Had there been ever so small a glimmer of light, to enable his eyes to play their part in this forest game, the man could have watched for an hour as moveless as the tree on which he leaned. But in that strange, absolute dark the strain soon grew almost intolerable. The game certainly ceased to be amusing after an uneventful fifteen minutes had passed. He was just about to give up, to step forth into the trail and resume his journey to the cabin, when he caught a strange sound, which made him stiffen back at once into watchful rigidity.

The sound was a great breath. In its suddenness and its vagueness the listener was unable to distinguish whether it came from a dozen yards down the trail, or a couple of dozen inches from his elbow. His nose, however, assured him that he had not the latter alternative to face; so he waited, his right hand upon the knife in his belt. He could hear his heart beating.

For several minutes nothing more was heard. Then through the high leafage overhead splashed a few big drops of rain, with the hushing sound of a shower not heavy enough to break through. The next moment a flash of white lightning lit up the forest aisles,—and in that moment the man saw a huge black bear standing in the trail, not ten feet distant. In that moment the eyes of the man and the eyes of the beast met each other fairly. Then the blackness fell once more; and a thin peal of midsummer thunder rolled over the unseen tree-tops.

When all was silence again the man felt uncomfortable, and regretted the rifle which he had left under the canoe. That the bear would attack him, unprovoked, he knew to be improbable; but he also knew enough about bears to know that it is never well to argue too confidently as to what they will do. The more he waited and listened, the more he felt sure that the bear was also waiting and listening, in an uncertainty not much unlike his own. He decided that it was for him to take the initiative. Clapping his hands smartly, he threw back his head, and burst into a peal of laughter.

The loud, incongruous sound shocked the silences. It almost horrified the man himself, so unexpected, so unnatural, so inexplicable did it seem even to his own ears. When it ceased, he knew that it had accomplished its purpose. He heard rustling and snapping noises swiftly diminishing in the distance, and knew that the bear was retreating in a panic. At this he laughed again, not loudly, but to himself, and stepped out into the trail.

But the man was not yet done with the effects of his loud challenge to the solemnities of the dark. Hardly had he taken three steps along the trail when a little in front of him—perhaps, as he guessed, some five and twenty paces—there arose a slashing and crashing noise of struggle. Branches cracked and rustled and snapped, heavy feet pounded the earth, and a confusion of gasping grunts suggested a blind menagerie in mortal combat. The man, fairly startled, groped his way back to the tree, and waited behind it, knife in hand. In fact he had a strong inclination to climb into the branches; but this impulse he angrily restrained.

For a whole minute the daunting uproar continued, neither approaching nor receding, and at length the man's curiosity, ever insatiable where the mysteries of the wild were concerned, got the better of his prudence. He lit a match and peered from behind his shelter. The little, sudden blaze spread a sharp light, but whatever was making the uproar went on as before, quite heedless of the singular phenomenon. When the match died out it left the man no wiser. Then with hurried hands he stripped some birch bark, and rolled himself a serviceable torch. When this blazed up with its smoky flame, he held it well off to one side and a little behind him, and made his way warily to the scene of the disturbance.

A turn in the trail, and the mystery stood revealed. With a cry of indignation the man darted forward, no longer cautious. What he saw before him was a great, gaunt moose-cow reared upon her hind legs, caught under the jaws by a villainous moose-snare. With her head high among the branches, she lurched and kicked in a brave struggle for life, while every effort but drew tighter the murdering noose. A few feet away stood her lanky calf, trembling, and staring stupidly at the light.

The man lost not a moment. Dropping his bundle and paddle, but carefully guarding the torch, he climbed the tree above the victim, lay out on a branch, reached down, and dexterously severed the noose with his knife. What matter if, with his haste and her struggles, he at the same time cut a slash in the beast's stout hide? The blood-letting was a sorely needed medicine to her choked veins. She fell in a heap, and for a minute or two lay gasping loudly. Then she staggered to her feet, and stood swaying, while she nosed the calf with her long muzzle to assure herself that it had not been hurt in the cataclysm which had overtaken her.

The man watched her until his torch was almost gone, then climbed down the tree (which was not a birch) to get himself another. Noticing him now for the first time, the moose pulled herself together with a mighty effort, and thrust the calf behind her. Could this be the enemy who had so nearly vanquished her? For a moment the man thought she was going to charge upon him, and he held himself in readiness to go up the tree again. But the poor shaken beast thought better of it. Pain, rage, fear, amazement, doubt,—all these the man fancied he could see in her staring, bloodshot eyes. He stood quite still, pitying her, and cursing the brutal poachers who had set the snare. Then, just before the torch gave its last flicker, the great animal turned and led her calf off through the woods, looking back nervously as she went.

When the light was out, and silence had come again upon the forest, the man resumed his journey. He travelled noisily, whistling and stamping as he went, as a warning to all wild creatures that a man was in their woods, and that they must give room to a master. He carried with him now, besides his blanket and his paddle, a generous roll of birch bark, with which to illuminate the lumber shanty before going in. It had occurred to him that possibly some lynx or wildcat might have taken up its dwelling therein; and if so, he was no longer in the mood to meet it at close quarters in the dark.



The Kings of the Intervale

Far out over the pale, smooth surface of the river a crow flew, flapping heavily. From time to time he uttered an angry and frightened squawk. Over, under, and all around him, now darting at his eyes, now dropping upon him like a little, arrow-pointed thunderbolt, now slapping a derisive wing across his formidable beak, flashed a small, dark bird whose silvery white belly now and then caught the sun.

The crow's accustomed alert self-possession was quite shattered. He had forgotten his own powers of attack. He seemed to fear for his eyes,—and among all the wild kindred there is no fear more horrifying than that. When he ducked, and swerved, and tried to dodge, he did it awkwardly, as if his presence of mind was all gone.

His assailant, less than a third of his weight, was a king-bird, whose nest, in the crotch of an elm on the intervale meadow, the crow had been so ill-advised as to investigate. The crow was comparatively inexperienced, or he would have known enough to keep away from the nests of the king-birds. But there it was, in plain sight; and he loved eggs or tender nestlings. Before he had had time to find out which it was that the nest contained, both the parent birds had fallen upon him with a swift ferocity which speedily took away his appetite for food or fight. Their beaks were sturdy and burning sharp. Their short, powerful wings gave them a flight so swift and darting that, for all his superior strength, he felt himself at their mercy. His one thought was to save his eyes and escape.

Both birds chased him till he was well out over the river. Then the female returned to her nest, leaving her mate to complete the intruder's chastisement. Had the crow been an old and cunning bird, he would have sought the extreme heights of air, where the king-bird is disinclined to follow; but lacking this crow-wisdom, he kept on at the level of the tallest tree-tops, and was forced to take his punishment. He was, in reality, more sore and terrified than actually injured. That darting, threatening beak of his pursuer never actually struck his eyes. But for this, it is probable, he had only the indulgence of the king-bird to thank. When at last the chastiser, tired of his task, turned and flew back up the river toward the nest in the elm-crotch, the ruffled crow took refuge out of sight, in the top of the densest hemlock, where he rolled his eyes and preened his plumage silently for an hour before daring again the vicissitudes of the wilderness world.

The nest to which the triumphant king-bird hurried back was audaciously perched in plain view of every prowler. The crotch of the elm-tree which it occupied was about twelve feet from the ground. The intervale, or water-meadow, by the side of the river, held but a few widely scattered trees,—trees of open growth, such as elm, balsam-poplar, and water-ash. It was free from all underbrush. There was nothing, therefore, to shield the nest from even the most careless eyes; and with an insolence of fearlessness matched only by that of the osprey, it was made the more conspicuous by having great tufts of white wool from a neighbouring sheep-pasture woven into its bulky, irregular frame. So irregular and haphazard, indeed, did it appear, that it might almost have been mistaken for a bunch of rubbish left in the tree from the time of freshet. But if the two king-birds relied on this resemblance as a concealment, they presumed as so clever a bird is not likely to do upon the blindness or stupidity of the wild kindred. The wild kindred are seldom blind, and very seldom stupid, because those members of the fellowship who are possessed of such defects sooner or later go to feed their fellows. Hence it was that most of the folk of the riverside, furred or feathered, knew well enough what the big whitish-gray bunch of rubbish in the elm-crotch was.

There were five eggs at the bottom of the smooth, warm cup, which formed the heart of the nest. They were a little smaller than a robin's egg, and of a soft creamy white, blotched irregularly with dull purplish maroon of varying tone. So jealous of these mottled marvels were the king-birds that not even the most harmless of visitors were allowed to look upon them. If so much as a thrush, or a pewee, or a mild-mannered white throat, presumed to alight on the very remotest branch of that elm, it was brusquely driven away.

