hole large enough to
+admit his slim body, he wormed his way like a hunting snake, and
+passed, swift and silent as death itself, through brush-piles, hollow
+logs, and up and down trees, to peer into the round window of a
+woodpecker's home or a squirrel's nest. Meadow-mice, deer-mice,
+chipmunks, rats, rabbits, and even squirrels in their trees the slayer
+ran down to their death; for, unlike the shrews, a weasel kills from
+blood-lust and not from hunger.
+
+Like some great inch-worm, the weasel looped its way along, until its
+path crossed that of the shrew pattering toward the brook. Even in the
+face of this incarnate terror of the wild folk the little shrew
+showed all the stubborn courage of his race and, refusing to turn
+aside, passed within an inch of the deadly jaws of the red killer.
+Nothing in nature, save the stab of one of the coiled pit-vipers, is
+swifter than the pounce of the weasel. In his grip the shrew, despite
+all of his fierce courage, would have had no more chance than a man
+ground by the frightful teeth of a killer whale. Against the larger
+mammals, however, this fierce fragment of flesh and blood has one last
+defense, which saved him that day.
+
+As the weasel caught a whiff of the pungent, evil odor of the shrew's
+fur, he drew aside, his lips curled back over his sharp teeth in a
+grimace of disgust, and the masked beastling passed unscathed. At a
+little cove by the edge of a stump, the shrew drank deep. The pointed
+snout had just come to the surface, when his quick hearing caught from
+overhead a tiny flutter of sound. Long ages of sudden death from the
+air for the shrew-folk made the next movement of this one automatic.
+As if this sound-wave from overhead had touched some reflex, he dived
+into the water at the first vibration, like a frog, and swam deep down
+under the overhanging bank. A fraction of a second later a pair of
+sharp, cramped talons sank deep into the bank where he had stood,
+printing in the sand the "K" signature of the hawk-folk, and a
+buff-waistcoated sparrow hawk swooped into the air again, with a
+shrill disappointed, "killi, killi, killi!"
+
+As the little fugitive swam along the bank something long and sinuous
+passed him like a flash in the golden water. For a land animal a shrew
+is no mean swimmer; but the banded watersnake outswims the fish on
+which it feeds. This one went past the speeding mammal so fast, that
+it showed only a blur of dingy brown markings on its back and a gleam
+of marbled red blotches on its belly, as it disappeared in a hole
+which sloped under the bank. Although not venomous, the banded
+watersnake has within its flat triangular head a mouthful of sharp
+teeth which it is always willing to use, and is an exceptionally
+active, powerful serpent. Even one of the larger mammals might well
+have hesitated before attacking one in its own den.
+
+Not so the shrew. By the swirl and suction of the water, he knew that
+something large and living had gone by. That was enough. Food meant
+everything, size and odds nothing, in his life. The snake had scarcely
+time to turn around in its dark burrow, before its cold unwinking eyes
+saw a dark little figure come out of the water and rush up the long
+slope that led to the hollow under the bank. Although less than two
+feet long, the watersnake was more than ten times the size of the
+shrew, and it seemed as unequal a combat as would be one between a man
+and any of the vast monsters spawned of the primeval ooze. The serpent
+threw itself into the figure-of-eight coil from which it fights, and
+to the advantages of size, weight, and strength added that of
+position, since the shrew had to fight uphill. Yet, like the
+meadow-voles, the snake never had a chance. As the wide-open jaws
+touched the whiskered muzzle, the shrew swerved, and escaped the
+snapping teeth by the width of a hair, while the crooked crocodile
+jaws clinched in the large muscles at the angle of the snake's jaw.
+The barred serpent hissed fiercely, throwing off the sickening
+effluvium like decayed fruit, which is one of the defenses of a
+fighting watersnake, and threw its thick body into swift changing
+loops and coils, hurling the shrew back and forth. The little animal
+held on with its death grip, and the crooked jaws burrowed deeper and
+deeper, bringing into play the long rows of sharp cutting teeth.
+
+A watersnake is not a constrictor, and the sandy sides of the den were
+too soft and narrow to enable it to dislodge the shrew's grip by
+battering the animal against the walls of the burrow; but again and
+again it tried to throw its coils over its opponent's rigid body, so
+as to afford leverage enough to tear the punishing jaws loose. Each
+time, by a swift movement, the shrew would escape the changing loops,
+and never for an instant ceased to drive its teeth deeper, until they
+cut clear through the snake's temporal muscles, and its lower jaw
+dangled limp and useless. Freed then from any fear of attack, the
+shrew sank his long curved teeth deliberately into the reptile's
+brain, and although the snake still struggled, the battle was over.
+
+Once more the ever-hungry little mammal claimed the spoils of victory.
+Only when there was nothing left of the snake but a well-picked
+skeleton, did he leave the den. Then again he drank deeply, plunged up
+through the water, and landed after dark on the same little beach
+from which he had dived days before. As he scurried across an open
+space in the woods, a dark shadow drifted down from the tree tops and
+two great wings hovered over him, so muffled by soft feathers that not
+even the shrew heard a single beat or flutter from them. A second
+longer above ground, and all his fierceness and courage and swiftness
+would have availed him nothing against the winged death that
+overshadowed him.
+
+At that instant, far and faint came a little twittering note from
+under the leaf carpet. It was only the shadow of a sound, but in a
+wink the shrew was gone, following the love call of his mate
+underground. Overhead sounded the deep and dreadful voice of a barred
+owl, as it floated back to its tree top, disappointed for once of its
+prey.
+
+At midnight Ben Gunnison, the peddler, reached the little glade where
+the shrew had disappeared. Trying for a short cut through the Barrens,
+Ben had followed the old cattle-trail from Perth Ambov, unused for
+more than a century. At first it stretched straight and plain through
+the pitch-pine woods. Beyond Double Trouble and Mount Misery, it began
+to wind, and by the time he had reached Four Mile he was lost. For
+long he staggered under his heavy pack through thickets of scrub oak,
+white-cedar swamps, and tangles of greenthorn. By the time he had
+reached the little opening, he was exhausted, and putting his pack
+under his head for a pillow, lay down under a great sweet-gum tree to
+sleep out the night.
+
+Just before dawn he was awakened by high-pitched, trilling, elfin
+music. Opening his eyes, he saw in the light of the setting moon two
+tiny things chasing each other round and round his pack, singing as
+they ran. Even as he listened, he heard from overhead an ominous
+cracking noise, and leaped to his feet just as a decayed stub whizzed
+down, landing with a crash on his pack. As long as he lives, Ben will
+believe that two fairies saved his life.
