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[Illustration: Geese]

                        The Kindred of the Wild
                         A Book of Animal Life

[Illustration: Fox]

[Illustration: Otter; The Works of Charles G. D. Roberts]

  The Haunters of the Silences           $2.00
  Red Fox                                 2.00
  The Watchers of the Trails              2.00
  The Kindred of the Wild                 2.00
  Earth’s Enigmas                         1.50
  The Heart of the Ancient Wood           1.50
  The Heart That Knows                    1.50
  The Prisoner of Mademoiselle            1.50
  Barbara Ladd                            1.50
  The Forge in the Forest                 1.50
  A Sister to Evangeline                  1.50
  By the Marshes of Minas                 1.50
  Cameron of Lochiel (_translated_)       1.50
  The Young Acadian                        .50
  The Cruise of the Yacht “Dido”           .50
  The Haunter of the Pine Gloom            .50
  The Lord of the Air                      .50
  The King of the Mamozekel                .50
  The Watchers of the Camp-fire            .50
  The Return to the Trails                 .50
  The Little People of the Sycamore        .50

                          L. C. Page & Company
                  New England Building, Boston, Mass.

[Illustration: The Kindred of the Wild, by Charles G. D. Roberts]

                             THE · KINDRED
                            OF · THE · WILD

                  A · BOOK · OF · ANIMAL · LIFE · _by_
                       CHARLES · G · D · ROBERTS
                              _Author of_
                    _The Heart of the Ancient Wood_
                       _The Forge in the Forest_
                        _A Sister to Evangeline_
                              _Poems etc_—

                      _With many illustrations by
                        CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL_

                       L · C · PAGE · & · COMPANY
                        PUBLISHERS . . . BOSTON

[Illustration: Hare]

    _Copyright, 1900, 1901, 1902, by_ The Outing Publishing Company
       _Copyright, 1901, 1902, by_ Frank Leslie Publishing House
              _Copyright, 1896, by_ H. S. Stone & Company
        _Copyright, 1902, by_ The Criterion Publication Company
             _Copyright, 1902, by_ Charles Scribner’s Sons

                         _Copyright, 1902, by_
                          L. C. Page & Company
                             (INCORPORATED)
                         _All rights reserved_

                          Published, May, 1902
                      Tenth Impression, July, 1907

                             Colonial Press
            Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
                         Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

[Illustration: Lynx]

                              To My People

[Illustration: Deer]

                          Contents of the Book

[Illustration: Puma]

                                                                     PAGE
  The Animal Story                                                    [1] 15
  The Moonlight Trails                                                 33
  The Lord of the Air                                                  55
  Wild Motherhood                                                      93
  The Homesickness of Kehonka                                         117
  Savoury Meats                                                       143
  The Boy and Hushwing                                                159
  A Treason of Nature                                                 181
  The Haunter of the Pine Gloom                                       199
  The Watchers of the Camp-Fire                                       241
  When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots                               273
  The King of the Mamozekel                                           287
  In Panoply of Spears                                                349

[1]Included by permission of the University Society

[Illustration: Owl]

              A List of the Full-Page Drawings in the Book

[Illustration: Crouching Lynx]

                                                                     PAGE
  The Animal Story                                                     13
      “The sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger”                     17
      “The inscrutable eyes of all the cats”                           25
  The Moonlight Trails                                                 31
      “All the players were motionless, with ears one way”             37
      “It was beyond his reach”                                        49
  The Lord of the Air                                                  53
      “He saw his wide-winged mate, too, leave the nest”               57
      “Holding the fish firmly in the clutch of one great talon”       65
      “Helplessly intertangled in the meshes”                          79
      “They flocked blackly about with vituperative malice”            83
  Wild Motherhood                                                      91
      “Led his herd off northward”                                     95
      “Stood for a moment to sniff the air”                            99
      “Around its rim circled the wary mother”                        105
  The Homesickness of Kehonka                                         115
      “He would stand motionless, his compact, glossy head high in
          air”                                                        125
      “Fell with a great splash into the channel of the Tantramar”    133
      “The discourager of quests darted stealthily forth”             137
  Savoury Meats                                                       141
      “Two green eyes, close to the ground”                           153
  The Boy and Hushwing                                                157
      “He struck the empty air”                                       165
      “Settled himself, much disconcerted, on the back of an old
          haircloth sofa”                                             171
  A Treason of Nature                                                 179
      “He gave answer at once to the summons”                         187
      “Started in mad haste down the shore”                           189
      “He dug his claws deeper into the bark, and bared his fangs
          thirstily”                                                  191
  The Haunter of the Pine Gloom                                       197
      “The big beast little imagined himself observed”                203
      “A great lynx landed on the log”                                207
      “Presently the lucifee arose and began creeping stealthily
          closer”                                                     213
      “A silent gray thunderbolt fell upon him”                       217
      “Yawned hugely, and stretched herself like a cat”               223
      “Mounted the carcass with an air of lordship”                   229
  The Watchers of the Camp-Fire                                       239
      “His big, spreading paws carried him over its surface as if he
          had been shod with snow-shoes”                              243
      “He pushed the ball again, very, very delicately”               249
      “Stole noiselessly toward the shining lovely thing”             259
  When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots                               271
      “She struggled straight toward the den that held her young”     281
  The King of the Mamozekel                                           285
      “The calf stood close by, watching with interest”               293
      “The mother mallard would float amid her brood”                 301
      “But they fell short of their intended mark”                    309
      “Thick piled the snows about the little herd”                   319
      “Was off through the underbrush in ignominious flight”          335
      “It was fear itself that he was wiping out”                     343
  In Panoply of Spears                                                347
      “The bear eyed him for some moments”                            353
      “A weasel glided noiselessly up to the door of the den”         369

  [Illustration: Eagle]

  [Illustration: THE ANIMAL STORY]

                                   The
                           Kindred of the Wild

                              Introductory
                            The Animal Story

Alike in matter and in method, the animal story, as we have it to-day,
may be regarded as a culmination. The animal story, of course, in one
form or another, is as old as the beginnings of literature. Perhaps the
most engrossing part in the life-drama of primitive man was that played
by the beasts which he hunted, and by those which hunted him. They
pressed incessantly upon his perceptions. They furnished both material
and impulse for his first gropings toward pictorial art. When he acquired
the kindred art of telling a story, they supplied his earliest themes;
and they suggested the hieroglyphs by means of which, on carved bone or
painted rock, he first gave his narrative a form to outlast the spoken
breath. We may not unreasonably infer that the first animal story—the
remote but authentic ancestor of “Mowgli” and “Lobo” and “Krag”—was a
story of some successful hunt, when success meant life to the starving
family; or of some desperate escape, when the truth of the narrative was
attested, to the hearers squatted trembling about their fire, by the
sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger at the rock-barred mouth of the
cave. Such first animal stories had at least one merit of prime literary
importance. They were convincing. The first critic, however supercilious,
would be little likely to cavil at their verisimilitude.

Somewhat later, when men had begun to harass their souls, and their
neighbours, with problems of life and conduct, then these same animals,
hourly and in every aspect thrust beneath the eyes of their observation,
served to point the moral of their tales. The beasts, not being in a
position to resent the ignoble office thrust upon them, were compelled to
do duty as concrete types of those obvious virtues and vices of which
alone the unsophisticated ethical sense was ready to take cognisance. In
this way, as soon as composition became a _métier_, was born the fable;
and in this way the ingenuity of the first author enabled him to avoid a
perilous unpopularity among those whose weaknesses and defects his art
held up to the scorn of all the caves.

[Illustration: “THE SNIFFINGS OF THE BAFFLED BEAR OR TIGER.”]

These earliest observers of animal life were compelled by the necessities
of the case to observe truly, if not deeply. Pitting their wits against
those of their four-foot rivals, they had to know their antagonists, and
respect them, in order to overcome them. But it was only the most salient
characteristics of each species that concerned the practical observer. It
was simple to remember that the tiger was cruel, the fox cunning, the
wolf rapacious. And so, as advancing civilisation drew an ever widening
line between man and the animals, and men became more and more engrossed
in the interests of their own kind, the personalities of the wild
creatures which they had once known so well became obscured to them, and
the creatures themselves came to be regarded, for the purposes of
literature, as types or symbols merely,—except in those cases, equally
obstructive to exact observation, where they were revered as temporary
tenements of the spirits of departed kinsfolk. The characters in that
great beast-epic of the middle ages, “Reynard the Fox,” though far more
elaborately limned than those which play their succinct rôles in the
fables of Æsop, are at the same time in their elaboration far more alien
to the truths of wild nature. Reynard, Isegrim, Bruin, and Greybeard have
little resemblance to the fox, the wolf, the bear, and the badger, as
patience, sympathy, and the camera reveal them to us to-day.

The advent of Christianity, strange as it may seem at first glance, did
not make for a closer understanding between man and the lower animals.
While it was militant, fighting for its life against the forces of
paganism, its effort was to set man at odds with the natural world, and
fill his eyes with the wonders of the spiritual. Man was the only thing
of consequence on earth, and of man, not his body, but his soul. Nature
was the ally of the enemy. The way of nature was the way of death. In man
alone was the seed of the divine. Of what concern could be the joy or
pain of creatures of no soul, to-morrow returning to the dust? To
strenuous spirits, their eyes fixed upon the fear of hell for themselves,
and the certainty of it for their neighbours, it smacked of sin to take
thought of the feelings of such evanescent products of corruption. Hence
it came that, in spite of the gentle understanding of such sweet saints
as Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, and Colomb of the Bees, the
inarticulate kindred for a long time reaped small comfort from the
Dispensation of Love.