One morning early, the male king-bird was sitting very erect, as was his custom, on the naked tip of a long, slender, dead branch some ten feet above the nest The morning chill was yet in the air, so it was a little early for the flies which formed his food to be stirring. But he was hungry, and on the alert for the first of them to appear. Only the tense feathers of his crest, raised to show the flame-orange spot which was his kingly crown, betrayed his eagerness; for he was a self-contained bird. The sun was just beginning to show the red topmost edge of his rim through the jagged line of firs across the river, and the long, level streaks of aerial rose, creeping under the branches, filled all the shadowed places of the wilderness with mysterious light. The eastward sides of the tree-trunks and naked branches glimmered pink; and dew-wet leaves, here and there, shone like pale jewels of pink, amber, and violet. The mirror-like surface of the river was blurred with twisting spirals of mist, silvery and opalescent, through which the dim-seen figure of a duck in straight flight shot like a missile.

As the king-bird sat erect on his branch, watching with bright eyes the miracle of the morning, an over-adventurous dragon-fly arose from a weed-top below him and flew into the rosy light. The bird darted straight and true, zigzagged sharply as the victim tried to dodge, caught the lean prize in his beak, and carried it very gallantly to his mate upon the nest. Then he fluttered back to his post on the branch.

As the sun got up over the hill, and the warmth dried their wings, the intervale began to hum softly with dancing flies and hurrying beetles, and the king-bird was continually on the move, twittering with soft monotony (his sole attempt at song), between each successful sally. At length the female rose from her eggs, stood on the edge of the nest, and gave an impatient call. Her mate flew down to take her place, and the two perched side by side, making a low chirping sound in their throats.

Just at this moment a small black snake, warmed into activity and hunger by the first rays of the sun, glided to the tree and began to climb. Bird's-nesting was the black snake's favourite employment; but it had not stopped to consider that the nest in this particular tree was a king-bird's. It climbed swiftly and noiselessly, and the preoccupied birds did not get glimpse of it till it was within two feet of the nest.

There was no time for consultation in the face of this peril. Like lightning the two darted down upon the enemy, buffeting its head with swift wing-strokes. The first assault all but swept it from the tree, and it shrank back upon itself with flattened head and angry hiss. Then it struck fiercely, again and again, at its bewildering assailants. But swift as were its movements, those of the king-birds were swifter, and its fangs never hit upon so much as one harassing feather. Suddenly, in its fury, it struck out too far, weakening for a moment its hold upon the crevices of the bark; and in that moment, both birds striking it together, its squirming folds were hurled to the ground. Thoroughly cowed, it slipped under cover and made off, only a wavering line among the grasses betraying its path. The king-birds, with excited and defiant twittering, followed for a little its hidden retreat, and then returned elated to the nest.

Among the kindred of the wild as well as among those of roof and hearth, events are apt to go in company. For day after day things will revolve in set fashion. Then chance takes sudden interest in a particular spot or a certain individual, and there, for a time, is established a centre for events. This day of the black snake was an eventful day for the little kings of the intervale. They had hardly more than recovered from their excitement over the snake when a red squirrel, his banner of a tail flaunting superbly behind him, came bounding over the grass to their tree. His intentions may have been strictly honourable. But a red squirrel's intentions are liable to change in the face of opportunity. As he ran up the tree, and paused curiously at the nested crotch, a feathered thunderbolt struck him on the side of the head. It knocked him clean out of the tree; and he turned a complete somersault in the air before he could get his balance and spread his legs so as to alight properly. When he reached the ground he fled in dismay, and was soon heard chattering vindictively among the branches of a far-off poplar.

It was a little before noon when came the great event of this eventful day. The male king-bird was on the edge of the nest, feeding a fat moth to his mate. As he straightened up and glanced around he saw a large marsh-hawk winnowing low across the river. As it reached the shore it swooped into the reed-fringe, but rose again without a capture. For a few minutes it quartered the open grass near the bank, hunting for mice. The two king-birds watched it with anxious, angry eyes. Suddenly it sailed straight toward the tree; and the king-birds shot into the air, ready for battle.

It was not the precious nest, however, nor the owners of the nest, on which the fierce eyes of the marsh-hawk had fallen. When he was within twenty paces of the nest he dropped into the grass. There was a moment of thrashing wings, then he rose again, and beat back toward the river with a young muskrat in his talons.

Considering the size and savagery of the hawk, any small bird but the little king would have been well content with his riddance. Not so the king-birds. With shrill chirpings they sped to the rescue. Their wings cuffed the marauder's head in a fashion that confused him. Their wedge-like beaks menaced his eyes and brought blood through the short feathers on the top of his head. He could make no defence or counter-attack against opponents so small and so agile of wing. At length a sharp jab split the lower lid of one eye,—and this added fear to his embarrassment. He dropped the muskrat, which fell into the river and swam off little the worse for the experience.

Relieved of his burden, the hawk made all speed to escape. At the farther shore the female king-bird desisted from the pursuit, and hurried back to her nest. But the avenging wrath of the male was not so easily pacified. Finding the tormentor still at his head, the hawk remembered the security of the upper air, and began to mount in sharp spirals. The king-bird pursued till, seen from the earth, he seemed no bigger than a bee dancing over the hawk's back. Then he disappeared altogether; and the hawk, but for his nervous, harassed flight, might have seemed to be alone in that clear altitude. At last his wings were seen to steady themselves into the tranquil, majestic soaring of his kind. Presently, far below the soaring wings, appeared a tiny dark shape, zigzagging swiftly downward; and soon the king-bird, hastening across the river, alighted once more on his branch and began to preen himself composedly.



The Kill

It was early winter and early morning, and the first of the light lay sharp on the new snow. The sun was just lifting over a far and low horizon. Long, level rays, streaking the snow with straight, attenuated stains of pinkish gold and sharp lines of smoky-blue shadow, pierced the edges of the tall fir forests of Touladi. Though every tint—of the blackish-green firs, of the black-brown trunks, of the violet and yellow and gray birch saplings, of the many-hued snow spaces—was unspeakably tender and delicate, the atmosphere was of a transparency and brilliancy almost vitreous. One felt as if the whole scene might shatter and vanish at the shock of any sudden sound. Then a sound came—but it was not sudden; and the mystic landscape did not dissolve. It was a sound of heavy, measured, muffled footfalls crushing the crisp snow. There was a bending and swishing of bare branches, a rattling as of twigs upon horn or ivory—and a huge bull moose strode into view. With his splendid antlers laid far back he lifted his great, dilating nostrils, stared down the long, white lanelike open toward the rising sun, and sniffed the air inquiringly. Then he turned to browse on the aromatic twigs of the birch saplings.

The great moose was a lord of his kind. His long, thick, glistening hair was almost black over the upper portions of his body, changing abruptly to a tawny ochre on the belly, and the inner and lower parts of the legs. The maned and hump-like ridge of his mighty fore-shoulders stood a good six feet three from the ground; and the spread of his polished, palmated antlers, so massive as to look a burden for even so colossal a head and neck as his, was well beyond five feet. The ridge of his back sloped down to hind-quarters disproportionately small, finished off with a little, meagrely tufted tail that on any beast less regal in mien and stature would have looked ridiculous. The majesty of a bull moose, however, is too secure to be marred by the incongruous pettiness of his tail. From the lower part of his neck, where the great muscles ran into the spacious, corded chest, hung a curious tuft of long and very coarse black hair, called among woodsmen the "bell." As he turned to his browsing, his black form stood out sharply against the background of the firs. Far down the silent, glittering slope, a good mile distant, a tall, gray figure on snow-shoes appeared for a second in the open, caught sight of the pasturing moose, and vanished hurriedly into the birch thickets.



Having cropped a few mouthfuls here and there from branches within easy reach, the great bull set himself to make a more systematic breakfast. Selecting a tall young birch with a bushy top, he leaned his chest against it until he bore it to the ground. Then, straddling it and working his way along toward the top, he held it firmly while he browsed at ease upon the juiciest and most savoury of the tips.

For some minutes he had been thus pleasantly occupied, when suddenly an obscure apprehension stirred in his brain. He stopped feeding, lifted his head, and stood motionless. Only his big ears moved, turning their wary interrogations toward every point of the compass, and his big nostrils suspiciously testing every current of air. Neither nose nor ears, the most alert of his sentinels, gave any report of danger. He looked about, saw nothing unusual, and fell again to feeding.