+
+"Don't tell me," he would say. "I _saw_ 'em. Little weeny fellows half
+the size of a mouse callin' me to get up. An' I got up. That's the
+reason I'm here to-day, bless 'em."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+BLACKCROSS
+
+
+After running twenty miles, old Raven Road stopped to rest under a
+vast black-oak tree. Beyond its sentinel bulk was Wild-Folk Land.
+Where hidden springs had kept the wet grass green all winter, the
+first flower of the year had forced its way through the cold ground.
+Smooth as ivory, all crimson-lake and gold-green on the outside, the
+curved hollow showed a rich crimson within. Cursed with an ill name
+and an evil savor, yet the skunk cabbage leads the year's procession
+of flowers.
+
+Among the dry leaves of the thickets showed the porcelain petals of a
+colony of hepatica, snow-white, pale pink, violet, deep purple, pure
+blue, lilac, and lavender. Beyond them was a patch of spice-bush,
+whose black fragrant branches snapped brittle as glass, and whose
+golden blossoms appear before the leaves. At the foot of a bank,
+hidden by the scented boughs, bubbled a deep unfailing spring, and
+from it a little trickle of water wound through the thicket into the
+swale beyond. Growing wider and deeper with every rod, it ran through
+a little valley hidden between two round, green hills, which widened
+into a stretch of marshland filled with reeds and thickets of wild
+rose, elderberry, and buttonbush, laced and interlaced with the
+choking orange strands of that parasite, the dodder.
+
+Beside the stream, and at times crossing it, a path, trodden deep,
+twisted in and out of the marsh. It was too narrow to have been made
+by human feet, nor could any man have found and followed so unerringly
+the little ridges of dry going hidden away between the bogs and under
+the lush growth. Packed hard by long years of use, nowhere in the
+path's whole length did any paw-print show. Only in snow-time was the
+white page printed deep with tracks like those of a dog, but cleaner
+cut and running in a straight line instead of spraddling to one side.
+Nor was there ever in these trails the little furrow which a dragging
+paw makes. Only a fox could have made that long straight line, where
+every paw-print was stamped in the soft snow as if with a die. From
+Cold Spring to Darby Creek the long narrow valley belonged to the
+fox-folk.
+
+Close beside the spring itself, at the very edge of its fringe of
+bushes, was a deep burrow that ran out into the open field, and yet
+was so cunningly hidden by a rock and masked by bushes and long grass
+that few humans ever suspected that a sly, old, gray fox had lived
+there for a fox-lifetime, or nearly ten years. His range extended to
+the swamp on the south, and up through the tangle of little wooded
+hills and valleys to the north known throughout the countryside as the
+Ridge.
+
+The other end of Fox Valley, and all the Darby Creek country from
+Fern Valley to Blacksnake Swamp was owned by a red-fox family. They
+were larger than the gray foxes and the blood of long-ago English
+foxes, brought over by fox-hunting colonial governors, ran in their
+veins. To the strength and size of the American fox they added the
+craft of a thousand generations of hunted foxes on English soil.
+
+Both fox families kept, for the most part, strictly to their own
+range, for poaching in a fox country always means trouble. Both ranges
+were well stocked with rabbits, three varieties of mice, birds, frogs,
+and the other small deer on which foxes live. Occasionally the hunters
+of both families would make a foray on some far-away farm and bring
+back a plump hen, a pigeon, or sometimes a tame duck. Never did the
+hunter rob a near-by farm, or go twice in succession to the same
+place; for it is a foolish fox who will make enemies for himself on
+his own home ranges--and foolish foxes are about as common as white
+crows.
+
+The red-fox range included a number of well-hidden homes. Rarely did
+they occupy the same house two seasons in succession, for experience
+has taught foxes that long leases are neither sanitary nor safe. This
+year they were living on the slope of a dry hillside in the very heart
+of a beech wood. Long years before they had fashioned their very first
+home, and during every succeeding year of occupancy had added
+improvements and repairs, until it was as complete a residence as any
+fox family could wish. The first burrow, which was some nine inches in
+diameter, ran straight into the hillside for about three feet; then
+it angled sharply along the side of a hidden rock, and ran back some
+twenty feet more. From off the main shaft branched different
+galleries. One led to a storehouse, and another to a chamber where the
+garbage of the den was buried; for there are no better housekeepers
+among the wild folk than the foxes. Last and best hidden of all was
+the sleeping-room, fully twelve inches across, and carefully lined
+with soft, dry grass.
+
+The perpendicular air shaft ran from the deepest part of the tunnel to
+the centre of a dense thicket on the hillside. In an irregular curve
+of some twenty feet, two more entrances were dug. Both of these joined
+the main shaft after describing an angle. Last of all was the
+emergency exit, the final touch which makes a fox home complete. It is
+always concealed carefully, and is never used except in times of great
+danger. This one was dug down through a decayed chestnut stump some
+two feet high, hidden in a fringe of bushes some distance up the
+hillside, and wound itself among the roots, and connected with the
+sleeping-chamber. Back of the main entrance lay a chestnut log fully
+three feet through, and screened from the hilltop by a thicket
+interlaced with greenbrier. This was the watchtower and sun-parlor of
+the fox family. From it they could survey the whole valley, while one
+bound would bring them to any one of the regular entrances.
+
+On a day in early April, full of sunshine and showers blowing across a
+soft spring sky, the old dog fox approached the den, carrying a
+cottontail rabbit slung over one shoulder. As he came to the main
+entrance, he suddenly stopped and, with one foot raised, stood
+motionless, sniffing a faint scent from the depths of the burrow.
+Without entering, he laid the rabbit down at the lip of the opening
+and withdrew; for no dog fox may enter his burrow after the cubs
+arrive. There were three of them--blind, lead-colored little kittens,
+who nuzzled and whimpered against Mother Fox's warm body and fed
+frantically every hour or so during the first days of their new life.
+For the next three weeks Father Fox hunted for five. Squirrels, red
+and gray, chipmunks, birds, rabbits, and scores and scores of mice,
+found their way into the den.
+
+The ninth day of the cubs' life on earth marked an event more
+important to Mother Fox than the Declaration of Independence, or the
+promulgation of the Suffrage Amendment. On that date, all three of her
+cubs opened their eyes! Twelve nights later, when the May moonlight
+made a new heaven and a new earth, they took their first journey. It
+was only twenty feet, but it covered the distance from one world to
+another. For a moment three sharp little noses peered out wonderingly
+at the new world. It was roofed with a shimmering sky instead of damp
+earth, and was big and boundless and very, very beautiful. Altogether
+the newcomers approved of it highly, although there did seem to be a
+great waste of air, and it was not so warm and cozy as the world
+underground.