With the spread of freedom and the broadening out of all intellectual
interests which characterise these modern days, the lower kindreds began
to regain their old place in the concern of man. The revival of interest
in the animals found literary expression (to classify roughly) in two
forms, which necessarily overlap each other now and then, viz., the story
of adventure and the anecdote of observation. Hunting as a recreation,
pursued with zest from pole to tropics by restless seekers after the new,
supplied a species of narrative singularly akin to what the first animal
stories must have been,—narratives of desperate encounter, strange peril,
and hairbreadth escape. Such hunters’ stories and travellers’ tales are
rarely conspicuous for the exactitude of their observation; but that was
not the quality at first demanded of them by fireside readers. The
attention of the writer was focussed, not upon the peculiarities or the
emotions of the beast protagonist in each fierce, brief drama, but upon
the thrill of the action, the final triumph of the human actor. The
inevitable tendency of these stories of adventure with beasts was to
awaken interest in animals, and to excite a desire for exact knowledge of
their traits and habits. The interest and the desire evoked the natural
historian, the inheritor of the half-forgotten mantle of Pliny. Precise
and patient scientists made the animals their care, observing with
microscope and measure, comparing bones, assorting families, subdividing
subdivisions, till at length all the beasts of significance to man were
ticketed neatly, and laid bare, as far as the inmost fibre of their
material substance was concerned, to the eye of popular information.

Altogether admirable and necessary as was this development at large,
another, of richer or at least more spiritual significance, was going on
at home. Folk who loved their animal comrades—their dogs, horses, cats,
parrots, elephants—were observing, with the wonder and interest of
discoverers, the astonishing fashion in which the mere instincts of these
so-called irrational creatures were able to simulate the operations of
reason. The results of this observation were written down, till
“anecdotes of animals” came to form a not inconsiderable body of
literature. The drift of all these data was overwhelmingly toward one
conclusion. The mental processes of the animals observed were seen to be
far more complex than the observers had supposed. Where instinct was
called in to account for the elaborate ingenuity with which a dog would
plan and accomplish the outwitting of a rival, or the nice judgment with
which an elephant, with no nest-building ancestors behind him to instruct
his brain, would choose and adjust the teak-logs which he was set to
pile, it began to seem as if that faithful faculty was being overworked.
To explain yet other cases, which no accepted theory seemed to fit,
coincidence was invoked, till that rare and elusive phenomenon threatened
to become as customary as buttercups. But when instinct and coincidence
had done all that could be asked of them, there remained a great
unaccounted-for body of facts; and men were forced at last to accept the
proposition that, within their varying limitations, animals can and do
reason. As far, at least, as the mental intelligence is concerned, the
gulf dividing the lowest of the human species from the highest of the
animals has in these latter days been reduced to a very narrow
psychological fissure.

Whether avowedly or not, it is with the psychology of animal life that
the representative animal stories of to-day are first of all concerned.
Looking deep into the eyes of certain of the four-footed kindred, we have
been startled to see therein a something, before unrecognised, that
answered to our inner and intellectual, if not spiritual selves. We have
suddenly attained a new and clearer vision. We have come face to face
with personality, where we were blindly wont to predicate mere instinct
and automatism. It is as if one should step carelessly out of one’s back
door, and marvel to see unrolling before his new-awakened eyes the peaks
and seas and misty valleys of an unknown world. Our chief writers of
animal stories at the present day may be regarded as explorers of this
unknown world, absorbed in charting its topography. They work, indeed,
upon a substantial foundation of known facts. They are minutely
scrupulous as to their natural history, and assiduous contributors to
that science. But above all are they diligent in their search for the
motive beneath the action. Their care is to catch the varying, elusive
personalities which dwell back of the luminous brain windows of the dog,
the horse, the deer, or wrap themselves in reserve behind the inscrutable
eyes of all the cats, or sit aloof in the gaze of the hawk and the eagle.
The animal story at its highest point of development is a psychological
romance constructed on a framework of natural science.

[Illustration: “THE INSCRUTABLE EYES OF ALL THE CATS.”]

The real psychology of the animals, so far as we are able to grope our
way toward it by deduction and induction combined, is a very different
thing from the psychology of certain stories of animals which paved the
way for the present vogue. Of these, such books as “Beautiful Joe” and
“Black Beauty” are deservedly conspicuous examples. It is no detraction
from the merit of these books, which have done great service in awakening
a sympathetic understanding of the animals and sharpening our sense of
kinship with all that breathe, to say that their psychology is human.
Their animal characters think and feel as human beings would think and
feel under like conditions. This marks the stage which these works occupy
in the development of the animal story.

The next stage must be regarded as, in literature, a climax indeed, but
not the climax in this genre. I refer to the “Mowgli” stories of Mr.
Kipling. In these tales the animals are frankly humanised. Their
individualisation is distinctly human, as are also their mental and
emotional processes, and their highly elaborate powers of expression.
Their notions are complex; whereas the motives of real animals, so far as
we have hitherto been able to judge them, seem to be essentially simple,
in the sense that the motive dominant at a given moment quite
obliterates, for the time, all secondary motives. Their reasoning powers
and their constructive imagination are far beyond anything which present
knowledge justifies us in ascribing to the inarticulate kindreds. To say
this is in no way to depreciate such work, but merely to classify it.
There are stories being written now which, for interest and artistic
value, are not to be mentioned in the same breath with the “Mowgli”
tales, but which nevertheless occupy a more advanced stage in the
evolution of this genre.

It seems to me fairly safe to say that this evolution is not likely to go
beyond the point to which it has been carried to-day. In such a story,
for instance, as that of “Krag, the Kootenay Ram,” by Mr. Ernest Seton,
the interest centres about the personality, individuality, mentality, of
an animal, as well as its purely physical characteristics. The field of
animal psychology so admirably opened is an inexhaustible world of
wonder. Sympathetic exploration may advance its boundaries to a degree of
which we hardly dare to dream; but such expansion cannot be called
evolution. There would seem to be no further evolution possible, unless
based upon a hypothesis that animals have souls. As souls are apt to
elude exact observation, to forecast any such development would seem to
be at best merely fanciful.

The animal story, as we now have it, is a potent emancipator. It frees us
for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities, and from the mean
tenement of self of which we do well to grow weary. It helps us to return
to nature, without requiring that we at the same time return to
barbarism. It leads us back to the old kinship of earth, without asking
us to relinquish by way of toll any part of the wisdom of the ages, any
fine essential of the “large result of time.” The clear and candid life
to which it re-initiates us, far behind though it lies in the long upward
march of being, holds for us this quality. It has ever the more
significance, it has ever the richer gift of refreshment and renewal, the
more humane the heart and spiritual the understanding which we bring to
the intimacy of it.

[Illustration: THE MOONLIGHT TRAILS]

                          The Moonlight Trails

There was no wind. The young fir-trees stood up straight and tall and
stiffly pointed from the noiseless white levels of the snow. The
blue-white moon of midwinter, sharply glittering like an icicle, hung
high in a heaven clear as tempered steel.

The young fir-trees were a second growth, on lands once well cleared, but
afterward reclaimed by the forest. They rose in serried phalanxes, with
here and there a solitary sentinel of spruce, and here and there a little
huddling group of yellow birches. The snow-spaces between formed
sparkling alleys, and long, mysterious vistas, expanding frequently into
amphitheatres of breathless stillness and flooding radiance. There was no
trace of that most ghostly and elusive winter haze which represents the
fine breathing of the forest. Rather the air seemed like diamonds held in
solution, fluent as by miracle, and not without strange peril to be
jarred by sound or motion.

Yet presently the exaggerated tension of the stillness was broken, and no
disaster followed. Two small, white, furry shapes came leaping, one
behind the other, down a corridor of radiance, as lightly as if a wind
were lifting and drifting them. It was as if some of the gentler spirits
of the winter and the wild had seized the magic hour for an incarnation.
Leaping at gay leisure, their little bodies would lengthen out to a span
of nearly three feet, then round themselves together so that the soft
pads of their hinder paws would touch the snow within a couple of inches
of the prints from which their fore paws were even then starting to rise.
The trail thus drawn down the white aisle consisted of an orderly
succession of close triplicate bunches of footprints, like no other trail
of the wild folk. From time to time the two harmonious shapes would halt,
sit up on their hindquarters, erect their long, attentive ears, glance
about warily with their bulging eyes which, in this position, could see
behind as well as in front of their narrow heads, wrinkle those cleft
nostrils which were cunning to differentiate every scent upon the sharp
air, and then browse hastily but with a cheerful relish at the spicy
shoots of the young yellow birch. Feeding, however, was plainly not their
chief purpose. Always within a few moments they would resume their
leaping progress through the white glitter and the hard, black shadows.