Among the wild kindreds, as far as man can judge, there are occasional intuitions that seem to work beyond the scope of the senses. It is not ordinarily so, else would all hunting, on the part of man or of the hunting beasts, be idle. But once in a while, as if by some unwilling telepathic communication from hunter to hunted, or else by an obscure and only half-delivered message from the powers that preside over the wild kindreds, a warning of peril is conveyed to a pasturing creature while yet the peril is far off and unrevealed. The great moose found his appetite all gone. He backed off the sapling and let its top spring up again toward the empty blue. He looked back nervously over his trail, sniffed the air, waved his ears inquiringly. The more he found nothing to warrant his uneasiness, the more his uneasiness grew. It was as if Death, following far off but relentlessly, had sent a grim menace along the windings of the trail. Something like a panic came into the dilating eyes of the big bull. He turned toward the fir forest, at a walk which presently broke into a shambling, rapid trot; and presently he disappeared among the sombre and shadowy colonnades.

In the strange gloom of the forest, a transparent gloom confused by thin glints and threads of penetrating, pinkish light, the formless alarm of the moose began to subside. In a few minutes his wild run diminished into a rapid walk. He would not go back to his feeding, however. He had been seized with a shuddering distrust of the young birch thickets on the slope. Over beyond the next ridge there were some bushy swales which he remembered as good pasturage—where, indeed, he had a mind to "yard up" for the winter, when the snow should get too deep for wide ranging. Once more quickening his pace, he circled back almost to the fringe of the forest, making toward a little stretch of frozen marsh, which was one of his frequented runways between ridge and ridge. That nameless fear in the birch thickets still haunted him, however, and he moved with marvellous quietness. Not once did his vast antlers and his rushing bulk disturb the dry undergrowth, or bring the brittle, dead branches crashing down behind him. The only sound that followed him was that of the shallow snow yielding crisply under his feet, and a light clicking, as the tips of his deep-cleft, loose-spreading hoofs came together at the recovery of each stride. This clicking, one of the most telltale of wilderness sounds to the woodsman's ear, grew more sharp and insistent as the moose increased his speed, till presently it became a sort of castanet accompaniment to his long, hurried stride. A porcupine, busy girdling a hemlock, ruffled and rattled his dry quills at the sound, and peered down with little, disapproving eyes as the big, black form fled by below him.

The snowy surface of the marsh was stained with ghosts of colour—aerial, elusive tinges of saffron and violet—as the moose came out upon it. As he swung down its lonely length, his gigantic shadow, lopsided and blue, danced along threateningly, its head lost in the bushes fringing the open. When he came to the end of the marsh, where the wooded slope of the next ridge began, he half paused, reaching his long muzzle irresolutely toward the tempting twigs of a young willow thicket; but before he could gather one mouthful, that nameless fear came over him again, that obscure forewarning of doom, and he sprang forward toward the cover of the firs. As he sprang, there was a movement and a flash far down a wooded alley—a sharp, ringing crack—and something invisible struck him in the body. He had been struck before, by falling branches, or by stones bounding down a bluff, but this missile seemed very different and very small. Small as it was, however, the blow staggered him for an instant; then he shuddered, and a surge of heat passed through his nerves. But a second later he recovered himself fully, and bounded into the woods, just in time to escape a second bullet, as a second shot rang out in vain behind him.

Straight up the wooded steep he ran, startled, but less actually terrified now, in fleeing from a definite peril, then when trembling before a formless menace. This peril was one that he felt he could cope with. He knew his own strength and speed. Now that he had the start of them, these slow-moving, relentless man-creatures, with the sticks that spoke fire, could never overtake him. With confident vigour he breasted the incline, his mighty muscles working as never before under the black hair of shoulder and flank. But he did not know that every splendid stride was measured by a scarlet sign on the snow.

For a few minutes the moose rushed on through the morning woods, up and up between the tall trunks of the firs, half-forgetting his alarm in the triumph of his speed. Then it began to seem to him that the slope of the hill had grown steeper than of old; gradually, and half-unconsciously, he changed his course, and ran parallel with the ridge; and with this change the scarlet signs upon his trail grew scanter. But in a few minutes more he began to feel that the snow was deeper than it had been—deeper, and more clinging. It weighted his hoofs and fetlocks as it had never done before, and his pace slackened. He began to be troubled by the thick foam welling into his nostrils and obstructing his breath. As he blew it forth impatiently it made red flecks and spatters on the snow. He had no pain, no realization that anything had gone wrong with him. But his eyes took on suddenly a harassed, anxious look, and he felt himself growing tired. He must rest a little before continuing his flight.

The idea of resting while his enemies were still so near and hot upon the trail, would, at any other time, have been rejected as absurd; but now the brain of the black moose was growing a little confused. Often before this he had run till he felt tired, and then lain down to rest. He had never felt tired till he knew that he had run a great distance. Now, from his dimming intelligence the sense of time had slipped away. He had been running, and he felt tired. Therefore, he must have run a long distance, and his slow enemies must have been left far behind. He could safely rest. His old craft, however, did not quite fail him at this point. Before yielding to the impulse which urged him to lie down, he doubled and ran back, parallel to his trail and some fifty paces from it, for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards. Staggering at every other stride, and fretfully blowing the stained froth from his nostrils, he crouched behind a thicket of hemlock seedlings, and watched the track by which his foes must come.

For a little while he kept his watch alertly, antlers laid back, ears attentive, eyes wide and bright. Then, so slowly that he did not seem aware of it himself, his massive head drooped forward till his muzzle lay outstretched upon the snow. So far back from the gate of the senses drew the life within him, that when three gray-coated figures on snow-shoes went silently past on his old trail, he never saw them. His eyes were filled with a blur of snow, and shadows, and unsteady trunks, and confusing little gleams of light.

Of the three hunters following on the trail of the great black moose, one was more impetuous than the others. It was his first moose that he was trailing; and it was his bullet that was speaking through those scarlet signs on the snow. He kept far ahead of his comrades, elated and fiercely glad, every nerve strung with expectation. Behind each bush, each thicket, he looked for the opportunity to make the final, effective shot that should end the great chase. Not unlearned in woodcraft, he knew what it meant when he reached the loop in the trail. He understood that the moose had gone back to watch for his pursuers. What he did not know or suspect was, that the watcher's eyes had grown too dim to see. He took it for granted that the wise beast had marked their passing, and fled off in another direction as soon as they got by. Instead, however, of redoubling his caution, he plunged ahead with a burst of fresh enthusiasm. He was very properly sure his bullet had done good work, since it had so soon compelled the enduring animal to rest.

A puff of wandering air, by chance, drifted down from the running man to the thicket, behind which the black bull lay, sunk in his torpor. The dreaded man-scent—the scent of death to the wilderness folk—was blown to the bull's nostrils. Filled though they were with that red froth, their fine sense caught the warning. The eyes might fail in their duty, the ears flag and betray their trust; but the nostrils, skilled and schooled, were faithful to the last. Their imperative message pierced to the fainting brain, and life resumed its duties. Once more the dull eyes awoke to brightness. The great, black form lunged up and crashed forward into the open, towering, formidable, and shaking ominous antlers.

Taken by surprise, and too close to shoot in time, the rash hunter sprang aside to make for a tree. He had heard much of the charge of a wounded moose. As he turned, the toe of one snow-shoe caught on a branchy stub, just below the surface of the snow. The snow-shoe turned side on, and tripped him, and he fell headlong right in the path of the charging beast.

As he fell, he heard a shout from his comrades, hurrying up far behind him; but the thought that flashed through him was that they could not be in time. Falling on his face, he expected the next instant to feel the bull's great rending hoofs descend upon his back and stamp his life out.

But the blow never fell. The moose had seen his foe coming, and charged to meet him, his strength and valour flashing up for an instant as the final emergency confronted him. But ere he could reach that prostrate shape in the snow, he forgot what he was doing, and stopped short. With legs a little apart he braced himself, and stood rigid. His noble head was held high, as if he scorned the enemies who had dogged him to his last refuge. But in reality he no longer saw them. The breath came hard through his rattling nostrils, and his eyes, very wide open, were dark with a fear which he could not understand. The life within him strove desperately to maintain its hold upon that free and lordly habitation. The second hunter, now, was just lifting his rifle,—but before he could sight and fire, the chase was ended. That erect, magnificent figure, towering over the fallen man, collapsed all at once. It fell together into a mere heap of hide and antlers. The light in the eyes went out, as a spark that is trodden, and the laboured breathing stopped in mid-breath. The fallen hunter sprang up, rushed forward with a shout, and drew his knife across the outstretched throat.



The Little People of the Sycamore

I.

The fantastic old sycamore, standing alone on the hill, thrust out its one gaunt limb across the face of the moon. It was late April, and the buds not yet swollen to bursting. On the middle of the limb, blackly silhouetted against the golden disk, crouched a raccoon, who sniffed the spring air and scanned the moon-washed spaces. From the marshy spots at the foot of the hill, over toward the full-fed, softly rushing brook, came the high piping of the frogs, a voice of poignant, indeterminate desire.