+
+[Illustration: THE FOX FAMILY]
+
+Then the trio of little heads disappeared, and Mother Fox came out and
+winnowed the air through the marvelous mesh of her nostrils. Convinced
+that all was safe, she called her cubs out with one of those wild-folk
+signals pitched below the range of human ears. A moment later, the
+cubs were out and about in the dangerous, delightful world of
+out-of-doors. With their long, sprawly legs and heads too big for
+their bodies, they had something of the lumbering, appealing looks
+that puppies have. Their broad foreheads and pricked-up ears seemed
+enormous compared with their little faces. Each one in turn put his
+head to one side and looked engagingly at the new world. With their
+soft woolly backs and round little stomachs, they seemed made to be
+patted and cuddled. Yet, playful and confiding as they appeared, a
+profound wisdom and craft looked out from their young eyes, which is
+never seen in those of any other animal.
+
+Mother Fox watched them with much pride. Forgotten were the nine cubs
+of the year before, and the quartettes and sextettes of many a
+yesteryear. Never before, in her opinion, had there ever been three
+cubs so wise and beautiful and remarkable as these. Suddenly she
+raised her voice in the squalling screech of a vixen. Again and again
+the fierce uncanny sound shuddered away over the hills, and a pair of
+newly arrived summer boarders, who were strolling along Raven Road in
+the moonlight, returned with exceeding haste to old Mose Butler's
+farmhouse, and reported to their grinning host that they had heard the
+scream of a panther.
+
+From far down Darby Creek came the answering bark of the old fox. Only
+the sudden explosive quality of the sound made it resemble in any way
+the bark of a dog. A curious screeching quality of tone ran through
+it, and it sounded as if made by some animal who was trying to bark
+but had never really learned how. Then, with the disconcerting
+suddenness of a fox, Father Fox stood before his new family for the
+first time. From his narrow jaws swung a fringe of plump mice, with
+their tails ingeniously crossed so that they could all be carried by
+one grip of the narrow jaws. Dropping them, the old fox stared
+solemnly at his family grouped in the moonlight, and then growled deep
+and approvingly in his throat. Two of the cubs wore the usual clouded
+pale yellow of a young red fox. The third, however, showed, faintly
+outlined, a velvety black face, ears, muzzle, and legs, with a silky
+black streak down his back, crossed at the shoulders by a similar
+stripe shading into reddish and silver-gray, while his little black
+tail had the silver tip which is the hall-mark of the rare cross-fox,
+which is sometimes born into a red-fox family.
+
+From that night the training of the little fox family began. Father
+Fox no longer brought his kill directly to the den. Instead, he hid it
+not too carefully some fifty yards away, and the cubs learned to know
+the scent of food--flesh or fowl--and to dig it out from under piles
+of leaves or brush, or even from under an inch or so of freshly dug
+earth. Then, with tiny growls, they would crouch and steal forward and
+pounce upon the defenseless kill, with tremendous exhibitions of
+craft and ferocity. They went out on little hunting-trips by night,
+with Mother Fox, to lonely hillside pastures, where she taught them to
+hunt field-mice in the withered grass. In the starlight, they would
+steal up to some promising clump, and rising on their hind legs peer
+far forward, with ears pricked up to catch the faintest squeak and
+eyes alert to note the tiniest movement in the grass. They learned to
+spring and pounce like lightning, with outspread paws, just ahead of
+where the grass stirred ever so slightly. If successful, they would
+kill with one nip a plump, round-headed, short-tailed meadow-mouse.
+Every night they went farther and farther, until at last with Mother
+Fox they covered the whole range, at the brisk walk which is the usual
+hunting-gait of a fox, with frequent pauses and sniffings and
+listenings.
+
+It was Father Fox who first took them into the sunlight, which was as
+strange and unnatural to fox children as midnight out-of-doors would
+be to a human child. He it was who taught them, when in danger, to
+stand still and keep on standing still--one of the most difficult
+courses in the wild-folk curriculum. Sometimes they met man, whose
+approach through the woods or across the fields sounded as loud to the
+fox children as the rumble of an auto-truck would sound to the human
+child. Crouched in the bleached tawny grass, absolutely immovable, the
+foxes looked so much like tussocks that it would have taken a trained
+eye indeed to have discovered them.
+
+Just as the cubs had grown old and wise enough to be left in and
+about the burrows alone, the Sword fell. That night both of the old
+foxes were abroad on a hunt too long for the untrained muscles of the
+cubs. Awaiting their return, the little foxes were playing and
+frolicking silently around the den. They had learned that the scent of
+man or dog means death to foxes, and to seek safety in their burrow at
+any strange sound. No one of them knew that a shadow in the air, which
+drifted silently nearer to the den, might conceal any danger. Suddenly
+the shadow fell, and seemed to blot out the little straw-colored cub
+farthest from the burrow. He had but time for a terrified whicker,
+when a double set of steel-like talons clamped through his soft fur
+clear to his heart, and in a second the little body shot up through
+the air and disappeared in the darkness. A few moments later, from a
+far-away clump of trees, sounded the deep sinister "Hoo, hoo, hoo,
+hoo, hoo" of the great horned owl.
+
+Once having found the fox family, Death followed fast on its trail.
+One morning the largest cub awoke, and decided to take a stroll by
+himself in the sunlight, without waiting for Father Fox to come, and
+without waking the rest of the family, who slept curled up together in
+the sleeping-room of the den. Stealing out of the main burrow, the
+little cub sniffed the air wisely, and examined the landscape from
+under wrinkled brows with an air of profound consideration. At first
+he followed a winding path which ran through a bit of woodland where
+Mother Fox had taken him once before by night. Finding no trace of
+game there, he left the path and climbed up a rocky hillside half
+covered with brush and trees. Just as he was turning a corner of a
+little rocky ledge which jutted out in front of him, he heard a low
+thick hiss. Directly in front of him, in an irregular loop, lay a
+hazel-brown snake, dappled with blunt Y's of a rich chestnut color,
+its head and neck being the color of rusty copper.
+
+[Illustration: DEATH IN THE DARK]
+
+For a second the young fox looked into the lidless, deadly eyes of the
+copperhead, with their strange oval pupils, the hall-mark of the fatal
+pit-vipers. All in one flash, the grim jaws of the snake gaped open,
+the two movable fangs of the upper jaw unfolded and thrust straight
+out like tiny spearheads, and the fatal crooked needles stabbed deep
+in the cub's soft side. Growling fiercely in his little throat, he
+clenched his sharp teeth through the snake's spine; but even as he
+closed his jaws, the fatal virus touched the tide of his life and he
+fell forward.