Very soon their path led them out into a wide glade, fenced all about
with the serried and formal ranks of the young firs. It seemed as if the
blue-white moon stared down into this space with a glassiness of
brilliance even more deluding and magical than elsewhere. The snow here
was crossed by a tangle of the fine triplicate tracks. Doubling upon
themselves in all directions and with obvious irresponsibility, they were
evidently the trails of play rather than of business or of flight. Their
pattern was the pattern of mirth; and some half dozen wild white rabbits
were gaily weaving at it when the two newcomers joined them. Long ears
twinkling, round eyes softly shining, they leaped lightly hither and
thither, pausing every now and then to touch each other with their
sensitive noses, or to pound on the snow with their strong hind legs in
mock challenge. It seemed to be the play of care-free children, almost a
kind of confused dance, a spontaneous expression of the joy of life.
Nevertheless, for all the mirth of it, there was never a moment when two
or more of the company were not to be seen sitting erect, with watchful
ears and eyes, close in the shadow of the young fir-trees. For the night
that was so favourable to the wild rabbits was favourable also to the
fox, the wildcat, and the weasel. And death stalks joy forever among the
kindred of the wild.

From time to time one or another of the leaping players would take
himself off through the fir-trees, while others continued to arrive along
the moonlight trails. This went on till the moon had swung perhaps an
hour’s distance on her shining course; then, suddenly it stopped; and
just for a fleeting fraction of a breath all the players were motionless,
with ears one way. From one or another of the watchers there had come
some signal, swift, but to the rabbits instantly clear. No onlooker not
of the cleft-nose, long-ear clan could have told in what the signal
consisted, or what was its full significance. But whatever it was, in a
moment the players were gone, vanishing to the east and west and south,
all at once, as if blown off by a mighty breath. Only toward the north
side of the open there went not one.

[Illustration: “ALL THE PLAYERS WERE MOTIONLESS, WITH EARS ONE WAY.”]

Nevertheless, the moon, peering down with sharp scrutiny into the
unshadowed northern fringes of the open, failed to spy out any lurking
shape of fox, wildcat, or weasel. Whatever the form in which fate had
approached, it chose not to unmask its menace. Thereafter, for an hour or
more, the sparkling glade with its woven devices was empty. Then,
throughout the rest of the night, an occasional rabbit would go bounding
across it hastily, on affairs intent, and paying no heed to its
significant hieroglyphs. And once, just before moon-set, came a large red
fox and sniffed about the tangled trails with an interest not untinged
with scorn.

                                  II.

The young fir wood covered a tract of poor land some miles in width,
between the outskirts of the ancient forest and a small settlement known
as Far Bazziley. In the best house of Far Bazziley—that of the parish
clergyman—there lived a boy whom chance, and the capricious destiny of
the wild folk, led to take a sudden lively interest in the moonlight
trails. Belonging to a different class from the other children of the
settlement, he was kept from the district school and tutored at home,
with more or less regularity, by his father. His lesson hours, as a rule,
fell when the other boys were busy at their chores—and it was the
tradition of Far Bazziley that boys were born to work, not play. Thus it
happened that the boy had little of the companionship of his fellows.

Being of too eager and adventurous a spirit to spend much of his leisure
in reading, he was thrown upon his own resources, and often found himself
hungry for new interests. Animals he loved, and of all cruelty toward
them he was fiercely intolerant. Great or small, it hurt him to see them
hurt; and he was not slow to resent and resist that kind of discomfort.

On more than one occasion he had thrashed other boys of the settlement
for torturing, with boyish playfulness and ingenuity, superfluous kittens
which thrifty housewives had confided to them to drown. These rough
interferences with custom did him no harm, for the boys were forced to
respect his prowess, and they knew well enough that kittens had some kind
of claim upon civilisation. But when it came to his overbearing
championship of snakes, that was another matter, and he made himself
unpopular. It was rank tyranny, and disgustingly unnatural, if they could
not crush a snake’s back with stones and then lay it out in the sun to
die gradually, without the risk of getting a black eye and bloodied nose
for it.

It was in vain the boy explained, on the incontrovertible authority of
his father, that the brilliant garter-snake, the dainty little green
snake, and indeed all the snakes of the neighbourhood without exception,
were as harmless as lady-bugs. A snake was a snake; and in the eyes of
Far Bazziley to kill one, with such additions of painfulness in the
process as could be devised on the moment, was to obey Biblical
injunction. The boy, not unnaturally, was thrust more and more into the
lonely eminence of his isolation.

But one unfailing resource he had always with him, and that was the hired
man. His mother might be, as she usually was, too absorbed in household
cares to give adequate heed to his searching interrogations. His father
might spend huge blanks of his time in interminable drives to outlying
parts of his parish. But the hired man was always at hand. It was not
always the same hired man. But whether his name were Bill or Tom, Henry
or Mart or Chris, the boy found that he could safely look for some
uniformity of characteristics, and that he could depend upon each in turn
for some teaching that seemed to him more practical and timely than
equations or the conjugation of _nolo_, _nolle_, _nolui_.

At this particular time of the frequenting of the moonlight trails, the
boy was unusually fortunate in his hired man. The latter was a boyish,
enthusiastic fellow, by the name of Andy, who had an interest in the kind
of things which the boy held important. One morning as he was helping
Andy with the barn work, the man said:

“It’s about full moon now, and right handy weather for rabbit-snarin’.
What say if we git off to the woods this afternoon, if your father’ll let
us, an’ set some snares fer to-night, afore a new snow comes and spiles
the tracks?”

The silent and mysterious winter woods, the shining spaces of the snow
marked here and there with strange footprints leading to unknown lairs,
the clear glooms, the awe and the sense of unseen presences—these were
what came thronging into the boy’s mind at Andy’s suggestion. All the
wonderful possibilities of it! The wild spirit of adventure, the hunting
zest of elemental man, stirred in his veins at the idea. Had he seen a
rabbit being hurt he would have rushed with indignant pity to the rescue.
But the idea of rabbit-snaring, as presented by Andy’s exciting words,
fired a side of his imagination so remote from pity as to have no
communication with it whatever along the nerves of sympathy or
association. He was a vigorous and normal boy, and the jewel of
consistency (which is usually paste) was therefore of as little
consequence to him as to the most enlightened of his elders. He threw
himself with fervour into Andy’s scheme, plied him with exhaustive
questions as to the methods of making and setting snares, and spent the
rest of the morning, under direction, in whittling with his pocket-knife
the required uprights and cross-pieces, and twisting the deadly nooses of
fine copper wire. In the prime of the afternoon the two, on their
snowshoes, set off gaily for the wood of the young fir-trees.

Up the long slope of the snowy pasture lots, where the drifted hillocks
sparkled crisply, and the black stumps here and there broke through in
suggestive, fantastic shapes, and the gray rampikes towered bleakly to
the upper air, the two climbed with brisk steps, the dry cold a tonic to
nerve and vein. As they entered the fir woods a fine, balsamy tang
breathed up to greet them, and the boy’s nostrils took eager note of it.

The first tracks to meet their eyes were the delicate footprints of the
red squirrel, ending abruptly at the foot of a tree somewhat larger than
its fellows. Then the boy’s sharp eyes marked a trail very slender and
precise—small, clear dots one after the other; and he had a feeling of
protective tenderness to the maker of that innocent little trail, till
Andy told him that he of the dainty footprints was the bloodthirsty and
indomitable weasel, the scourge of all the lesser forest kin.

The weasel’s trail led them presently to another track, consisting of
those triplicate clusters of prints, dropped lightly and far apart; and
Andy said, “Rabbits! and the weasel’s after them!” The words made a swift
picture in the boy’s imagination; and he never forgot the trail of the
wild rabbit or the trail of the weasel.

Crossing these tracks, they soon came to one more beaten, along which it
was plain that many rabbits had fared. This they followed, one going on
either side of it that it might not be obliterated by the broad trail of
their snowshoes; and in a little time it led them out upon the sheltered
glade whereon the merrymakers of the night before had held their revels.

In the unclouded downpour of the sunlight the tracks stood forth with
emphasised distinctness, a melting, vapourous violet against the
gold-white of the snowy surface; and to the boy’s eyes, though not to the
man’s, was revealed a formal and intricate pattern in the tangled
markings. To Andy it was incomprehensible; but he saw at once that in the
ways leading to the open it would be well to plant the snares. The boy,
on the other hand, had a keener insight, and exclaimed at once, “What fun
they must have been having!” But his sympathy was asleep. Nothing, at
that moment, could wake it up so far as to make him realise the part he
was about to play toward those childlike revellers of the moonlight
trails.

Skirting the glade, and stepping carefully over the trails, they
proceeded to set their snares at the openings of three of the main
alleys; and for a little while the strokes of their hatchets rang out
frostily on the still air as they chopped down fragrant armfuls of the
young fir branches.

Each of the three snares was set in this fashion: First they stuck the
fir branches into the snow to form a thick green fence on both sides of
the trail, with a passage only wide enough for one rabbit at a time to
pass through. On each side of this passageway they drove securely a
slender stake, notched on the inner face. Over the opening they bent down
a springy sapling, securing its top, by a strong cord, to a small wooden
cross-piece which was caught and held in the notches of the two uprights.
From the under side of this cross-piece was suspended the easy-running
noose of copper wire, just ample enough for a rabbit’s head, with the
ears lying back, to enter readily.

By the time the snares were set it was near sundown, and the young
fir-trees were casting long, pointed, purple shadows. With the drawing on
of evening the boy felt stirrings of a wild, predatory instinct. His skin
tingled with a still excitement which he did not understand, and he went
with a fierce yet furtive wariness, peering into the shadows as if for
prey. As he and Andy emerged from the woods, and strode silently down the
desolate slopes of the pasture lots, he could think of nothing but his
return on the morrow to see what prizes had fallen to his snares. His
tenderness of heart, his enlightened sympathy with the four-footed
kindred, much of his civilisation, in fact, had vanished for the moment,
burnt out in the flame of an instinct handed down to him from his
primeval ancestors.