Having reconnoitred the night to her satisfaction, the raccoon returned to a deep hole in the sycamore, and hastily touched with her pointed nose each in turn of her five, blind, furry little ones. Very little they were, half-cub, half-kitten in appearance, with their long noses, long tails, and bear-like feet. They huddled luxuriously together in the warm, dry darkness of the den, and gave little squeals in response to their mother's touch. In her absence they had been voiceless, almost moveless, lest voice or motion should betray them to an enemy.

Having satisfied herself as to the comfort of the furry children, the old raccoon nimbly descended the tree, ran lightly down the hill, and made for the nearest pool, where the frogs were piping. She was a sturdy figure, yet lithe and graceful, about the bulk of the largest cat, and with a tail almost the length of her body. Her legs, however, were much shorter and more powerful than those of a cat; and when, for a moment of wary observation, she stood still, her feet came down flatly, like those of a bear, though in running she went on her toes, light as the seed of the milkweed. Her head was much like a bear's in shape, with the nose very long and pointed; and a bar of black across the middle of her face, gave a startling intensity to her dark, keen, half-malicious eyes. Her fur, very long and thick, was of a cloudy brown; and the black rings on her gray tail stood out sharply in the moonlight. Both in expression and in movement, she showed that strange mixture of gaiety, ferocity, mischievousness, and confident sagacity, which makes the raccoon unlike in character to all the other wild kindreds.



Though she was on important affairs intent, and carrying the cares of the family, she was not too absorbed to feel the glad impulse of the spring; and for sheer exuberance of life, she would go bounding over a stick or a stone as if it were a tree or a boulder. Though life was a serious matter, she was prepared to get out of it all the fun there was to be had.

But when she neared the noisy pools she went stealthily enough. Nevertheless, for all her caution, the pipings ceased in that section of the pool when she was within two or three feet of the waterside; and, in the little space of sudden silence, she knew that every small piper was staring at her with fixed, protruding eyes. On she went, straight out to the end of a half-submerged log, and there crouched flat, moveless as the log itself. She knew that if she only kept still long enough, she would come to be regarded by the pool-dwellers as nothing more than a portion of the log. Meanwhile the high chorus from the adjoining pools swelled ever louder and shriller, as the small musicians voiced the joy of spring.

For perhaps ten minutes the space about the waiting raccoon on the log appeared lifeless. Then one little black spot, which had seemed like a lump of mud against a dead grass-stalk, moved; then another, and another, and another—all over the pool. Pale throats began to throb rhythmically; and the pipings once more pulsed forth buoyant and strong. The frogs had utterly forgotten the intruder, and their bulging eyes were no longer fixed on the log. Nevertheless, as it chanced, there was not a single piper within reach of the watcher's paw.

The raccoon's eyes gleamed with intenser fire, but she never stirred. She knew that the price of a meal, to most of the wood-folk, was patience as untiring as a stone. Only her full, dark eyes, set in their bar of black, moved watchfully, searching the pallid spaces all about the log.

A moment more and her patience was rewarded. A big frog from the neighbour pool, unaware that there had been any intrusion here, came swimming up, on some errand of private urgency, and made directly for the log. The next instant, before he had any inkling of the imminence of doom, the raccoon's forepaw shot out like a flash. It was a wide-spread, flexible paw, like a little, black, lean hand, strong and delicate, the fingers tipped with formidable claws. It caught the swimming frog under the belly, swept him from the water, and threw him far up on to the shore. With a pounce, the raccoon was upon him; and a snap of her strong teeth ended his struggles.

The raccoon was very hungry, but, unlike others of the hunting tribes, she did not fall instantly to her meal. The mauled victim was covered with bits of dried stubble and leaf and earth, which clung to its sticky skin and were most distasteful to her fastidious appetite. Picking it up in her jaws, she carried it back to the pool. There, holding it in her claws, she proceeded to wash it thoroughly, sousing it up and down till there was not a vestige of soilure to be found upon it. When quite satisfied that no washing could make it cleaner, she fell to and made her meal with relish.

But what was one frog to a raccoon with a family, a mother whose breast must supply five hungry little mouths? She ran over to the brook, and followed down its bank to a spot where it widened out and a strong eddy made up against the hither shore, washing a slope of gravel. Here, in the shallows, she heard a feeble flopping, and knew that a sick or disabled fish was making its last fight with fate. It was a large chub, which had evidently been hooked by some heedless trout-fisher farther up-stream, torn from the hook in anger because it was not a trout, and thrown back into the water, to survive or die as the water-fates should will. It turned on one side, revealing its white belly and torn gills; then, feeling itself washed ashore by the eddy, it gave one more feeble flop in the effort to regain the safe deeps. At this moment the raccoon, pouncing with a light splash into the shallows, seized it, and with a nip through the backbone ended its misery.

Having eaten the fish, and daintily cleaned her fur, the raccoon ascended the bank, with the purpose of returning to her lair in the old sycamore. She stopped abruptly, however, as a new sound, very different from that of the frog chorus, fell upon her heedful ear. It was an excited, yelping whine; and presently she caught sight of a long-legged, plumy-tailed dog, rushing wildly hither and thither, nose to earth, quartering the ground for fresh trails.

The raccoon knew the dog, from a distance, for the young, unbroken, brown Irish setter which had lately come to the neighbour farm. His qualities and capabilities, however, were, as yet, unknown to her. Though she knew herself more than a match for the average dog, and particularly for the small black and white mongrel which, up to a month ago, had been the only dog on the farm, she did not know just how dangerous the Irish setter might be. Therefore, though the light of battle flamed into her eyes, she considered her responsibilities, and looked around for a tree.

There was no tree near, so she turned, crouched close to the ground, and attempted to steal off unperceived. But as she turned the dog caught sight of her. At the same instant he also caught her scent. It was a new scent to him, a most interesting scent; and he rushed upon her, with streaming tail and a peal of joyously savage yelpings. The raccoon backed up against a granite rock, and stood at bay, her long, white teeth bared, her eyes fierce, fearless, and watchful.

The Irish setter was a wild, undisciplined pup, harebrained and headlong after the manner of his breed. Of raccoons and their capabilities he had had no experience. This small, crouching animal, under the rock in the moonlight, seemed to promise an easy victory. He sprang upon her, open-mouthed, and snapped confidently at her neck.

All his big jaws got were a few hairs; for on the instant the raccoon had dodged. Her keen claws raked the side of his face, and her fine, punishing fangs tore a gash in his neck, dangerously near his throat. With a yelp of pain and terror he tore himself free of those deadly teeth and bounded out of reach. And the raccoon, silently triumphant, backed up again into her posture of defence against the rock.

But the Irish setter, in that half-minute, had learned a great deal about raccoons. He now refused to come within four or five feet of his small antagonist. He leaped up and down, snapping and barking, but had no more stomach for the actual encounter. His noisy threatenings, however, which did violence to the silver magic of the night, soon brought no answer; and the black and white mongrel, barking in great excitement, rushed up to take a hand in the affray.

At the sight of the quietly desperate raccoon he stopped short. But his hesitation was from discretion, not from cowardice. He knew that the raccoon could master him. He took some sort of swift counsel, therefore, with the blustering setter; and then, having apparently received assurance of support, sprang boldly on the enemy.

There was a sharp tussle, a confusion of snapping, snarling, clawing, growling, and squealing; while the Irish setter, having reconsidered his promise to take a hand, contented himself with barking brave encouragement from a safe distance. At last the black and white mongrel, finding that he was getting badly worsted and receiving no support, tried to draw away; and the raccoon, fearing to be dragged from her post of vantage against the rock, at once let him go. Both combatants were breathless and bleeding, and they eyed each other with the watchfulness born of respect.

The little mongrel now seemed to hold a second and more elaborate conference with the Irish setter. Possibly he conveyed his opinion of the latter's character, for the proud-plumed tail drooped disconsolately, and the loud-mouthed threatenings ceased. Just what new courage the sagacious mongrel might have succeeded in infusing into the volatile heart of his ally, just what plan of concerted action might have been evolved, to the ruin of the heroic little fighter under the rock, will never be known; for at this moment a second and larger raccoon came running swiftly and silently up the bank.

It was the mother 'coon's mate, who had heard the noise of combat where he was foraging by himself, far down the brook. At sight of this most timely reinforcement, the beleaguered raccoon made a sortie. Recognizing the weak point in the assailing forces, she darted straight upon the hesitating setter, and snapped at his leg.