+
+The wild folk have no tears, nor may they show their sorrow by the
+sobs and wailing of humankind, yet there was something in the dumb
+despair of the two foxes who had followed the trail of their lost cub,
+as they hung over the soft little body, that showed that the love of
+our lesser brethren for their little ones is akin to the love of
+humankind. Thereafter all the watchfulness and the love and the hope
+of the two were concentrated on the little fox with the black cross on
+his back. Night and day Mother Fox guarded him. Day and night Father
+Fox taught and trained him, until he had acquired much of the lore of
+fox-kind. He learned to catch birds and mice and frogs and squirrels,
+and even the keen-eared cottontail rabbit, whose eyes can see forward
+and backward equally well. He learned, too, the lessons of prudence
+and foresight which keep foxes alive when ice and snow have locked
+many of their larders. Once, when he was crossing a pasture with
+Father Fox, the latter stopped and stood like a pointing dog, one
+velvety black bent forefoot in the air, while with outstretched muzzle
+he sniffed the faintest of warm scents, which seemed to float from a
+clump of tangled dry grass. Stealing forward like a shadow, the old
+fox sprang at the tussock. Before he landed, a plump quail buzzed out
+of the cover like a bullet, to be caught by the fox in mid-air.
+Underneath a fringe of dry grass was a round nest of pure white,
+sharp-pointed eggs--so many of them that they were heaped up in
+layers.
+
+After eating the quail, the old fox carefully carried off the eggs and
+hid them under layers of damp moss, where they would keep indefinitely
+and be a resource in the famine days that were yet to come.
+
+Another day the cub learned the advantage of teamwork. On that day the
+two old foxes were hunting together, and, as usual, Blackcross tagged
+along. Near the middle of a great field, a flock of killdeer were
+feeding--those loud-voiced plover, which wear two rings around their
+white necks. For a moment the two foxes stood motionless, staring at
+the distant birds. Then, without a sound, Mother Fox turned back. For
+a moment Blackcross could watch her as she made a wide detour around
+the field, and then she disappeared from sight. Father Fox lay still
+for several minutes, with his wise head resting on his forepaws. Then,
+while Blackcross stayed behind, the old fox started deliberately
+toward the flock of feeding birds. At times he would stop, and bound
+high in the air, and scurry up and down, waving his flaunting brush
+and cutting curious capers, moving gradually nearer and nearer to the
+flock.
+
+The killdeer, which are wise birds in spite of their loud voices,
+moved farther and farther away toward the end of the pasture, ready to
+spring into the air and flash away on their long narrow wings if the
+fox came too near, but evidently much interested in his antics as they
+fed. Gradually the curveting fox edged the flock clear across the
+field, until they were close to a thicket that lay between the field
+and a patch of woods beyond. Then he redoubled his efforts, prancing
+and bounding and rolling over and over, while his fluffy tail showed
+like a plume above the long grass, and the birds stopped feeding and
+watched him with evident curiosity.
+
+Suddenly, when the attention of the whole flock was fixed on the
+performing fox, there was a rustle in the thicket, and out flashed a
+tawny shape. Before the flock could spring into the air, Mother Fox
+had caught one bird in her teeth and beaten down another with her
+paws.
+
+Another morning Blackcross learned what happens to foxes who poach on
+their neighbor's preserves. In the early dawn-light, he was loping
+along the upper end of the valley with Father Fox. Suddenly the fur
+bristled all along the latter's back, and he gave a little churring
+growl. Right ahead of him, trotting along a path made by a generation
+of red-fox pads, came the old gray fox who lived by Cold Spring, a
+dead cottontail rabbit swung over one shoulder. The poacher was caught
+with the game. With another growl, the old red fox sprang at the
+trespasser. The gray fox was a mile from his burrow, and knowing that
+the red fox could outpace him, decided to fight for his booty. With a
+quick flirt of his head, he tossed the rabbit into a near-by bush, and
+with bristling back awaited the attack.
+
+Walking stiff-legged like two dogs, and growling deep in their
+throats, the two came together, until they stood sidewise to each
+other, sparring for an opening. Finally, the old red fox snapped at
+the other's foreleg, with a movement more like the slash of a wolf
+than the bite of a dog. The gray fox dropped his head, and the bared
+teeth of the two snicked together. Again the red fox made the same
+lead, and met with the same block. The third time he feinted, and as
+the other dropped his head, whirled and brought his brush, with a
+blinding, stinging swish, across the eyes of the gray fox. Before the
+latter could recover, the narrow jaws of the red fox had met in the
+soft flesh just above the gray hind leg. A wolf would have hamstrung
+his opponent and killed him at his leisure; but foxes rarely fight to
+the death. As the old gray fox felt the rending teeth tear through his
+soft skin, he yelped, tore himself loose, and started full-speed for
+his den. For two hundred yards the red fox pursued him, with such
+swiftness that he managed to nip his unprotected hind quarters several
+times. At each bite the fleeing gray fox yelped with the high, shrill,
+sorrowful note of a hurt little dog; and when Father Fox returned to
+claim the spoils of victory, all that could be seen of the other was a
+gray streak moving rapidly toward Cold Spring.
+
+As the cub reached his full stature, he ranged farther and farther
+afield with the two old foxes. He learned all the hiding and camping
+places of the range, and how to sleep out in a blaze of sunlight in
+some deserted field, looking for all the world like a tussock of tawny
+blackened grass, or, if so be that he hunted by day and slept by
+night, he found that he wore a blanket on his back which kept him warm
+even during the coldest nights. As for his unprotected nose and four
+paddies, he wrapped them up warm in the fluffy rug of his thick soft
+brush. By the time frost had come, his fur had grown long and glossy
+and very beautiful, with the velvet cross of midnight-black bordered
+with old-gold, silver, and tawny-pink, his black brush waving aloft
+like a white-tipped plume.
+
+Death came with the frost, in the form of traps, hounds and hunters.
+Old Father Fox taught him how to escape them all. Many years ago he
+had lived across the hills on the lonely Barrack, where the Deans and
+the Blakesleys and the Howes and the Baileys and the Reeds have a
+far-away hill country of their own. Old Fred Dean lived there, and
+prided himself on both the wild and the tame crops which he raised on
+his hill farm. He made the whitest, sweetest maple sugar in the
+world, and harvested hickories, chestnuts, butternuts, and even
+hazel-nuts. It was his fur crop, however, which was the most
+profitable. Foxes, raccoons, skunks, muskrat, mink--the old man knew
+how to trap them all.
+
+In Father Fox's second year, he was caught in a trap which Fred had
+cunningly hidden in the snow among a maze of cattle tracks--the last
+place where a fox would suspect danger. The fox finally managed to
+work his imprisoned foot out of the gripping jaws; but it had cost him
+four toes to learn that the scent of man or iron meant death to foxes.