                                  III.

That night the moon rose over the young fir woods, blue-white and
glittering as on the night before. The air was of the same biting
stillness and vitreous transparency. The magic of it stirred up the same
merry madness in the veins of the wild rabbits, and set them to aimless
gambolling instead of their usual cautious browsing in the thickets of
yellow birch. One by one and two by two the white shapes came drifting
down the shadowed alleys and moonlight trails of the fir wood toward the
bright glade which they seemed to have adopted, for the time, as their
playground. The lanes and ways were many that gave entrance to the glade;
and presently some half dozen rabbits came bounding, from different
directions, across the radiant open. But on the instant they stopped and
sat straight up on their haunches, ears erect, struck with consternation.

There at the mouth of one of the alleys a white form jerked high into the
air. It hung, silently struggling, whirling round and round, and at the
same time swaying up and down with the bending of the sapling-top from
which it swung. The startled spectators had no comprehension of the
sight, no signal-code to express the kind of peril it portended, and how
to flee from it. They sat gazing in terror. Then, at the next entrance,
there shot up into the brilliant air another like horror; and at the
next, in the same breath, another. The three hung kicking in a hideous
silence.

The spell was broken. The spectators, trembling under the imminence of a
doom which they could not understand, vanished with long bounds by the
opposite side of the glade. All was still again under the blue-white,
wizard scrutiny of the moon but those three kicking shapes. And these,
too, in a few minutes hung motionless as the fir-trees and the snow. As
the glassy cold took hold upon them they slowly stiffened.

About an hour later a big red fox came trotting into the glade. The
hanging shapes caught his eye at once. He knew all about snares, being an
old fox, for years at odds with the settlement of Far Bazziley. Casting a
sharp glance about, he trotted over to the nearest snare and sniffed up
desirously toward the white rabbit dangling above him. It was beyond his
reach, and one unavailing spring convinced him of the fact. The second
hung equally remote. But with the third he was more fortunate. The
sapling was slender, and drooped its burden closer to the snow. With an
easy leap the fox seized the dangling body, dragged it down, gnawed off
its head to release the noose, and bore away the spoils in triumph,
conscious of having scored against his human rivals in the hunt.

[Illustration: “IT WAS BEYOND HIS REACH.”]

Late in the morning, when the sun was pale in a sky that threatened
snowfall, the boy and Andy came, thrilling with anticipation, to see what
the snares had captured. At the sight of the first victim, the stiff,
furry body hanging in the air from the bowed top of the sapling, the
boy’s nerves tingled with a novel and fierce sense of triumph. His heart
leapt, his eyes flamed, and he sprang forward, with a little cry, as a
young beast might in sighting its first quarry. His companion, long used
to the hunter’s enthusiasm, was less excited. He went to the next snare,
removed the victim, reset the catch and noose; while the boy, slinging
his trophy over his shoulder with the air of a veteran (as he had seen it
done in pictures), hastened on to the third to see why it had failed him.
To his untrained eye the trampled snow, the torn head, and the blood
spots told the story in part; and as he looked a sense of the tragedy of
it began to stir achingly at the roots of his heart. “A fox,” remarked
Andy, in a matter-of-fact voice, coming up at the moment, with his prize
hanging rigidly, by the pathetically babyish hind legs, from the grasp of
his mittened fist.

The boy felt a spasm of indignation against the fox. Then, turning his
gaze upon Andy’s capture, he was struck by the cruel marks of the noose
under its jaws and behind its ears. He saw, for the first time, the
half-open mouth, the small, jutting tongue, the expression of the dead
eyes; and his face changed. He removed his own trophy from his shoulder
and stared at it for some moments. Then two big tears rolled over his
ruddy cheeks. With an angry exclamation he flung the dead rabbit down on
the snow and ran to break up the snares.

“We won’t snare any more rabbits, Andy,” he cried, averting his face, and
starting homeward with a dogged set to his shoulders. Andy, picking up
the rejected spoils with a grin that was half bewilderment, half
indulgent comprehension, philosophically followed the penitent.

[Illustration: THE LORD OF THE AIR]

                          The Lord of the Air

The chill glitter of the northern summer sunrise was washing down over
the rounded top of old Sugar Loaf. The sombre and solitary peak, bald
save for a ragged veil of blueberry and juniper scrub, seemed to topple
over the deep enshadowed valley at its foot. The valley was brimmed with
crawling vapours, and around its rim emerged spectrally the jagged crests
of the fir wood. On either side of the shrouded valley, to east and west,
stretched a chain of similar basins, but more ample, and less deeply
wrapped in mist. From these, where the vapours had begun to lift, came
radiances of unruffled water.

Where the peak leaned to the valley, the trunk of a giant pine jutted
forth slantingly from a roothold a little below the summit. Its top had
long ago been shattered by lightning and hurled away into the depths; but
from a point some ten or twelve feet below the fracture, one gaunt limb
still waved green with persistent, indomitable life. This bleached stub,
thrust out over the vast basin, hummed about by the untrammelled winds,
was the watch-tower of the great bald eagle who ruled supreme over all
the aerial vicinage of the Squatooks.

When the earliest of the morning light fell palely on the crest of Sugar
Loaf, the great eagle came to his watch-tower, leaving the nest on the
other side of the peak, where the two nestlings had begun to stir
hungrily at the first premonition of dawn. Launching majestically from
the edge of the nest, he had swooped down into the cold shadow, then,
rising into the light by a splendid spiral, with muffled resonance of
wing-stroke, he had taken a survey of the empty, glimmering world. It was
still quite too dark for hunting, down there on earth, hungry though the
nestlings were. He soared, and soared, till presently he saw his
wide-winged mate, too, leave the nest, and beat swiftly off toward the
Tuladi Lakes, her own special hunting-grounds. Then he dropped quietly to
his blanched pine-top on the leaning side of the summit.

[Illustration: “HE SAW HIS WIDE-WINGED MATE, TOO, LEAVE THE NEST.”]

Erect and moveless he sat in the growing light, his snowy, flat-crowned
head thrust a little forward, consciously lord of the air. His powerful
beak, long and scythe-edged, curved over sharply at the end in a rending
hook. His eyes, clear, direct, unacquainted with fear, had a certain
hardness in their vitreous brilliancy, perhaps by reason of the sharp
contrast between the bright gold iris and the unfathomable pupil, and the
straight line of the low overhanging brow gave them a savage intensity of
penetration. His neck and tail were of the same snowy whiteness as his
snake-like head, while the rest of his body was a deep, shadowy brown,
close kin to black.

Suddenly, far, far down, winging swiftly in a straight line through the
topmost fold of the mist drift, he saw a duck flying from one lake to
another. The errand of the duck was probably an unwonted one, of some
special urgency, or he would not have flown so high and taken the
straight route over the forest; for at this season the duck of inland
waters is apt to fly low and follow the watercourse. However that may be,
he had forgotten the piercing eyes that kept watch from the peak of old
Sugar Loaf.

The eagle lifted and spread the sombre amplitude of his wings, and glided
from his perch in a long curve, till he balanced above the unconscious
voyager. Then down went his head; his wings shut close, his feathers
hardened till he was like a wedge of steel, and down he shot with
breathless, appalling speed. But the duck was travelling fast, and the
great eagle saw that the mere speed of dropping like a thunderbolt was
insufficient for his purpose. Two or three quick, short, fierce thrusts
of his pinions, and the speed of his descent was more than doubled. The
duck heard an awful hissing in the air above him. But before he could
swerve to look up he was struck, whirled away, blotted out of life.

Carried downward with his quarry by the rush of his descent, the eagle
spread his pinions and rose sharply just before he reached the nearest
tree-tops. High he mounted on still wings with that tremendous impulse.
Then, as the impulse failed, his wings began to flap strongly, and he
flew off with business-like directness toward the eyrie on the other
slope of Sugar Loaf. The head and legs of the duck hung limply from the
clutch of his talons.

The nest was a seemingly haphazard collection of sticks, like a hay-cart
load of rubbish, deposited on a ledge of the mountainside. In reality,
every stick in the structure had been selected with care, and so adeptly
fitted that the nest stood unshaken beneath the wildest storms that swept
old Sugar Loaf. The ground below the ledge was strewn with the faggots
and branches which the careful builders had rejected. The nest had the
appearance of being merely laid upon the ledge, but in reality its
foundations were firmly locked into a ragged crevice which cleft the
ledge at that point.

As the eagle drew near with his prey, he saw his mate winging heavily
from the Tuladis, a large fish hanging from her talons. They met at the
nest’s edge, and two heavy-bodied, soot-coloured, half-fledged nestlings,
with wings half spread in eagerness, thrust up hungry, gaping beaks to
greet them. The fish, as being the choicer morsel, was first torn to
fragments and fed to these greedy beaks; and the duck followed in a few
moments, the young ones gulping their meal with grotesque contortions and
ecstatic liftings of their wings. Being already much more than half the
size of their parents, and growing almost visibly, and expending vast
vitality in the production of their first feathers, their appetites were
prodigious. Not until these appetites seemed to be, for the moment,
stayed, and the eaglets sank back contentedly upon the nest, did the old
birds fly off to forage for themselves, leaving a bloody garniture of
bones and feathers upon the threshold of their home.