This was quite too much for his jarred nerves, and with a howl, as if he already felt those white teeth crunching to the bone, the setter turned and fled. The black and white mongrel, highly disgusted, but realizing the hopelessness of the situation, turned and fled after him in silence. Then the triumphant raccoons touched noses in brief congratulation, and presently moved off to their hunting as if nothing had happened. The wild kindred, as a rule, maintain a poise which the most extravagant adventures this side of death seldom deeply disturb.

II.

Up to this time, through the hungry weeks of late winter and the first thaws, the raccoons in the old sycamore had resisted the temptation of the farmer's hen-roosts. They knew that the wilderness hunting, though the most difficult, was safe, while any serious depredations at the farm would be sure to bring retaliation from that most crafty and dangerous creature, man. Now, however, after the fight with the dogs, a mixture of audacity with the desire for revenge got the better of them; and that same night, very late, when the moon was casting long, sharp shadows from the very rim of the horizon, they hurried through the belt of forest, which separated their sycamore from the cleared fields, and stole into the rear of the barn-yard.

The farm was an outpost, so to speak, of the settlements, on the debatable ground between the forces of the forest and the forces of civilization, and therefore much exposed to attack. As the raccoons crept along behind the wood-shed they smelt traces of a sickly pungent odour, and knew that other marauders had been on the ground not very long before. This made them bolder in their enterprise, for they knew that such depredations as they might commit would be laid to the account of the skunks, and therefore not likely to draw down vengeance upon the den in the sycamore. They killed a sitting hen upon her nest, feasted luxuriously upon her eggs and as much of herself as they could hold, and went away highly elated. For three successive nights they repeated their raid upon the fowl-house, each night smelling the pungent, choking scent more strongly, but never catching a glimpse of the rival marauder. On the fourth night, as they crossed the hillocky stump-lot behind the barns, the scent became overpowering, and they found the body of the skunk, where fate had overtaken him, lying beside the path. They stopped, considered, and turned back to their wildwood foraging; and through all that spring they went no more to the farmyard, lest they should call down a similar doom upon themselves.

As spring ripened and turned to summer over the land, food grew abundant in the neighbourhood of the sycamore, and there was no temptation to trespass on man's preserves. There were grouse nests to rifle, there were squirrels, hare, wood-mice, chipmunks, to exercise all the craft and skill of the raccoons. Also there were the occasional unwary trout, chub, or suckers, to be scooped up upon the borders of the brook. And once, more in hate than in hunger, the old mother raccoon had the fierce joy of eradicating a nest of weasels, which she found in a pile of rocks. She had a savage antipathy to the weasel tribe, whose blood-lust menaces all the lesser wood-folk, and whose teeth delight to kill, after hunger is sated, for the mere relish of a taste of quivering brain or a spurt of warm blood. The raccoon carried more scars from the victory over the weasels than she had to remind her of the scuffle with the dogs. But she had the nerve that takes punishment without complaint, and the scars troubled her little.

When the five young raccoons came down from the sycamore and began to depend upon their own foraging, it soon became necessary to extend the range, as game grew shyer and more scarce. Even chub and suckers learn something in course of time; and as for wood-mice and chipmunks, under such incentive as an active family of raccoons can give them they attain to a truly heartless cunning in the art of making their enemies go hungry. Hanging together with an intense clannishness, the raccoon family would make expeditions of such length as to keep often for two or three days at a time away from the home in the sycamore.

At last, one night in late summer, when the stars seemed to hang low among the warm and thick-leaved trees, and warm scents steamed up wherever the dew was disturbed by furry feet, the raccoons wandered over to the edge of the corn-field. It chanced that the corn was just plumping to tender and juicy fulness. The old raccoons showed the youngsters what richness of sweetness lay hidden within the green wrappings of the ears; and forth-with the whole clan fell to feasting recklessly.

In regard to the ducks and chickens of the farm, the raccoons were shrewd enough to know that any extensive depredations upon them would call down the swift vengeance of the farmer-folk; but they could not realize that they were in mischief when they helped themselves to these juicy, growing things. The corn, though manifestly in some way involved with the works of man, seemed nevertheless to them a portion of nature's liberality. They ran riot, therefore, through the tall, well-ordered ranks of green, without malice or misgiving; and in their gaiety they were extravagant. They would snatch a mouthful out of one sweet ear, then out of another, spoiling ten for one that they consumed.

Night after night they came to the corn-field, and waxed fat on their plunder, till at last, when they had done the damage of a herd of oxen, one silvery night they were discovered. The young farmer, with his hired boy and the harebrained, Irish setter, chanced to come by through the woods, and to notice that the corn was moving although there was no wind. The raccoons were promptly hunted out; and one of the young ones, before they could gain the shadowy refuge of the trees, was killed with sticks,—the setter contributing much noise, but keeping at a very safe distance. When the affray was over, and the young farmer, going through the field, found out what damage had been done, he was eloquent with picturesque backwoods blasphemies, and vowed the extermination of the whole 'coon clan. With the aid of the setter, who now, for the first time, was able to prove the worth of his breeding, he tracked the escaping marauders through the woods, and at last, after a long hunt, located their lair in the old sycamore-tree on the hill. At this his wrath gave way to the hunter's elation. His eyes sparkled.



"To-morrow night," said he, to the hired boy, "we'll have a reg'lar old-fashioned 'coon hunt!"

Then, whistling off the setter, who was barking, jumping, and whining ecstatically at the foot of the sycamore-tree, he turned and strode away through the moon-shadows of the forest, with the dog and the hired boy at his heels. The diminished raccoon family, with beating hearts and trembling nerves, snuggled down together into the depths of the sycamore, and dreamed not of the doom preparing for them.

III.

On the following night, soon after moonrise, they came. Stealthily, though there was little need of stealth, they crept, Indian file, around the branchy edges of the fields, through the wet, sweet-smelling thickets. The hunter's fever was upon them, fierce and furtive. They came to the corn-field—to find that the raccoons had paid their visit, made their meal, and got away at the first faint signal of the approach of danger. With an outburst of excited yelpings, the dogs took up the hot trail, and the hunters made straight through the woods for the sycamore-tree.

It was a party of five. With the young farmer, the hired boy, the harebrained Irish setter, and the wise little black and white mongrel, came also the young schoolmaster of the settlement, who boarded at the farm. A year out of college, and more engrossed in the study of the wild creatures than ever he had been in his books, he had joined the hunt less from sympathy than from curiosity. He had outgrown his boyhood's zeal for killing things, and he had a distinct partiality for raccoons; but he had never taken part in a 'coon hunt, and it was his way to go thoroughly into whatever he undertook. He carried a little .22 Winchester repeater, which he had brought with him from college, and had employed, hitherto, on nothing more sentient than empty bottles or old tomato-cans.

Now it chanced that not all the raccoon family had made their escape to the deep hole in the sycamore. The old male, who was rather solitary and moody in his habits at this season, had followed the flight of the clan for only a short distance; and suddenly, to their doubtful joy and complete surprise, the two dogs, who were far ahead of the hunters, overtook him. After a moment's wise hesitation, the black and white mongrel joined battle, while the setter contributed a great deal of noisy encouragement. By the time the hunters came up the mongrel had drawn off, bleeding and badly worsted; and the angry raccoon, backed up against a tree, glared at the newcomers with fierce eyes and wide-open mouth, as if minded to rush upon them.

The odds, however, were much too great for even so dauntless a soul as his; and when the enemy were within some ten or twelve paces, he turned and ran up the tree. In the first fork he crouched, almost hidden, and peered down with one watchful eye.

The young farmer was armed with an old, muzzle-loading, single-barrelled duck-gun. He raised it to his shoulder and took aim at the one bright eye gleaming from behind the branch. Then he lowered it, and turned to his boarder with a mixture of politeness and rustic mockery.

"Your first shot!" said he. "I'll shoot the critter, after you've tried that there pea-shooter on him!"

"He's licked the dogs in fair fight," said the schoolmaster. "Let's let him off!"

The farmer swore in unaffected amazement. "Why, that's the —— —— that does more damage than all the rest put together!" he exclaimed. "You'll see me fix him. But you take first shot, Mister Chase. I want to see the pea-shooter work!"

The young schoolmaster saw his prestige threatened,—and with no profit whatever to the doomed raccoon. Prestige is nowhere held at higher premium than in the backwoods. It is the magic wand of power. The young man fired, a quick, but careful shot; and on the snappy, insignificant report, the raccoon fell dead from the tree.

"You kin shoot some!" remarked the farmer, picking up the victim, and noting the bullet-hole in its forehead. And the hired boy spread his mouth in a huge, broken-toothed grin of admiration.

The old sycamore stood out lonely in the flood of the moonlight. Not a raccoon was in sight; but the round, black doorway to their den was visible against the gray bark, beside the crotch of the one great limb. The frantic yelpings of the dogs around the foot of the tree were proof enough that the family were at home. The hunters, after the ancient custom of men that hunt 'coons, had brought an axe with them; but the hired boy, who carried it, looked with dismay at the huge girth of the sycamore.