+He never forgot, and he taught Blackcross to fear the tiniest whiff of
+either. As for dogs, the old fox taught his cub that no dog can
+overtake a fox going uphill or in the rough, and that shifting sand
+and running water are the fox's friends, since his scent will lie in
+neither. He taught him all the cut-offs, the jumps, and the run-backs
+of the range, and finally the cherished fortresses where, as a last
+resort, he might take refuge.
+
+When it came to hunters, the young fox had to take his chances. In the
+last analysis a man's brain can outwit that of a fox. It was when the
+blaze and the glow of the crimson and gold frost-fires had died away
+to the russet of late fall that the fox family was most in danger, for
+the Raven Hunt Club needed a fox. Three times now the men had dressed
+themselves with great care, in wonderful scarlet coats and shiny
+top-boots, while the women wore comfortable breeches and uncomfortable
+collars; and they had all jumped fences and waded brooks and crashed
+through thickets; but never a fox could they find, so close had the
+dwellers in Fox Valley lain hidden. In fact, the last hunt had been a
+drag-hunt, and the pack had followed for hours the scent of a bag of
+anise which had been dragged the day before by a string, through the
+woods and across the fields, by a sleepy stable-boy on a broken-down
+hunter. But you cannot rise in your stirrups and shout "Tally-ho!" or
+"Stole away!" or any of the other proper hunting remarks, over a bag
+of anise. Then, too, the hounds have nothing to worry and kill at the
+end of the hunt; nor can the brush be cut off for a trophy, for an
+anise bag hasn't any brush.
+
+Thanksgiving was two scant weeks away, and it was absolutely necessary
+for the happiness of the Hunt that a live fox be secured at once.
+Accordingly the Raven Hunt Club offered fifty dollars for a live red
+fox. Grays were barred, because they prefer to hide in burrows and be
+safe rather than run and be killed. For a week all the farmers' boys
+for miles around Fox Valley trapped desperately, but without success.
+Father Fox had not paid four toes for nothing. Then they sent for Fred
+Dean. Thereafter, one night Blackcross, while hunting over a hilltop
+pasture, noted a long, freshly turned furrow that ran straight across
+the field, which was filled with old chaff taken from deserted barns
+and smelt delightfully of mice. Along the furrow and through the
+litter the young fox nosed his way, ready to pounce upon the first
+mouse which darted out. Suddenly there was a snap, and Blackcross was
+caught by his slim dark muzzle. There the old trapper found him the
+next morning, hardly alive; and when he saw that he had secured a
+cross-fox, demanded a hundred from the committee instead of the
+offered fifty. Said committee took the fox, and advertised far and
+wide that the Thanksgiving Hunt would be after such a fox as had never
+been hunted before in the memory of man.
+
+The holiday turned out to be one of those rare and fleeting days of
+Indian summer which Autumn sometimes borrows from her sister. The pack
+was in fine fettle. The horses and the hunters were fit, and the hunt
+breakfast excellent. Everybody was thankful--except the shivering
+little fox. For days he had been cooped in a dirty wire cage, and
+eaten tainted meat and drunk stale water, and he was stiff and sore
+from his night in the trap and from lack of exercise. Just at sunrise
+on Thanksgiving morning, he was crammed into a bag, and then let out
+two fields ahead of the pack. As he shot into the sunlight, there was
+a chorus of shouts, yells, and yelps, and a crowd of men, women,
+horses, and hounds rushed after him in a tremendous burst of speed.
+
+The young fox's legs tottered under him as he ran. Moreover, for a
+mile around the country was level. As he crossed the first field, the
+pack was already at the farther wall, and would surely have overtaken
+him in the third field if it had not been for one of the old fox's
+lessons. The pasture sloped up to where a sand bank showed as a great
+crescent gash in the turf. Springing to the side of the bank, the fox
+clung to it like a fly, scurried along its side, cleared the stone
+wall beyond, and headed for the thickets of Fox Valley. The shifting
+sand left no track or scent, and while the pack puzzled out the trail,
+Blackcross won to the shelter of the nearest thicket.
+
+Up and down the hillsides, across marshes and through tangles of
+underbrush, he doubled, checked, turned, and twisted. Raven Hunt,
+however, boasted the best pack of fox-hounds in the state, nor had
+Blackcross either the strength or endurance for a long run. His pace
+became slower and slower, while the bell-like notes of the hounds and
+the shouts of the hunters sounded ever nearer and louder.
+
+Only just in time the beset fox saw looming up before him the best
+hidden of all the fox fortresses in the Valley. It seemed only an
+impenetrable tangle of greenbrier on the hillside--that vine whose
+stems are like slim, green wires, studded everywhere with up-curved
+thorns through which neither man nor beast can force a way. Through
+the very middle of the tangle ran the naked trunk of a fallen
+chestnut, showing just above the barbed vines. As the pack scrambled
+through the barway at the foot of the hill, the little fox ran along
+the log, and with all his last remaining strength sprang far out
+across the interlaced tangle of vine and thorn, where the smooth
+needles under a little white pine made a tiny island in the thicket.
+From there the fox bounded over a narrow belt of greenbrier into a
+mass of wild honeysuckle, whose glossy green leaves and bending
+vine-stocks carpeted the hill at that point fully two feet deep.
+Across the yielding surface he hurried, until he reached the entrance
+of a little tunnel beneath the vines, entirely hidden from sight by
+the drooping leaves. Through this he crept noiselessly, beneath the
+green carpet, until he reached the entrance to a burrow which led far
+up the hillside and had no less than three well-concealed exits.
+
+For a long hour the pack and the hunters and the horses circled and
+beat and trampled back and forth through the thicket, and as far into
+the greenbrier tangle as they could force a way; but no one of them
+found the lost trail. A hundred dollars had been spent and nothing
+killed. Everybody agreed that it was a most unfortunate ending to a
+good day--everybody, that is, except the fox.
+
+As the months wore on, Blackcross hunted more and more by himself, nor
+did he use any of the family dens. This was partly because snow leaves
+a telltale trail, which he who hunts can read, and partly because of a
+difference in the attitude toward him of the old foxes. Among the wild
+folk the love and care of parents cease when their children have
+become full-grown. This is part of nature's plan to scatter families,
+and prevent the in-breeding which will weaken the stock. At last the
+time came when Mother Fox no longer allowed him the freedom of the den
+in which he had been born, and Father Fox growled in his throat when
+he met him carrying his kill.