The king—who, though smaller than his mate, was her lord by virtue of
superior initiative and more assured, equable daring—returned at once to
his watch-tower on the lake side of the summit. It had become his habit
to initiate every enterprise from that starting-point. Perching
motionless for a few minutes, he surveyed the whole wide landscape of the
Squatook Lakes, with the great waters of Lake Temiscouata gleaming to the
northwest, and the peak of Bald Mountain, old Sugar Loaf’s rival, lifting
a defiant front from the shores of Nictau Lake, far to the south.

The last wisp of vapour had vanished, drunk up by the rising sun, and the
eagle’s eye had clear command of every district of his realm. It was upon
the little lake far below him that his interest presently centred itself.
There, at no great height above the unruffled waters, he saw a fish-hawk
sailing, now tilted to one side or the other on moveless wing, now
flapping hurriedly to another course, as if he were scrupulously
quartering the whole lake surface.

The king recognised with satisfaction the diligence of this, the most
serviceable, though most unwilling, of his subjects. In leisurely fashion
he swung off from his perch, and presently was whirling in slow spirals
directly over the centre of the lake. Up, up he mounted, till he was a
mere speck in the blue, and seemingly oblivious of all that went on
below; but, as he wheeled, there in his supreme altitude, his grim white
head was stretched ever earthward, and his eyes lost no detail of the
fish-hawk’s diligence.

All at once, the fish-hawk was seen to poise on steady wing. Then his
wings closed, and he shot downward like a javelin. The still waters of
the lake were broken with a violent splash, and the fish-hawk’s body for
a moment almost disappeared. Then, with a struggle and a heavy flapping
of wings, the daring fisher arose, grasping in his victorious claws a
large “togue” or gray lake trout. He rose till he was well above the
tree-tops of the near-by shore, and then headed for his nest in the cedar
swamp.

This was the moment for which the eagle had been waiting, up in the blue.
Again his vast wings folded themselves. Again his plumage hardened to a
wedge of steel. Again he dropped like a plummet. But this time he had no
slaughterous intent. He was merely descending out of the heavens to take
tribute. Before he reached the hurrying fish-hawk he swerved upward,
steadied himself, and flapped a menacing wing in the fish-hawk’s face,
heading it out again toward the centre of the lake.

Frightened, angry, and obstinate, the big hawk clutched his prize the
closer, and made futile efforts to reach the tree-tops. But, fleet though
he was, he was no match for the fleetness of his master. The great eagle
was over him, under him, around him, all at once, yet never striking him.
The king was simply indicating, quite unmistakably, his pleasure, which
was that the fish should be delivered up.

Suddenly, however, seeing that the fish-hawk was obstinate, the eagle
lost patience. It was time, he concluded, to end the folly. He had no
wish to harm the fish-hawk,—a most useful creature, and none too abundant
for his kingly needs. In fact, he was always careful not to exact too
heavy a tribute from the industrious fisherman, lest the latter should
grow discouraged and remove to freer waters. Of the spoils of his fishing
the big hawk was always allowed to keep enough to satisfy the
requirements of himself and his nestlings. But it was necessary that
there should be no foolish misunderstanding on the subject.

[Illustration: “HOLDING THE FISH FIRMLY IN THE CLUTCH OF ONE GREAT
TALON.”]

The eagle swung away, wheeled sharply with an ominous, harsh rustling of
stiffened feathers, and then came at the hawk with a yelp and a sudden
tremendous rush. His beak was half open. His great talons were drawn
forward and extended for a deadly stroke. His wings darkened broadly over
the fugitive. His sound, his shadow,—they were doom itself, annihilation
to the frightened hawk.

But that deadly stroke was not delivered. The threat was enough.
Shrinking aside with a scream the fish-hawk opened his claws, and the
trout fell, a gleaming bar of silver in the morning light. On the instant
the eagle half closed his wings, tilted sideways, and swooped. He did not
drop, as he had descended upon the voyaging duck, but with a peculiar
shortened wing-stroke, he flew straight downward for perhaps a hundred
feet. Then, with this tremendous impulse driving him, he shot down like
lightning, caught the fish some twenty feet above the water, turned, and
rose in a long, magnificent slant, with the tribute borne in his talons.
He sailed away majestically to his watch-tower on old Sugar Loaf, to make
his meal at leisure, while the ruffled hawk beat away rapidly down the
river to try his luck in the lower lake.

Holding the fish firmly in the clutch of one great talon, the eagle tore
it to pieces and swallowed it with savage haste. Then he straightened
himself, twisted and stretched his neck once or twice, settled back into
erect and tranquil dignity, and swept a kingly glance over all his
domain, from the far head of Big Squatook, to the alder-crowded outlet of
Fourth Lake. He saw unmoved the fish-hawk capture another prize, and fly
off with it in triumph to his hidden nest in the swamp. He saw two more
ducks winging their way from a sheltered cove to a wide, green reed-bed
at the head of the thoroughfare. Being a right kingly monarch, he had no
desire to trouble them. Untainted by the lust of killing, he killed only
when the need was upon him.

Having preened himself with some care, polished his great beak on the dry
wood of the stub, and stretched each wing, deliberately and slowly, the
one after the other, with crisp rustling noises, till each strong-shanked
plume tingled pleasantly in its socket and fitted with the utmost nicety
to its overlapping fellows, he bethought him once more of the appetites
of his nestlings. There were no more industrious fish-hawks in sight.
Neither hare nor grouse was stirring in the brushy opens. No living
creatures were visible save a pair of loons chasing each other off the
point of Sugar Loaf Island, and an Indian in his canoe just paddling down
to the outlet to spear suckers.

The eagle knew that the loons were no concern of his. They were never to
be caught napping. They could dive quicker than he could swoop and
strike. The Indian also he knew, and from long experience had learned to
regard him as inoffensive. He had often watched, with feelings as near
akin to jealousy as his arrogant heart could entertain, the spearing of
suckers and whitefish. And now the sight determined him to go fishing on
his own account. He remembered a point of shoals on Big Squatook where
large fish were wont to lie basking in the sun, and where sick or
disabled fish were frequently washed ashore. Here he might gather some
spoil of the shallows, pending the time when he could again take tribute
of the fish-hawk. Once more he launched himself from his watch-tower
under the peak of Sugar Loaf, and sailed away over the serried green tops
of the forest.

                                  II.

Now it chanced that the old Indian, who was the most cunning trapper in
all the wilderness of Northern New Brunswick, though he seemed so intent
upon his fishing, was in reality watching the great eagle. He had
anticipated, and indeed prepared for the regal bird’s expedition to those
shoals of the Big Squatook; and now, as he marked the direction of his
flight, he clucked grimly to himself with satisfaction, and deftly landed
a large sucker in the canoe.

That very morning, before the first pallor of dawn had spread over
Squatook, the Indian had scattered some fish, trout and suckers, on the
shore adjoining the shoal water. The point he chose was where a dense
growth of huckleberry and withe-wood ran out to within a few feet of the
water’s edge, and where the sand of the beach was dotted thickly with
tufts of grass. The fish, partly hidden among these tufts of grass, were
all distributed over a circular area of a diameter not greater than six
or seven feet; and just at the centre of the baited circle the Indian had
placed a stone about a foot high, such as any reasonable eagle would like
to perch upon when making a hasty meal. He was crafty with all the
cunning of the woods, was this old trapper, and he knew that a wise and
experienced bird like the king of Sugar Loaf was not to be snared by any
ordinary methods. But to snare him he was resolved, though it should take
all the rest of the summer to accomplish it; for a rich American,
visiting Edmundston on the Madawaska in the spring, had promised him
fifty dollars for a fine specimen of the great white headed and white
tailed eagle of the New Brunswick lakes, if delivered at Edmundston alive
and unhurt.

When the eagle came to the point of shoals he noticed a slight change.
That big stone was something new, and therefore to be suspected. He flew
over it without stopping, and alighted on the top of a dead birch-tree
near by. A piercing scrutiny convinced him that the presence of the stone
at a point where he was accustomed to hop awkwardly on the level sand,
was in no way portentous, but rather a provision of destiny for his
convenience. He sailed down and alighted upon the stone.

When he saw a dead sucker lying under a grass tuft he considered again.
Had the fish lain at the water’s edge he would have understood; but up
among the grasses, that was a singular situation for a dead fish to get
itself into. He now peered suspiciously into the neighbouring bushes,
scanned every tuft of grass, and cast a sweeping survey up and down the
shores. Everything was as it should be. He hopped down, captured the
fish, and was about to fly away with it to his nestlings, when he caught
sight of another, and yet another. Further search revealed two more.
Plainly the wilderness, in one of those caprices which even his old
wisdom had not yet learned to comprehend, was caring very lavishly for
the king. He hastily tore and swallowed two of the fish, and then flew
away with the biggest of the lot to the nest behind the top of old Sugar
Loaf. That same day he came twice again to the point of shoals, till
there was not another fish left among the grass tufts. But on the
following day, when he came again, with hope rather than expectation in
his heart, he found that the supply had been miraculously renewed. His
labours thus were greatly lightened. He had more time to sit upon his
wind-swept watch-tower under the peak, viewing widely his domain, and
leaving the diligent fish-hawks to toil in peace. He fell at once into
the custom of perching on the stone at every visit, and then devouring at
least one fish before carrying a meal to the nest. His surprise and
curiosity as to the source of the supply had died out on the second day.
The wild creatures quickly learn to accept a simple obvious good, however
extraordinary, as one of those beneficences which the unseen powers
bestow without explanation.