"Won't git that chopped down in a week!" said he, with pardonable depreciation of his powers.

"Go fetch another axe!" commanded the farmer, seating himself on a stump, and getting out his pipe.

"It would be a pity to cut down that tree, the biggest sycamore in the country, just to get at a 'coon's nest!" said the young schoolmaster, willing to spare both the tree and its inhabitants.

The farmer let his match go out while he eyed the great trunk.

"Never mind the axe," said he, calling back the hired boy. "Fetch me the new bindin' rope out of the spare manger; an' a bunch of rags, an' some salmon-twine. An' stir yerself!"

Relieved of his anxiety as to the chopping, the boy sped willingly on his errand. And the young schoolmaster realized, with a little twinge of regret, that the raccoon family was doomed.

When the boy came back, the farmer took the bunch of rags, smeared them liberally with wet gunpowder, and tied them into a loose, fluffy ball, on the end of a length of salmon-twine. Then, having thrown the rope over the limb of the sycamore, he held both ends, and sent the hired boy up into the tree, where he sat astride, grinning and expectant, and peered into the well-worn hole.

"Now," said the farmer, tossing the ball of rags up to him, "light this 'ere spittin' devil, an' lower it into the hole, an' we'll see what's what!"

As he spoke, he turned, and gave the schoolmaster a slow wink, which quickened the latter's expectations. The next moment the boy had set a match to the rags, and they were ablaze with wild sputterings and jets of red flame. Eagerly, but carefully, he lowered the fiery ball into the hole, paying out the string till it was evident that the tree was hollow almost down to the butt.

Suddenly there was a wild commotion of squeals, grunts, and scratchings in the depths of the invaded hole. The sounds rose swiftly up the inside of the trunk. Then there was an eruption at the mouth of the hole. A confusion of furry forms shot forth, with such violence that the startled boy almost lost his balance. As it was, he backed away precipitately along the branch, amid derisive encouragement from his friends below.

Having eluded, for the moment, the flaming invader of their home, the raccoons paused on the limb to survey the situation.

"Fling 'em down to us," jeered the farmer, hugely amused at the boy's dismay.

The latter grinned nervously, and started forward as if to obey. But at this moment the raccoons made their decision. The dogs and men below looked more formidable than the hesitating boy astride of their branch. In a resolute line, their fierce old mother leading, they made for him.

The boy backed away with awkward alacrity, but still keeping his hold on the salmon-twine. Consequently, by the time he had nearly reached the end of the limb, the still sputtering fire-ball emerged from the hole in the crotch. At the sound of it behind them the young raccoons turned in terror, and straightway dropped from the tree; but the old mother, undaunted, darted savagely upon her foe. The boy gave a cry of fear. The next instant there was a spiteful crack from the schoolmaster's little rifle. The old raccoon stopped, shrank, and rolled lifeless from the limb.

Meanwhile, the youngsters were in a melee with the two dogs. Though little more than three-fourths grown, they had courage; and so brave a front did they oppose to their enemies that for a few moments the dogs were cautious in attack. Then the black and white mongrel sprang in; and the big setter, realizing that these were no such antagonists as their parents had been, followed, and was astonished to learn that he could stand a bite from those sharp teeth and resist the impulse to howl and run away. In less time than it takes to describe, one of the raccoons was shaken to death in the setter's great jaws, and then the other three scattered in flight.

One was overtaken in two seconds by the black and white mongrel, and bitten through the back. The second ran past the farmer, and was killed by a quick blow with his gun-barrel. The third, full of courage and resource, flew straight at the setter's throat, and so alarmed him that he jumped away. Then, seeing no tree within reach, and probably realizing that there was no escape by any ordinary course, he fled straight to the farmer.

The farmer, however, mistook this action for the ferocity of despair. He struck out with his gun-barrel, missed his aim, swore apprehensively, and caught the little animal a kick, which landed it within a couple of yards of the spot where stood the young schoolmaster, watching the scene with mingled interest and pity. His sympathies now went out warmly to this brave and sole survivor of the little people of the sycamore. His quick intuitions had understood the appeal which had been so cruelly repulsed.

For a second the young raccoon stood still where he had fallen, and his keen, dark eyes flashed a glance on each of his enemies in turn. Both dogs were now rushing upon him. The ever-imminent doom of the wild kindred was about to lay hold of him. He half-turned, as if to die fighting, then changed his mind, darted to the feet of the young schoolmaster, ran up his trouser-leg, and confidently took refuge under his coat.

"Shake him off! Shake him off! A 'coon's bite is pizen!" shouted the farmer, in great excitement.

"Not much!" said the young schoolmaster, with decision, gathering his coat snugly around his panting guest. "This 'coon hunt's over. This little chap's coming home to live with me!"

The farmer stared, and then laughed good-naturedly.

"Jest as you say," said he. "Recken ye've 'arned the right to have a say in the matter. But ye'll find 'coons is mighty mischeevous 'round a house. Fetch the karkisses, Jake. Reckon we've done pretty well for one night's huntin', an' there ain't goin' to be no more 'coons messin' in the corn this summer!"

In a few minutes the procession was again plodding, Indian file, through the still, dew-fragrant, midnight woods. The little raccoon, its heart now beating quietly, nestled in secure contentment under the young schoolmaster's arm, untroubled even by the solemn and deep-toned menace of a horned-owl's cry from the spiky top of a dead hemlock near at hand. From the lake behind the hill came the long laughter of a loon, the wildest and saddest of all the wilderness voices. And a lonely silence settled down about the old sycamore on the hill, solitary under the white, high-sailing moon.



Horns and Antlers

The young red and white bull was very angry. He stood by the pasture bars grumbling, and blowing through his nostrils, and shaking his short, straight horns, and glaring fiercely after the man, who was driving three cows down the hill to the farmyard in the shadowy valley. Every evening for weeks the man had come about sunset and taken away the cows in that fashion, rudely suppressing the young bull's efforts to accompany his herd, and leaving him to the sole companionship of two silly and calf-like yearlings whom he scorned to notice. For the past few evenings the bull had been trying to work himself up to the point of fairly joining issue with the man, and having it out with him. But there was something in the man's cool assurance, in his steady, compelling eye, in the abrupt authority of his voice, which made the angry animal hesitate to defy him. Certainly the bull could see that the man was very much smaller than he,—a pigmy, indeed, in comparison; but he felt that within that erect and fragile-looking shape there dwelt an unknown force which no four-footed beast could ever hope to withstand. Every evening, after the man and cows had gone half-way down the hillside, the bull would fall to bellowing and pawing the ground, and rolling his defiance across the quiet valley. But when next the man came face to face with him, and spoke to him, he would assume, in spite of himself, an attitude of lofty and reluctant deference.

The high hill pasture, with its decaying stumps, its rounded hillocks, its patches of withering fern and harsh dwarf juniper, was bathed in all the colours of the autumn sunset, while the farmyard down in the valley was already in the first purple of the twilight. The centre of the pasture was the hilltop, roughly rounded, and naked save for one maple-tree, now ablaze with scarlet and amber. Along the line of hills across the dusk valley the last of the sunset laid a band of clear orange, which faded softly through lemon and pink and violet and tender green to the high, cold gray-blue of the dome above the hill, where one crow was beating his way toward the tree-tops on the farther ridge. The tranquillity of the scene was curiously at variance with the loud vapourings of the bull, as he raged up and down behind the bars, watched tremblingly by the pair of awestruck yearlings.

Over on the other side of the hill, behind the red maple, where the hillocks and fern patches lay already in a cool, violet-brown shadow, stood a high-antlered red buck, listening to the bull's ravings. He had just come out of the woods and up to the snake fence of split rails which bounded the pasture. With some curiosity, not unmixed with scorn, he had sniffed at the fence, a phenomenon with which he was unfamiliar. But the voice of the bull had promptly absorbed his attention. There was something in the voice that irritated him,—which seemed, though in a language he did not know, to convey a taunt and a challenge. His fine, slim head went high. He snorted several times, stamped his delicate hoofs, then bounded lightly over the fence and trotted up the slope toward the shining maple.