+
+Then the love-moon of the foxes in February showed in the sky, and
+something drove Blackcross far afield--something that called and
+cried, and would not let him sleep, and took away even the interest
+and joy of a successful hunt. Across the ridges, through Fern Valley
+and beyond Blacksnake Swamp he journeyed, until, far beyond them all,
+he found a lonely valley shut in on all four sides by steep slopes,
+and untenanted by any of the fox-folk. On the crest of one of the
+hills stood an abandoned haystack, left by some thriftless farmer
+years before, and so bleached and weathered by sun and storm that it
+was useless as hay, but an ideal place for a fox-warren. Under this
+Blackcross dug a home with many entrances, all of them cunningly
+concealed by the overhanging hay. Through the centre of the stack
+itself, he ran a series of tunnels and rooms, besides the safer ones
+far underground.
+
+Finally, it was almost completed--almost but not quite. Night after
+night the young fox barked from the top of the hill with a sharp
+staccato screech, which could be heard a long mile away. Then came the
+night of the full moon. There was no snow and overhead in the crisp
+air wheeled Orion the Hunter, Lepus the Hare, the Great and Little
+Dog, and all the other mighty constellations of winter. Under the
+sheen and shimmer of the stars and through the still moonlight,
+Blackcross sent his bark echoing and ringing, until at long last it
+was answered by a curious, high-pitched squall which to Blackcross
+contained all the magic and music of sky and earth. Nearer and nearer
+the sound approached, until finally, in the moonlight, a slim tawny
+figure stole up to the stack. For a moment black muzzle and tawny
+touched. Then Blackcross turned and disappeared down one of the
+entrances to his burrow, and the stranger followed. At last, his home
+was complete.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+SEA OTTER
+
+
+The short Arctic summer had flung its flower fields among the glaciers
+of the Siberian coast, like many-colored jewels set in crystal. Flocks
+of skuas, jaegers, and little auks circled and screamed above the
+smoky green waters of the Straits; and far out from shore a bed of
+kelp writhed and tossed like a mass of golden-brown sea snakes.
+
+There, cradled on the swaying stems, a water-baby was born. He had a
+funny little nose, with a padded cushion on top which made it look
+like the ace of spades, and his round, blunt head was of a dingy white
+color, while the rest of his fifteen inches was covered with a loose,
+kinky, gray-brown coat. Its harsh outer surface, sprinkled with long
+white hairs, covered a velvet-like inner fur that gave promise of the
+glory that was yet to be.
+
+In spite of his insignificant appearance, the little cub was of blood
+royal, of the lineage of the sea otter, that king of fur-bearers, who
+wears a fortune on his back and is dogged by death every moment of his
+life. Vitus Behring and his shipwrecked crew discovered them in 1741,
+in the surf and shallows around a barren island, in the sea which now
+bears his name. When they won their way back to Asia, sly, wise
+Chinese merchants paid their weight in silver for the new furs, so
+lustrous, silky, and durable, which the sailors had been using for
+coats and blankets. In Russia they came to be worth their weight in
+gold, outranking even the royal sables, which none but the Tsar and
+his nobles might wear. To-day the pelt of a sea otter is worth its
+weight in platinum or palladium.
+
+This last-born princeling soon learned how to float on his back, with
+his round little head just showing above the kelp. For the most part,
+however, he lived clasped in his mother's arms and wrapped in the
+silky folds of her fur, while he nuzzled and fed against her warm
+breast, making happy little chirps and grunts of satisfaction, quite
+like a human baby.
+
+To-day, as they rocked back and forth in the swinging water, the
+kelp-carpet in front of them parted, and a great, blunt, misshapen
+head thrust itself into the air a few yards away. It had little eyes
+set high in the skull, while the ears showed below the grinning mouth
+filled full of blunt teeth like white water-worn pebbles--the hallmark
+of a sea otter.
+
+The newcomer was none other than Father Otter, come to look over his
+son and heir. He did not come very close to his family, for mother
+otters do not permit even their mates to approach too near a newborn
+cub. As the old dog otter stretched himself out on the kelp-raft, his
+cylindrical body, all gleaming ebony and silver in the sunlight,
+showed nearly as long as that of a man, and weighed perhaps a hundred
+and twenty-five pounds. It was the great otter's pelt, however, that
+stamped him as the sea king that he was. Lustrous as light on the
+water, the inner fur had a close pile like velvet and, frosted with
+long white hairs, showed a tinge of silver-purple gleaming through its
+long loose folds.
+
+For some time the old dog otter gravely surveyed his mate and his new
+cub, approvingly. Then he scanned sea and sky and kelp, listening the
+while with a pair of the sharpest ears that ever guarded the life of
+one of the wild folk, at the same time winnowing the air through a
+pair of nostrils that could smell smoke--that danger-signal to all
+wild people--a mile away. There was no sign of danger anywhere, and a
+moment later he disappeared under the water, after the food which his
+vibrant body unceasingly required.
+
+For long after his disappearance the mother otter anxiously studied
+the horizon for the tiniest danger-signal. Convinced at last that all
+was well, she stretched herself out on the slow-swinging kelp, for one
+of those periods of quiet happiness which come even into the lives of
+the hunted. While her cub snuggled against her soft fur, she tossed a
+kelp-bulb high into the air, catching it like a ball, first in one
+bare little palm, then in the other, while she sang the cradle-song
+which all little sea otters know. High and shrill she chirped and
+twittered like a bird, in the midst of that lonely sea, clasping her
+sleepy baby closer as she sang.
+
+There seemed no living thing near, yet death is never far from the sea
+otter. From mid-sky what seemed a dark wisp of cloud drifted toward
+the sea. Driven down by hunger from the North, an eagle owl, all buff
+and gray and brown, was crossing from Asia to America; for, unlike
+most of his fierce clan, he hunted by day. Larger than that
+death-in-the-dark, the great-horned owl, or that fierce white ghost of
+the North, the snowy owl, he skimmed down toward the kelp-bed, his
+round, fixed eyes gleaming red and horrible in the sunlight. Muffled
+by the softest of down, his great wings, although they had a spread of
+nearly five feet, were absolutely noiseless.
+
+Not until the shadow of the bird, like the shadow of death itself,
+fell upon her cub, did the otter have the slightest warning of any
+danger. By that time it would have been too late for any other
+creature to escape. No animal, however, on land or sea can dive with
+the sea otter. Just as the crooked talons were closing, she slipped
+through the kelp into the water, without a splash, like something
+fluid, her cub clasped close, while overhead the baffled owl snapped
+its beak like a pistol shot, and flew on toward the Alaskan coast.