By the time the eagle had come to this frame of mind, the old Indian was
ready for the next move in his crafty game. He made a strong hoop of
plaited withe-wood, about seven feet in diameter. To this he fastened an
ample bag of strong salmon-netting, which he had brought with him from
Edmundston for this purpose. To the hoop he fixed securely a stiff birch
sapling for a handle, so that the affair when completed was a monster
scoop-net, stout and durable in every part. On a moonlight night when he
knew that the eagle was safely out of sight, on his eyrie around at the
back of Sugar Loaf, the Indian stuck this gigantic scoop into the bow of
his canoe, and paddled over to the point of shoals. He had never heard of
any one trying to catch an eagle in a net; but, on the other hand, he had
never heard of any one wanting an eagle alive, and being willing to
emphasise his wants with fifty dollars. The case was plainly one that
called for new ideas, and the Indian, who had freed himself from the
conservatism of his race, was keenly interested in the plan which he had
devised.

The handle of the great scoop-net was about eight feet in length. Its
butt the trapper drove slantingly into the sand where the water was an
inch or two deep, bracing it securely with stones. He fixed it at an
angle so acute that the rim of the net lay almost flat at a height of
about four feet above the stone whereon the eagle was wont to perch.
Under the uppermost edge of the hoop the trapper fixed a firm prop,
making the structure steady and secure. The drooping slack of the net he
then caught up and held lightly in place on three or four willow twigs,
so that it all lay flat within the rim. This accomplished to his
satisfaction, he scattered fish upon the ground as usual, most of them
close about the stone and within the area overshadowed by the net, but
two or three well outside. Then he paddled noiselessly away across the
moon-silvered mirror of the lake, and disappeared into the blackness
about the outlet.

On the following morning, the king sat upon his watch-tower while the
first light gilded the leaning summit of Sugar Loaf. His gaze swept the
vast and shadowy basin of the landscape with its pointed tree-tops dimly
emerging above the vapour-drift, and its blank, pallid spaces whereunder
the lakes lay veiled in dream. His golden eye flamed fiercely under the
straight and fierce white brow; nevertheless, when he saw, far down, two
ducks winging their way across the lake, now for a second visible, now
vanishing in the mist, he suffered them to go unstricken. The clear light
gilded the white feathers of his head and tail, but sank and was absorbed
in the cloudy gloom of his wings. For fully half an hour he sat in regal
immobility. But when at last the waters of Big Squatook were revealed,
stripped and gleaming, he dropped from his perch in a tremendous,
leisurely curve, and flew over to the point of shoals.

As he drew near, he was puzzled and annoyed to see the queer structure
that had been erected during the night above his rock. It was
inexplicable. He at once checked his flight and began whirling in great
circles, higher and higher, over the spot, trying in vain to make out
what it was. He could see that the dead fish were there as usual. And at
length he satisfied himself that no hidden peril lurked in the near-by
huckleberry thicket. Then he descended to the nearest tree-top and spent
a good half-hour in moveless watching of the net. He little guessed that
a dusky figure, equally moveless and far more patient, was watching him
in turn from a thicket across the lake.

At the end of this long scrutiny, the eagle decided that a closer
investigation was desirable. He flew down and alighted on the level sand
well away from the net. There he found a fish which he devoured. Then he
found another; and this he carried away to the eyrie. He had not solved
the mystery of the strange structure overhanging the rock, but he had
proved that it was not actively inimical. It had not interfered with his
morning meal, or attempted to hinder him from carrying off his customary
spoils. When he returned an hour later to the point of shoals the net
looked less strange to him. He even perched on the sloping handle,
balancing himself with outspread wings till the swaying ceased. The thing
was manifestly harmless. He hopped down, looked with keen interested eyes
at the fish beside the rock, hopped in and clutched one out with beak and
claw, hopped back again in a great hurry, and flew away with the prize to
his watch-tower on Sugar Loaf. This caution he repeated at every visit
throughout that day. But when he came again on the morrow, he had grown
once more utterly confident. He went under the net without haste or
apprehension, and perched unconcernedly on the stone in the midst of his
banquet. And the stony face of the old Indian, in his thicket across the
lake, flashed for one instant with a furtive grin. He grunted, melted
back into the woods, and slipped away to resume his fishing at the
outlet.

The next morning, about an hour before dawn, a ghostly birch canoe
slipped up to the point of shoals, and came to land about a hundred yards
from the net. The Indian stepped out, lifted it from the water, and hid
it in the bushes. Then he proceeded to make some important changes in the
arrangement of the net.

To the topmost rim of the hoop he tied a strong cord, brought the free
end to the ground, led it under a willow root, and carried it some ten
paces back into the thicket. Next he removed the supporting prop. Going
back into the thicket, he pulled the cord. It ran freely under the willow
root, and the net swayed down till it covered the rock, to rebound to its
former position the moment he released the cord. Then he restored the
prop to its place; but this time, instead of planting its butt firmly in
the sand, he balanced it on a small flat stone, so that the least pull
would instantaneously dislodge it. To the base of the prop he fixed
another cord; and this also he ran under the willow root and carried back
into the thicket. To the free end of this second cord he tied a scrap of
red flannel, that there might be no mistake at a critical moment. The
butt of the handle he loosened, so that if the prop were removed the net
would almost fall of its own weight; and on the upper side of the butt,
to give steadiness and speed of action, he leaned two heavy stones.
Finally, he baited his trap with the usual dead fish, bunching them now
under the centre of the net. Then, satisfying himself that all was in
working order, he wormed his way into the heart of the thicket. A few
leafy branches, cunningly disposed around and above his hiding-place,
made his concealment perfect, while his keen black beads of eyes
commanded a clear view of the stone beneath the net. The ends of the two
cords were between his lean fingers. No waiting fox or hiding grouse
could have lain more immovable, could have held his muscles in more
patient perfect stillness, than did the wary old trapper through the
chill hour of growing dawn.

At last there came a sound that thrilled even such stoic nerves as his.
Mighty wings hissed in the air above his head. The next moment he saw the
eagle alight upon the level sand beside the net. This time there was no
hesitation. The great bird, for all his wisdom, had been lured into
accepting the structure as a part of the established order of things. He
hopped with undignified alacrity right under the net, clutched a large
whitefish, and perched himself on the stone to enjoy his meal.

[Illustration: “HELPLESSLY INTERTANGLED IN THE MESHES.”]

At that instant he felt, rather than saw, the shadow of a movement in the
thicket. Or rather, perhaps, some inward, unaccredited guardian signalled
to him of danger. His muscles gathered themselves for that instantaneous
spring wherewith he was wont to hurl himself into the air. But even that
electric speed of his was too slow for this demand. Ere he could spring,
the great net came down about him with a vicious swish; and in a moment
beating wings, tearing beak, and clutching talons were helplessly
intertangled in the meshes. Before he could rip himself free, a blanket
was thrown over him. He was ignominiously rolled into a bundle, picked
up, and carried off under the old Indian’s arm.

                                  III.

When the king was gone, it seemed as if a hush had fallen over the
country of the Squatooks. When the old pine beneath the toppling peak of
Sugar Loaf had stood vacant all the long golden hours of the morning, two
crows flew up from the fir-woods to investigate. They hopped up and down
on the sacred seat, cawing impertinently and excitedly. Then in a sudden
flurry of apprehension they darted away. News of the great eagle’s
mysterious absence spread quickly among the woodfolk,—not by direct
communication, indeed, except in the case of the crows, but subtly and
silently, as if by some telepathic code intelligible alike to mink and
wood-mouse, kingfisher and lucifee.

When the noon had gone by, and the shadow of Sugar Loaf began to creep
over the edge of the nest, the old mother eagle grew uneasy at the
prolonged absence of her mate. Never before since the nestlings broke the
shell had he been so long away. Never before had she been compelled to
realise how insatiable were the appetites of her young. She flew around
to the pine-tree on the other side of the peak,—and finding it vacant,
something told her it had been long unoccupied. Then she flew hither and
thither over all the lakes, a fierce loneliness growing in her heart.
From the long grasses around the mouth of the thoroughfare between third
and fourth lakes a heron arose, flapping wide bluish wings, and she
dropped upon it savagely. However her wild heart ached, the nestlings
must be fed. With the long limp neck and slender legs of the heron
trailing from her talons, she flew away to the eyrie; and she came no
more to the Squatooks.

[Illustration: “THEY FLOCKED BLACKLY ABOUT WITH VITUPERATIVE MALICE.”]

The knowledge of all the woodfolk around the lakes had been flashed in
upon her, and she knew some mysterious doom had fallen upon her mate.
Thereafter, though the country of the Squatooks was closer at hand and
equally well stocked with game, and though the responsibilities of her
hunting had been doubled, she kept strictly to her old hunting-ground of
the Tuladis. Everything on the north side of old Sugar Loaf had grown
hateful to her; and unmolested within half a mile of the eyrie, the
diligent fish-hawks plied their craft, screaming triumphantly over every
capture. The male, indeed, growing audacious after the king had been a
whole week absent, presumed so far as to adopt the old pine-tree under
the peak for his perch, to the loud and disconcerting derision of the
crows. They flocked blackly about with vituperative malice, driving him
to forsake his seat of usurpation and soar indignantly to heights where
they could not follow. But at last the game palled upon their whimsical
fancies, and they left him in peace to his aping of the king.