For most of the greater members of the wild kindred,—and for the tribes of the deer and moose, in particular,—the month of October is the month of love and war. Under those tender and enchanting skies, amid the dying crimsons and purples and yellows and russets, and in the wistfulness of the falling leaf, duels are fought to the death in the forest aisles and high hill glades. When a sting and a tang strike across the dreamy air, and the frosts nip crisply, then the blood runs hot in the veins and mating-time stirs up both love and hate. The red buck, as it happened, had been something of a laggard in awakening to the season's summons. His antlers, this year, had been late to mature and overlong in the velvet. When he entered the field, therefore, he found that other bucks had been ahead of him, and that there were no more does wandering forlorn. He had "belled" in vain for several days, searched in vain the limits of his wonted range, and at last set out in quest of some little herd whose leader his superior strength might beat down and supplant. Of his own prowess, his power to supplant all rivals, he had no doubt. But hitherto he had found none to answer his challenge, and his humour was testy. He had no idea what sort of an animal it was that was making such objectionable noises on the other side of the hill; but whatever it might be, he did not like it. He knew it was not a bear. He knew it was not a bull-moose. And of nothing else that walked the forest did he stand in deference, when the courage of rutting-time was upon him.

Stepping daintily, the red buck reached the top of the hill and saw the bull below him. A formidable antagonist, surely! The buck stopped where he was. He had now less inclination to pick a quarrel; but he was consumed with curiosity. What could the heavy red and white beast be up to, with his grunting and bellowing, his pawings of the sod, and his rampings to and fro? The buck could see no object for such defiance, no purpose to such rage. It was plain to him, however, that those two odd-looking, rather attractive little animals, who stood aside and watched the bull's rantings, were in no way the cause or object, as the bull completely ignored them. Growing more and more inquisitive as he gazed, the buck took a few steps down the slope, and again paused to investigate.

At this point the bull caught sight of the intruder, and wheeled sharply. His half-artificial rage against the man was promptly forgotten. Who was this daring trespasser, advancing undismayed into the very heart of his domain? He stared for a moment or two in silence, lashing his tail wrathfully. Then, with a rumbling bellow deep in his throat, he lowered his head and charged.

This was a demonstration which the red buck could very well understand, but his ill-humour had been swallowed up in curiosity, and he was not now so ready to fight. In fact, it was with large apprehension that he saw that dangerous bulk charging upon him, and his great, liquid eyes opened wide. He stood his ground, however, till the bull was almost upon him, and then bounded lightly aside.

The bull, infuriated at this easy evasion, almost threw himself in his effort to stop and turn quickly; and in a few seconds he charged again. This time the charge was down-hill, which doubled its speed and resistlessness. But again the buck sprang aside, and the bull thundered on for a score of yards, ploughing up the turf in the fierce effort to stop himself.

And now the big, wondering eyes of the buck changed. A glitter came into them. It had angered him to be so hustled. And moreover, the ponderous clumsiness of the bull filled him with contempt. When the bull charged him for the third time, he stamped his narrow, sharp hoofs in defiance, and stood with antlers down. At the last moment he jumped aside no farther than was absolutely necessary, and plowed a red furrow in the bull's flank as he plunged by.



Beside himself with rage, the bull changed his tactics, trying short, close rushes and side lunges with his horns. But the buck, thoroughly aroused, and elated with the joy of battle, was always just beyond his reach, and always punishing him. Before the fight had lasted ten minutes, his flanks and neck were streaming with blood.

With his matchless agility, the buck more than once sprang right over his enemy's back. It was impossible for the bull to catch him. Sometimes, instead of ripping with the antlers, he would rear straight up, and slash the bull mercilessly with his knifelike hoofs. For a time, the bull doggedly maintained the unequal struggle; but at length, feeling himself grow tired, and realizing that his foe was as elusive as a shadow, he lost heart and tried to withdraw. But the buck's blood was up, and he would have no withdrawing. He followed relentlessly, bounding and goring and slashing, till the helpless bull was seized with panic, and ran bellowing along the fence, looking vainly for an exit.

For perhaps a hundred yards the conquering buck pursued, now half in malice, half in sport, but always punishing, punishing. Then, suddenly growing tired of it, he stopped, and went daintily mincing his steps back to where the two yearlings stood huddled in awe. They shrank, staring wildly, as he approached, but for some reason did not run away. Sniffing at them curiously, and not finding their scent to his taste, he lifted his slim muzzle, and "belled" sonorously several times, pausing between the calls to listen for an answer from the forest. Then, receiving no reply, he seemed to remember his interrupted quest, and moved off over the hill through the fading light.



In the Deep of the Grass

Misty gray green, washed with tints of the palest violet, spotted with red clover-blooms, white oxeyes, and hot orange Canada lilies, the deep-grassed levels basked under the July sun. A drowsy hum of bees and flies seemed to distil, with warm aromatic scents, from the sun-steeped blooms and grass-tops. The broad, blooming, tranquil expanse, shimmering and softly radiant in the heat, seemed the very epitome of summer. Now and again a small cloud-shadow sailed across it. Now and again a little wind, swooping down upon it gently, bent the grass-tops all one way, and spread a sudden silvery pallor. Save for the droning bees and flies there seemed to be but one live creature astir between the grass and the blue. A solitary marsh-hawk, far over by the rail fence, was winnowing slowly, slowly hither and thither, lazily hunting.

All this was in the world above the grass-tops. But below the grass-tops was a very different world,—a dense, tangled world of dim green shade, shot with piercing shafts of sun, and populous with small, furtive life. Here, among the brown and white roots, the crowded green stems and the mottled stalks, the little earth kindreds went busily about their affairs and their desires, giving scant thought to the aerial world above them. All that made life significant to them was here in the warm, green gloom; and when anything chanced to part the grass to its depths they would scurry away in unanimous indignation.

On a small stone, over which the green closed so thickly that, when he chanced to look upward, he caught but the scantiest shreds of sky, sat a half-grown field-mouse, washing his whiskers with his dainty claws. His tiny, bead-like eyes kept ceaseless watch, peering through the shadowy tangle for whatever might come near in the shape of foe or prey. Presently two or three stems above his head were beaten down, and a big green grasshopper, alighting clumsily from one of his blind leaps, fell sprawling on the stone. Before he could struggle to his long legs and climb back to the safer region of the grass-tops, the little mouse was upon him. Sharp, white teeth pierced his green mail, his legs kicked convulsively twice or thrice, and the faint iridescence faded out of his big, blank, foolish eyes. The mouse made his meal with relish, daintily discarding the dry legs and wing-cases. Then, amid the green debris scattered upon the stone, he sat up, and once more went through his fastidious toilet.

But life for the little mouse in his grass-world was not quite all watching and hunting. When his toilet was complete, and he had amiably let a large black cricket crawl by unmolested, he suddenly began to whirl round and round on the stone, chasing his own tail. As he was amusing himself with this foolish play, another mouse, about the same size as himself, and probably of the same litter, jumped upon the stone, and knocked him off. He promptly retorted in kind; and for several minutes, as if the game were a well-understood one, the two kept it up, squeaking soft merriment, and apparently forgetful of all peril. The grass-tops above this play rocked and rustled in a way that would certainly have attracted attention had there been any eyes to see. But the marsh-hawk was still hunting lazily at the other side of the field, and no tragedy followed the childishness.

Both seemed to tire of the sport at the same instant; for suddenly they stopped, and hurried away through the grass on opposite sides of the stone, as if remembered business had just called to them. Whatever the business was, the first mouse seemed to forget it very speedily, for in half a minute he was back upon the stone again, combing his fine whiskers and scratching his ears. This done to his satisfaction, he dropped like a flash from his seat, and disappeared into a small hollow beneath it. As he did so, a hairy black spider darted out, and ran away among the roots.

A minute or two after the disappearance of the mouse, a creature came along which appeared gigantic in the diminutive world of the grass folk. It was nearly three feet long, and of the thickness of a man's finger. Of a steely gray black, striped and reticulated in a mysterious pattern with a clear whitish yellow, it was an ominous shape indeed, as it glided smoothly and swiftly, in graceful curves, through the close green tangle. The cool shadows and thin lights touched it flickeringly as it went, and never a grass-top stirred to mark its sinister approach. Without a sound of warning it came straight up to the stone, and darted its narrow, cruel head into the hole.

There was a sharp squeak, and instantly the narrow head came out again, ejected by the force of the mouse's agonized spring. But the snake's teeth were fastened in the little animal's neck. The doom of the green world had come upon him while he slept.

But doomed though he was, the mouse was game. He knew there was no poison in those fangs that gripped him, and he struggled desperately to break free. His powerful hind legs kicked the ground with a force which the snake, hampered at first by the fact of its length being partly trailed out through the tangle, was unable to quite control. With unerring instinct,—though this was the first snake he had ever encountered,—the mouse strove to reach its enemy's back and sever the bone with the fine chisels of his teeth. But it was just this that the snake was watchful to prevent. Three times in his convulsive leaps the mouse succeeded in touching the snake's body,—but with his feet only, never once with those destructive little teeth. The snake held him inexorably, with a steady, elastic pressure which yielded just so far, and never quite far enough. And in a minute or two the mouse's brave struggles grew more feeble.