+
+Down through the swaying tangles she twisted her way like an eel,
+until she passed clear through the floating bed of this strange growth
+of the sea, which grows with its roots in the air. There the water
+darkened, and as she neared the bottom a shape flashed ahead of her,
+lighted with that phosphorescence which all dwellers in the northern
+seas seem to acquire. The otter recognized the glowing figure as that
+of a sea bass, a bronze-green fish hardly to be distinguished from
+the small-mouthed black bass of fresh water. The bass was no mean
+swimmer, but the long, oar-like, webbed hind legs of the sea otter
+twisted over and over each other like the screw of a propeller, and
+drove her through the water with such tremendous speed that, in spite
+of the handicap of the cub, she soon swam down the fish, following its
+every twist and turn, and in less than a minute had caught it in her
+blunt teeth. Then, with the plump fish in her jaws, she swam up again
+through the kelp, and fed full, never for a moment, however, loosening
+her grip of her cub--for the babies of the sea folk who wander only a
+few feet from their mothers may never return.
+
+The meal finished, the great otter climbed out on a pinnacle of rock
+just showing above the kelp. Immediately from a miracle of lithe,
+swift grace, she changed into one of the slowest and most awkward of
+animals. The webbed flipper-like hind feet, which drove her with such
+speed through the water, were of very little use on land, and her tiny
+forepaws were so short that they seemed to have no wrists at all.
+Slowly and painfully she waddled up on the rock, and there preened and
+cleaned and combed and licked every inch of her fur just as a cat
+would do, until it shone in the sunlight like a black opal.
+
+As the weeks went by, the cub was trained in the lessons of the sea.
+He learned to enjoy salads of kelp-sprouts, and to dive with his
+mother to the bottom of the shallows, and watch her grind her way
+through the great clams of the northwest, whose bivalves are a foot
+in width, or crunch with her pebble-like teeth into the white meat of
+the vast, armored crabs of those seas. Another one of her favorite
+foods was the sea urchin--that chestnut burr of the sea. Protected by
+a bristling hedge of steel-sharp spines, it would seem safe from any
+attack. Yet, just as the squirrel on land opens without injury the
+real chestnut burr, so the sea otter had learned the combination which
+unlocked this little spiked safe of the sea, and devoured with much
+relish every one she could find.
+
+As the weeks went by, the larder of the kelp-bed began to empty. The
+clam-beds had been stripped, the sea urchins were gone, and the fish
+had learned to keep away. Little by little, the mother otter hunted
+farther and farther from the safety of the kelp; until there came a
+day when, driven by hunger, she followed a fleeing pollock out into
+the open sea. The big gleaming fish, with the black line along its
+silver sides, swam far and fast. Yet, if the otter had not been
+hampered by her clinging cub, the chase would have been a short one.
+As it was, she did not overtake the fugitive until it was fully a
+quarter of a mile away from the kelp. In desperation it swam down into
+the lower depth, until the dull green of the water changed to black;
+but always the weasel of the sea was hard on its track, following the
+phosphorescent trail which the fleeing fish left behind.
+
+Suddenly, as the pollock dived to even lower depths, in the hope that
+the water-pressure might drive back its pursuer, a grotesquely
+horrible head thrust itself up from the darkness right in its path.
+Dark, and shining like wet rubber, the shape resembled nothing so much
+as that of a great, double-headed sledgehammer. From either of the
+living hammer-heads gleamed a greenish, malignant eye. Before the
+pollock could dart aside, the great hammer-head shark turned partly
+over, there was a flash of sharp teeth, and the fugitive fish
+disappeared.
+
+A second later the ridged, gray, fifteen-foot body shot toward the
+otter, with such speed that the water fairly hissed from the
+scimetar-shaped side-fins. The sea otter is among the swiftest
+swimmers of the mammals, but no air-breathing creature can compete in
+speed with a shark. Almost instantly the hammerhead was upon her. The
+jaws of all the sharks are so undershot that, in order to grip their
+prey, they must perforce turn over on their sides. This peculiarity of
+their kind was all that saved the otter. For a second the grim head
+overshadowed her. Then, with a twist of its long tail, shaped like the
+fluke of an anchor, the shark turned over and the vast mouth swung
+open, armed with six rows of inch-long, steel-sharp, triangular teeth,
+whose edges were serrated like a saw. Each separate tooth was curved
+back toward the gullet, so that for any living thing caught in their
+dreadful grip there was no more chance of escape than there would be
+from the interlocking cogwheels of a stone-crusher.
+
+As the jaws of death gaped for the sea otter, with a writhe of her
+swift body she flashed to one side, while the little cub whimpered in
+her arms and the fatal teeth of the shark just grazed her trailing,
+flipper-like hind legs, so close they snapped behind her. Swerving
+beneath the great bulk, the otter began a desperate flight for life.
+Every foot of the shark's gaunt, stripped body was built for speed.
+There was not a bone anywhere under his drab and livid skin--only
+rings and strips and columns of tough, springy cartilage, which
+enabled him to cut through the water like a blade of tempered gray
+steel. With the rush of a torpedo the grim figure shot after the
+fleeing otter, who had but one advantage and that was in length. It
+takes a six-foot body less time to turn than one that measures fifteen
+feet. In a straightaway race, the fish would have overtaken the mammal
+in a few seconds; but when it came to twisting, turning, and doubling,
+the sea otter had an advantage, albeit of the slightest. Again and
+again the desperate sea mother avoided death by an inch. More than
+once the ringing jaws of the great fish snapped together just behind
+her, and only the tiny tick of time which it took to turn over saved
+her. Desperately she sought to win the refuge of the kelp-bed; but
+always the gray shape thrust itself between her and safety.
+
+At last an ally of the sea folk joined in the hunt. Water was claiming
+her toll of oxygen from the alien within her depths. A sea otter can
+stay under for half an hour at a pinch--but not when swimming at full
+speed, with the laboring heart pumping blood at capacity; and this one
+realized despairingly that soon she must breathe or die. Little by
+little she shaped her course toward the surface, dreadfully fearing
+lest the second she must spend in drawing one deep breath would be her
+last. She flashed upward through a whole gamut of greens--chrome,
+cedar, jasper, myrtle, malachite, emerald, ending with the pulsing,
+golden sap-green of the surface. Swim as she would, however, the
+monstrous head was always just at her flank, and the slightest pause
+would give those fatal teeth their grip. Once again she avoided by a
+hair's breadth a snap of the deadly jaws, and struggled despairingly
+toward the upper air.
+
+As the great fish turned to follow, out from the sunlight, through the
+gleaming water, shot a long dark body. Away from the safety of the
+kelp to the head of horror with its implacable eyes came the old dog
+otter, for the creed of the sea otter is unchanging--one mate for life
+and death. With his round misshapen head bristling and his snaky black
+eyes gleaming like fire, this one crossed the vast back of the shark
+like a shadow. As the great fish turned to follow the fleeing mother,
+the blunt pebble-teeth of the dog otter, which can grind the flintiest
+shells to powder, fastened themselves with a bull-dog grip just behind
+the last fin of the shark, where its long, sinuous tail joined the
+body. With all the force of his tremendous jaws, the great sea otter
+clamped his teeth through the masses of muscles, deep into the
+cartilage column, crushing one of its ball-and-socket joints.