Meanwhile, in the village of Edmundston, in the yard of a house that
stood ever enfolded in the sleepless roar of the Falls of Madawaska, the
king was eating out his sorrowful and tameless heart. Around one
steely-scaled leg, just above the spread of the mighty claws, he wore the
ragged ignominy of a bandage of soiled red flannel. This was to prevent
the chafing of the clumsy and rusty dog-chain which secured him to his
perch in an open shed that looked out upon the river. Across the river,
across the cultivated valley with its roofs, and farther across the
forest hills than any human eye could see, his eye could see a dim
summit, as it were a faint blue cloud on the horizon, his own lost realm
of Sugar Loaf. Hour after hour he would sit upon his rude perch,
unstirring, unwinking, and gaze upon this faint blue cloud of his desire.

From his jailers he accepted scornfully his daily rations of fish,
ignoring the food while any one was by, but tearing it and gorging it
savagely when left alone. As week after week dragged on, his hatred of
his captors gathered force, but he showed no sign. Fear he was hardly
conscious of; or, at least, he had never felt that panic fear which
unnerves even kings, except during the one appalling moment when he felt
the falling net encumber his wings, and the trapper’s smothering blanket
shut out the sun from his eyes. Now, when any one of his jailers
approached and sought to win his confidence, he would shrink within
himself and harden his feathers with wild inward aversion, but his eye of
piercing gold would neither dim nor waver, and a clear perception of the
limits of his chain would prevent any futile and ignoble struggle to
escape. Had he shown more fear, more wildness, his jailers would have
more hope of subduing him in some measure; but as it was, being back
country men with some knowledge of the wilderness folk, they presently
gave him up as tameless and left off troubling him with their attentions.
They took good care of him, however, for they were to be well paid for
their trouble when the rich American came for his prize.

At last he came; and when he saw the king he was glad. Trophies he had at
home in abundance,—the skins of lions which he had shot on the Zambesi,
of tigers from Himalayan foot-hills, of grizzlies from Alaskan cañons,
and noble heads of moose and caribou from these very highlands of
Squatook, whereon the king had been wont to look from his dizzy gyres of
flight above old Sugar Loaf. But the great white-headed eagle, who year
after year had baffled his woodcraft and eluded his rifle, he had come to
love so that he coveted him alive. Now, having been apprised of the
capture of so fine and well-known a bird as the king of old Sugar Loaf,
he had brought with him an anklet of thick, soft leather for the
illustrious captive’s leg, and a chain of wrought steel links, slender,
delicate, and strong. On the morning after his arrival the new chain was
to be fitted.

The great eagle was sitting erect upon his perch, gazing at the faint
blue cloud which he alone could see, when two men came to the shed beside
the river. One he knew. It was his chief jailer, the man who usually
brought fish. The other was a stranger, who carried in his hand a long,
glittering thing that jangled and stirred a vague apprehension in his
heart. The jailer approached, and with a quick movement wrapped him in a
coat, till beak and wings and talons alike were helpless. There was one
instinctive, convulsive spasm within the wrapping, and the bundle was
still, the great bird being too proud as well as too wise to waste force
in a vain struggle.

“Seems pretty tame already,” remarked the stranger, in a tone of
satisfaction.

“Tame!” exclaimed the countryman. “Them’s the kind as don’t tame. I’ve
give up trying to tame him. Ef you keep him, an’ feed him, an’ coax him
for ten year, he’ll be as wild as the day Gabe snared him up on Big
Squatook.”

“We’ll see,” said the stranger, who had confidence in his knowledge of
the wild folk.

Seating himself on a broken-backed chair just outside the shadow of the
shed, where the light was good, the countryman held the motionless bundle
firmly across his knees, and proceeded cautiously to free the fettered
leg. He held it in an inflexible grip, respecting those knife-edged
claws. Having removed the rusty dog-chain and the ignominious red flannel
bandage, he fitted dexterously the soft leather anklet, with its three
tiny silver buckles, and its daintily engraved plate, bearing the king’s
name with the place and date of his capture. Then he reached out his hand
for the new steel chain.

The eagle, meanwhile, had been slowly and imperceptibly working his head
free; and now, behind the countryman’s arm, he looked out from the
imprisoning folds of the coat. Fierce, wild, but unaffrighted, his eye
caught the glitter of the chain as the stranger held it out. That glitter
moved him strangely. On a sudden impulse he opened his mighty beak, and
tore savagely at the countryman’s leg.

With a yell of pain and surprise the man attempted to jump away from this
assault. But as the assailant was on his lap this was obviously
impossible. The muscles of his leg stiffened out instinctively,—and the
broken-backed chair gave way under the strain. Arms and legs flew wildly
in the air as he sprawled backward,—and the coat fell apart,—and the
eagle found himself free. The stranger sprang forward to clutch his
treasured captive, but received a blinding buffet from the great wings
undestined to captivity. The next moment the king bounded upward. The air
whistled under his tremendous wing-strokes. Up, up he mounted, leaving
the men to gape after him, flushed and foolish. Then he headed his flight
for that faint blue cloud beyond the hills.

That afternoon there was a difference in the country of the Squatooks.
The nestlings in the eyrie—bigger and blacker and more clamorous they
were now than when he went away—found more abundant satisfaction to their
growing appetites. Their wide-winged mother, hunting away on Tuladi,
hunted with more joyous heart. The fish-hawks on the Squatook waters came
no more near the blasted pine; but they fished more diligently, and their
hearts were big with indignation over the spoils which they had been
forced to deliver up.

The crows far down in the fir-tops were garrulous about the king’s
return, and the news spread swiftly among the mallards, the muskrats, the
hares, and the careful beavers. And the solitude about the toppling peak
of old Sugar Loaf seemed to resume some lost sublimity, as the king
resumed his throne among the winds.

[Illustration: WILD MOTHERHOOD]

                            Wild Motherhood

The deep snow in the moose-yard was trodden down to the moss, and darkly
soiled with many days of occupancy. The young spruce and birch trees
which lined the trodden paths were cropped of all but their toughest and
coarsest branches; and the wall of loftier growth which fenced the yard
was stripped of its tenderer twigs to the utmost height of the tall
bull’s neck. The available provender was all but gone, and the herd was
in that restlessness which precedes a move to new pastures.

The herd of moose was a small one—three gaunt, rusty-brown, slouching
cows, two ungainly calves of a lighter hue, and one huge, high-shouldered
bull, whose sweep of palmated antlers bristled like a forest. Compared
with the towering bulk of his forequarters, the massive depth of his
rough-maned neck, the weight of the formidable antlers, the length and
thickness of his clumsy, hooked muzzle with its prehensile upper lip, his
lean and frayed hindquarters looked grotesquely diminutive. Surprised by
three days of blinding snowfall, the great bull-moose had been forced to
establish the yard for his herd in an unfavourable neighbourhood; and now
he found himself confronted by the necessity of a long march through snow
of such softness and depth as would make swift movement impossible and
fetter him in the face of his enemies. In deep snow the moose can neither
flee nor fight, at both of which he is adept under fair conditions; and
deep snow, as he knew, is the opportunity of the wolf and the hunter. But
in this case the herd had no choice. It was simply take the risk or
starve.

[Illustration: “LED HIS HERD OFF NORTHWARD.”]

That same night, when the moon was rising round and white behind the
fir-tops, the tall bull breasted and trod down the snowy barriers, and
led his herd off northward between the hemlock trunks and the jutting
granite boulders. He moved slowly, his immense muzzle stretched straight
out before him, the bony array of his antlers laid back level to avoid
the hindrance of clinging boughs. Here and there a hollow under the level
surface would set him plunging and wallowing for a moment, but in the
main his giant strength enabled him to forge his way ahead with a steady
majesty of might. Behind him, in dutiful line, came the three cows; and
behind these, again, the calves followed at ease in a clear trail, their
muzzles not outstretched like that of the leader, but drooping almost to
the snow, their high shoulders working awkwardly at every stride. In
utter silence, like dark, monstrous spectres, the line of strange shapes
moved on; and down the bewildering, ever-rearranging forest corridors the
ominous fingers of long moonlight felt curiously after them. When they
had journeyed for some hours the herd came out upon a high and somewhat
bare plateau, dotted sparsely with clumps of aspen, stunted yellow birch,
and spruce. From this table-land the streaming northwest winds had swept
the snow almost clean, carrying it off to fill the neighbouring valleys.
The big bull, who knew where he was going and had no will to linger on
the way, halted only for a few minutes’ browsing, and then started
forward on a long, swinging trot. At every stride his loose-hung,
wide-cleft, spreading hoofs came sharply together with a flat, clacking
noise. The rest of the line swept dutifully into place, and the herd was
off.

But not all the herd. One of the calves, tempted a little aside by a
thicket of special juiciness and savour, took alarm, and thought he was
going to be left behind. He sprang forward, a powerful but clumsy stride,
careless of his footing. A treacherous screen of snow-crusted scrub gave
way, and he slid sprawling to the bottom of a little narrow gully or
crevice, a natural pitfall. His mother, looking solicitously backward,
saw him disappear. With a heave of her shoulders, a sweep of her long,
hornless head, an anxious flick of her little naked tail, she swung out
of the line and trotted swiftly to the rescue.

There was nothing she could do. The crevice was some ten or twelve feet
long and five or six in width, with sides almost perpendicular. The calf
could just reach its bushy edges with his upstretched muzzle, but he
could get no foothold by which to clamber out. On every side he essayed
it, falling back with a hoarse bleat from each frightened effort; while
the mother, with head down and piteous eyes staring upon him, ran round
and round the rim of the trap. At last, when he stopped and stood with
palpitating sides and wide nostrils of terror, she, too, halted. Dropping
awkwardly upon her knees in the snowy bushes, with loud, blowing breaths,
she reached down her head to nose and comfort him with her sensitive
muzzle. The calf leaned up as close as possible to her caresses. Under
their tenderness the tremblings of his gaunt, pathetic knees presently
ceased. And in this position the two remained almost motionless for an
hour, under the white, unfriendly moon. The herd had gone on without
them.