All this, however,—the lashing and the wriggling and the jumping,—had not gone on without much disturbance to the grass-tops. Timothy head and clover-bloom, oxeye and feathery plume-grass, they had bowed and swayed and shivered till the commotion, very conspicuous to one looking down upon the tranquil, flowery sea of green, caught the attention of the marsh-hawk, which at that moment chanced to be perching on a high fence stake. The lean-headed, fierce-eyed, trim-feathered bird shot from his perch, and sailed on long wings over the grass to see what was happening. As the swift shadow hovered over the grass-tops, the snake looked up. Well he understood the significance of that sudden shade. Jerking back his fangs with difficulty from the mouse's neck, he started to glide off under the thickest matting of the roots. But lightning quick though he was, he was not quite quick enough. Just as his narrow head darted under the roots, the hawk, with wings held straight up, and talons reaching down, dropped upon him, and clutched the middle of his back in a grip of steel. The next moment he was jerked into the air, writhing and coiling, and striking in vain frenzy at his captor's mail of hard feathers. The hawk flew off with him over the sea of green to the top of the fence stake, there to devour him at leisure. The mouse, sore wounded but not past recovery, dragged himself back to the hollow under the stone. And over the stone the grass-tops, once more still, hummed with flies, and breathed warm perfumes in the distilling heat.



When the Moon Is over the Corn

In the mystical transparency of the moonlight the leafy world seemed all afloat. The solid ground, the trees, the rail fences, the serried ranks of silver-washed corn seemed to have lost all substantial foundation. Everything lay swimming, as it were, upon a dream. The light that poured down from the round, gold-white, high-sailing moon was not ordinary moonlight, but that liquid enchantment which the sorceress of the heavens sheds at times, and notably at the ripe of the summer, lest earth should forget the incomprehensibility of beauty. A little to one side, beyond the corn-field and over a billowy mass of silvered leafage, stood the gray, clustered roofs of a backwoods farmstead.

In the top of a tall, slim poplar, leaning out from the edge of the woods and over the fence that marked the bounds of the wilderness, clung a queer-looking, roundish object, gently swaying in the magic light. It might almost have been mistaken for a huge, bristly bird's-nest, but for the squeaky grunts of satisfaction which it kept emitting at intervals. Whether it was that the magic of the moonlight had got into its blood, driving it to strange pastimes, or that it was merely indulging an established taste for the game of "Rock-a-bye-baby," observation made it plain that the porcupine was amusing itself by swinging in the tree-top. Any other of the woods folk would have chosen for their recreation a less conspicuous spot than this poplar-top thrust out over the open field. But the porcupine feared nobody, and was quite untroubled by bashfulness. He cared not a jot who heard, saw, or derided him. It was a pleasant world; and for all that had ever been shown him to the contrary, it belonged to him.

After a time he got tired of swinging and squeaking. He straightened himself out, slowly descended the tree, and set off along the top of the fence toward the farmyard. Never before had it occurred to him to visit the farmyard; but now that the moon had put the madness into his head, he acted upon the whim without a moment's misgiving. Unlike the rest of the wild kindreds, he stood little in awe of either the works or the ways of man.



Presently the fence turned off at a sharp angle to the way he had chosen to go. He descended, and crawled in leisurely fashion along an unused, grassy lane, wandering from side to side as he went, as if time were of no concern to him. About a hundred feet from the fence he came to a brook crossing the lane. Spring freshets had carried away the little bridge, doubtless years before, and now the stream was spanned by nothing but an old tree-trunk, carelessly thrown across. Upon the end of this,—for him an ample bridge,—the porcupine crawled, never troubling himself to inquire if another passenger might chance to be crossing from the other side.

At the very same moment, indeed, another passenger raised furtive, padded paws, and took possession of the opposite end of the bridge. It was a huge bob-cat, with stubby tail and wide, pale green, unwinking eyes. It had come stealing down from the thick woods to visit the farmyard,—driven, perhaps, by the same moon-madness that stirred the porcupine. But at the edge of the silent farmyard, white and tranquil under the flooding radiance, the man-smell on the bars had brought the bob-cat to a sudden halt. No moon-madness could make the cautious cat forget the menace of that smell. It had turned in its tracks, and concluded to look for woodchucks in the corn-field.

When the bob-cat had taken a few paces along the log, it paused and glared at the porcupine vindictively, its eyes seeming to emit faint, whitish flames. The porcupine, on the other hand, came right on, slowly and indifferently, as if unaware of the bob-cat's presence. The latter crouched down, flattened back its ears, dug long, punishing claws into the bark, opened its sharp-toothed jaws, and gave a savage spitting snarl. Was it possible that this insignificant, blundering, sluggish creature, this pig of the tree-tops, was going to demand the right of way? The porcupine, unhurried, continued to advance, nothing but an increased elevation of his quills betraying that he was aware of an opponent. The cat's absurd stub of a tail twitched spasmodically, and for a few seconds it seemed as if rage might get the better of discretion. But all the wild creatures know the qualities of that fine armory of quills carried by the porcupine. The big cat pulled himself together with a screech, ran back, and sprang off to a rock on the bank, whence he spat impotently while the porcupine crawled by.

So leisurely was the progress of the bristling little adventurer that it was a good half-hour ere he reached the farmyard bars. Here he stopped, and sniffed curiously. But it was no dread of the dreaded man-smell that delayed him. The bars had been handled by many hot, toiling hands; and the salt of their sweat had left upon the wood a taste which the porcupine found pleasant. Here and there, up and down, he gnawed at the discoloured surfaces. Then, when the relish was exhausted, he climbed down on the inside, and marched deliberately up the middle of the yard toward the kitchen door. His quills made a dry, rustling noise as he went; his claws rattled on the chips, and in the unshadowed open he was most audaciously in evidence. His bearing was not defiant, but self-reliant, as of one who minded his own business and demanded to be let alone. From the stables across the yard came the stamping of horses' hoofs; a turkey in the tree behind the barn quit-quitted warningly; and a long-drawn, high-pitched kwee-ee-ee-ee-ee of inquiry came from the wakeful Leghorn cock in the poultry-house. To all these unfamiliar sounds the porcupine turned the deaf ear of self-contained indifference.

At this moment around from the front door-step came the farmer's big black and white dog, to see what was exciting his family. He was a wise dog, and versed in the lore of the wilderness. Had the intruder been a bear he would have sought to attract its attention, and raised an outcry to summon his master to the fray. But a porcupine! He was too wary to attack it, and too dignified to make any fuss over it. With a scornful woof, he turned away, and strolled into the garden, to dig up an old bone which he had buried in the cucumber-bed.

The porcupine, meanwhile, had found something that interested him. Near the kitchen door stood an empty wooden box, shining in the moonlight. First its bright colour, then its scent, attracted his attention. It had recently contained choice flakes of salted codfish, and the salt had soaked deep into its fibres. With the long, keen chisels of his front teeth, he attacked the wood eagerly,—and the loud sound of his gnawings echoed on the stillness. It awoke the farmer, who rubbed his eyes, arose on his elbow, listened a moment, muttered, "Another of them durn porkypines!" and dropped to sleep again.

When the leisurely adventurer had eaten as much of the box as he could hold, he took it into his head to go home,—which meant, to any comfortable tree back in the woods. His home was at large. This time he decided to go through a hole under the board fence between the barn and the fowl-house. And it was here that, for the first time on this expedition, he was induced by a power outside himself to change his mind. As he approached the hole under the fence, from the radiance of the open yard beyond came another animal, heading for the same point. The stranger was much smaller than the porcupine, and wore no panoply of points. But it had the same tranquil air of owning the earth. The moonlight, shining full upon it, showed its pointed nose, and two broad, white stripes running down the black fur of its back.

The stranger reached the opening in the fence about three seconds ahead of the porcupine. And this time the porcupine was the one to defer. He did not like it. He grunted angrily, and his deadly spines stood up. But he drew aside, and avoided giving any offence to so formidable an acquaintance. No foot of ground would his sturdy courage yield to bob-cat, bear, or man; but of a skunk he was afraid. When the skunk had passed through the fence, and wandered off to hunt for eggs under the barn, the porcupine turned and went all the way around the fowl-house. Then he struck down through the back of the garden, gained the rail fence enclosing the corn-field, and at length, whether by intention, or because the fence, a convenient promenade, led him to it, he came back to the leaning poplar. With a pleasant memory drawing him on, he climbed the tree once more. The round moon was getting low now, and the shadows she cast out across the corn were long and weird. But the downpour of her light was still mysterious in its clarity, and in its sheen the porcupine, rolled up like a bird's nest, swung himself luxuriously to sleep.