+
+Like a steel spring, the shark bent almost double on itself. Just as
+the gaping jaws were about to close, with a quick flirt of his body
+the otter swung across to the other side, without relaxing for an
+instant the grip of those punishing teeth. The undershot jaws of the
+great fish could not reach the head of its tormentor, fixed as it was
+in the central ridge of the shark's back. Again and again the
+hammer-head bent from side to side; but each time the old dog otter
+evaded the clashing teeth and ground to bits joint after joint of the
+shark's spine, while the lashing tail-strokes became feebler and
+feebler. Not until the mother otter and her cub were safe on their way
+to the kelp-bed, breathing great life-saving draughts of fresh air at
+the surface, did the grim jaws of the old otter relax. Then, with an
+arrowy dive and double, he shot under and over the disabled fish, and
+sped away to join his mate in the hidden thickets of the kelp.
+
+The swift Arctic summer soon passed, to be followed by the freezing
+gales of an Arctic winter. With the storms would come an enemy from
+the land, fiercer and more fatal than any foe that menaced the otter
+family by sea or sky; for these sea otter were among the last of their
+race, and there was a price upon their pelts beyond the dreams of the
+avarice of a thousand murky Aleuts and oily Kolash and Kadiakers, to
+say nothing of a horde of white adventurers from all the five
+continents of earth. Only in storms, when the kelp-beds are broken and
+the otter are forced to seek the shelter of beaches and sea caves, do
+hunters still have a chance to secure these rarest of all the
+fur-bearers.
+
+At last came the first of the great winter gales. Day after day the
+wind howled up from the southeast, the storm quarter of that coast,
+and the air throbbed with the boom of breakers, while all the way down
+the Straits the white-caps foamed and roared among a tangle of
+cross-currents.
+
+Out at sea, the great kelp-raft on which the otter family had lived
+since spring was at last broken and scattered under the pounding of
+the gale. Otter need sleep as much as humans, and like them, too, must
+sleep where they can breathe. Battered and blinded by the gale, the
+little family started to hunt for some refuge where they might slumber
+out the storm. Along all the miles of coast, and among the myriads of
+barren islands, there seemed to be no place where they could find a
+yard of safety. At the first sign of bad weather every strip of beach
+was patrolled and every islet guarded.
+
+To lonely little Saanak the dog otter first led them, hoping to find
+some tiny stretch of safe beach among the water-worn boulders piled
+high along the shore. A mile to windward he stopped, thrust his blunt
+muzzle high up into the gale, and winnowed the salt-laden air through
+the meshes of his wonderful nostrils. Then he turned away at right
+angles, toward another island. A little band of Indian hunters,
+starved with cold, had built far back among the rocks a tiny fire.
+
+Smoke spells death to a sea otter. Beyond Saanak the wary veteran
+visited other beaches, only to detect the death-scent of human
+footprints, although they had been washed by waves and covered by
+tides. In far-away Oonalaska, he sought the entrance of a sea cave in
+whose winding depths, many years before, he had found refuge. As he
+thrust his head into the hidden opening, his sturdy breast struck the
+strands of a net made of sea-lion sinews, so soaked and bleached by
+salt water that it bore even to his matchless nostrils no smell of
+danger. With a warning chirp, he halted his mate following close
+behind, and backed out carefully, without entangling himself among the
+wide meshes.
+
+Agonizing for sleep, the little band turned back and journeyed wearily
+to the far-away islet of Attoo, the westernmost point of land in North
+America. In its lee was a sheltered kelp-raft never broken by the
+waves, although too near shore to be a safe refuge except in a storm.
+There, in the very centre of the heaving bed, with the waves booming
+outside, the otter family slept the sleep of utter exhaustion, their
+heads buried under the kelp-stems and their shimmering bodies showing
+on the surface.
+
+At the foot of a high bluff on Kadiak Island crouched Dick Barrington,
+on his first otter-hunt. Dick was the son of a factor of the Hudson
+Bay Company, which, in spite of kings and parliaments, still rules
+Arctic America. With him as a guide was Oonga, the chief of a tribe of
+Aleutian hunters.
+
+"Stick to old Oonga," the factor had advised. "He knows more about sea
+otter than any man in his tribe. At that there's only one chance in a
+thousand that you'll get one."
+
+The old chief had allowed the rest of the band to slip away one by
+one, each choosing the islet or bit of shore where he hoped to draw
+the winning number in this lottery of the sea. Hour after hour went
+by, and still the old man sat huddled under the lee of the cliff. At
+last, he suddenly stood up. Although the gale seemed still at its
+height, his practised eye saw signs that it was about to break, and in
+a moment, with Dick's help, he had launched the triple-pointed,
+high-sterned _bidarka_, a little craft made of oiled sea-lion skins,
+and as unsinkable as any boat could be.
+
+A few quick strokes of the paddle, and they were beyond the breakers.
+Then, straight across the bay, through the rush and smother of the
+storm, they shot toward Attoo. Steering by unknown ranges and glimpses
+of dim islands, old Oonga held his course unfalteringly, until, just
+as the gale began to slacken, they reached the kelp-bed in the lee of
+the little island. Across the hollow tendrils the old chief guided the
+bidarka silently, in a zigzag course. Suddenly he stretched out his
+paddle, and, touching Dick on the shoulder, pointed to a dark spot
+showing against the kelp a hundred yards away.
+
+With infinite care the two edged the canoe along, until there before
+them lay asleep the mother otter, her cub clasped tight in her arms.
+Even as they watched, the little otter nuzzled its small white nose
+against its mother's warm breast. As she felt its touch, without
+opening her eyes she clasped the cub tighter in her arms, with a
+curiously human gesture, and wrapped it close in her long silky fur,
+which had a changing shimmer and ripple through it like watered
+silk--a pelt with which a man might ransom his life.
+
+As Dick gripped the short heavy club which the old chief had placed at
+his feet at the beginning of the voyage, and looked down upon the
+pair, it seemed to him as if the great sea had taken him into her
+confidence and entrusted the sleeping mother and child to him.
+Suddenly, in the silence, with sea and sky watching, he knew that he
+could no more strike down that mother sleeping before him with her
+dear-loved cub in her arms, than he could have killed a human child
+entrusted to his care. With a quick motion, he splashed the water over
+the sleeping otter with the end of his club. So swiftly that the eye
+could scarcely follow her motion, the great otter flashed out of sight
+under the kelp, with her cub still held close. Once again, mother-love
+had been too strong for death.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41880 ***