[Illustration: “STOOD FOR A MOMENT TO SNIFF THE AIR.”]

                                  II.

In the wolf’s cave in the great blue and white wall of plaster-rock,
miles back beside the rushing of the river, there was famine. The
she-wolf, heavy and near her time, lay agonising in the darkest corner of
the cave, licking in grim silence the raw stump of her right foreleg.
Caught in a steel trap, she had gnawed off her own paw as the price of
freedom. She could not hunt; and the hunting was bad that winter in the
forests by the blue and white wall. The wapiti deer had migrated to safer
ranges, and her gray mate, hunting alone, was hard put to it to keep
starvation from the cave.

The gray wolf trotted briskly down the broken face of the plaster-rock,
in the full glare of the moon, and stood for a moment to sniff the air
that came blowing lightly but keenly over the stiff tops of the forest.
The wind was clean. It gave him no tidings of a quarry. Descending
hurriedly the last fifty yards of the slope, he plunged into the darkness
of the fir woods. Soft as was the snow in those quiet recesses, it was
yet sufficiently packed to support him as he trotted, noiseless and
alert, on the broad-spreading pads of his paws. Furtive and fierce, he
slipped through the shadow like a ghost. Across the open glades he
fleeted more swiftly, a bright and sinister shape, his head swinging a
little from side to side, every sense upon the watch. His direction was
pretty steadily to the west of north.

He had travelled long, till the direction of the moon-shadows had taken a
different angle to his path, when suddenly there came a scent upon the
wind. He stopped, one foot up, arrested in his stride. The gray, cloudy
brush of his tail stiffened out. His nostrils, held high to catch every
waft of the new scent, dilated; and the edges of his upper lip came down
over the white fangs, from which they had been snarlingly withdrawn. His
pause was but for a breath or two. Yes, there was no mistaking it. The
scent was moose—very far off, but moose, without question. He darted
forward at a gallop, but with his muzzle still held high, following that
scent up the wind.

Presently he struck the trail of the herd. An instant’s scrutiny told his
trained sense that there were calves and young cows, one or another of
which he might hope to stampede by his cunning. The same instant’s
scrutiny revealed to him that the herd had passed nearly an hour ahead of
him. Up went the gray cloud of his tail and down went his nose; and then
he straightened himself to his top speed, compared to which the pace
wherewith he had followed the scent up the wind was a mere casual
sauntering.

When he emerged upon the open plateau and reached the spot where the herd
had scattered to browse, he slackened his pace and went warily, peering
from side to side. The cow-moose, lying down in the bushes to fondle her
imprisoned young, was hidden from his sight for the moment; and so it
chanced that before he discovered her he came between her and the wind.
That scent—it was the taint of death to her. It went through her frame
like an electric shock. With a snort of fear and fury she heaved to her
feet and stood, wide-eyed and with lowered brow, facing the menace.

The wolf heard that snorting challenge, and saw the awkward bulk of her
shoulders as she rose above the scrub. His jaws wrinkled back tightly,
baring the full length of his keen white fangs, and a greenish
phosphorescent film seemed to pass suddenly across his narrowed eyeballs.
But he did not spring at once to the attack. He was surprised. Moreover,
he inferred the calf, from the presence of the cow apart from the rest of
the herd. And a full-grown cow-moose, with the mother fury in her heart,
he knew to be a dangerous adversary. Though she was hornless, he knew the
force of her battering front, the swift, sharp stroke of her hoof, the
dauntless intrepidity of her courage. Further, though his own courage and
the avid urge of his hunger might have led him under other circumstances
to attack forthwith, to-night he knew that he must take no chances. The
cave in the blue and white rocks was depending on his success. His mate,
wounded and heavy with young—if he let himself get disabled in this
hunting she must perish miserably. With prudent tactics, therefore, he
circled at a safe distance around the hidden pit; and around its rim
circled the wary mother, presenting to him ceaselessly the defiance of
her huge and sullen front. By this means he easily concluded that the
calf was a prisoner in the pit. This being the case, he knew that with
patience and his experienced craft the game was safely his. He drew off
some half-dozen paces, and sat upon his haunches contemplatively to weigh
the situation. Everything had turned out most fortunately for his
hunting, and food would no longer be scarce in the cave of the painted
rocks.

[Illustration: “AROUND ITS RIM CIRCLED THE WARY MOTHER.”]

                                  III.

That same night, in a cabin of unutterable loneliness some miles to the
west of the trail from the moose-yard, a sallow-faced, lean backwoodsman
was awakened by the moonlight streaming into his face through the small
square window. He glanced at the embers on the open hearth, and knew that
for the white maple logs to have so burned down he must have been
sleeping a good six hours. And he had turned in soon after the early
winter sunset. Rising on his elbow, he threw down the gaudy patchwork
quilt of red, yellow, blue, and mottled squares, which draped the bunk in
its corner against the rough log walls. He looked long at the thin face
of his wife, whose pale brown hair lay over the bare arm crooked beneath
her cheek. Her lips looked pathetically white in the decolourising rays
which streamed through the window. His mouth, stubbled with a week’s
growth of dark beard, twitched curiously as he looked. Then he got up,
very noiselessly. Stepping across the bare, hard room, whose austerity
the moon made more austere, he gazed into a trundle-bed where a
yellow-haired, round-faced boy slept, with the chubby sprawling legs and
arms of perfect security. The lad’s face looked pale to his troubled
eyes.

“It’s fresh meat they want, the both of ’em,” he muttered to himself.
“They can’t live and thrive on pork an’ molasses, nohow!”

His big fingers, clumsily gentle, played for a moment with the child’s
yellow curls. Then he pulled a thick, gray homespun hunting-shirt over
his head, hitched his heavy trousers up under his belt, clothed his feet
in three pairs of home-knit socks and heavy cowhide moccasins, took down
his rifle, cartridge-pouch, and snowshoes from their nails on the
moss-chinked wall, cast one tender look on the sleepers’ faces, and
slipped out of the cabin door as silently as a shadow.

“I’ll have fresh meat for them before next sundown,” he vowed to himself.

Outside, amid the chips of his chopping, with a rough well-sweep on one
hand and a rougher barn on the other, he knelt to put on his snowshoes.
The cabin stood, a desolate, silver-gray dot in the waste of snow, naked
to the steely skies of winter. With the curious improvidence of the
backwoodsman, he had cut down every tree in the neighbourhood of the
cabin, and the thick woods which might so well have sheltered him stood
acres distant on every side. When he had settled the thongs of his
snowshoes over his moccasins quite to his satisfaction, he straightened
himself with a deep breath, pulled his cap well down over his ears, slung
his rifle over his shoulder, and started out with the white moon in his
face.

In the ancient forest, among the silent wilderness folk, things happen
with the slow inexorableness of time. For days, for weeks, nothing may
befall. Hour may tread noiselessly on hour, apparently working no change;
yet all the time the forces are assembling, and at last doom strikes. The
violence is swift, and soon done. And then the great, still world looks
inscrutable, unhurried, changeless as before.

So, after long tranquillity, the forces of fate were assembling about
that high plateau in the wilderness. The backwoodsman could no longer
endure to see the woman and boy pining for the tonic, vitalising juices
of fresh meat. He was not a professional hunter. Absorbed in the clearing
and securing of a farm in the free forest, he cared not to kill for the
killing’s sake. For his own part, he was well content with his salt pork,
beans and molasses, and corn-meal mush; but when occasion called, he
could handle a rifle as backwoodsmen should. On this night, he was all
hunter, and his quiet, wide-open eye, alert for every woodland sign, had
a fire in it that would have looked strange to the wife and child.

His long strides carried him swiftly through the glimmering glades.
Journeying to the north of east, as the gray wolf had to the north of
west, he too, before long, struck the trail of the moose, but at a point
far beyond that at which the wolf had come upon it. So trampled and
confused a trail it was, however, that for a time he took no note of the
light wolf track among the heavy footprints of the moose. Suddenly it
caught his eye—one print on a smooth spread of snow, emphasised in a pour
of unobstructed radiance. He stopped, scrutinised the trail minutely to
assure himself he had but a single wolf to deal with, then resumed his
march with new zest and springier pace. Hunting was not without its
relish for him when it admitted some savour of the combat.

The cabin stood in the valley lands just back of the high plateau, and so
it chanced that the backwoodsman had not far to travel that night. Where
the trail broke into the open, he stopped, and reconnoitred cautiously
through a screen of hemlock boughs. He saw the big gray wolf sitting
straight up on his haunches, his tongue hanging out, contemplating
securely his intended prey. He saw the dark shape of the cow-moose,
obstinately confronting her foe, her hindquarters backed close up to the
edge of the gully. He caught the fierce and anxious gleam of her eyes, as
she rolled them backward for an instant’s reassuring glance at her young
one. And, though he could not see the calf in its prisoning pit, he
understood the whole situation.

Well, there was a bounty on wolf-snouts, and this fellow’s pelt was worth
considering. As for the moose, he knew that not a broadside of cannon
would scare her away from that hole in the rocks so long as the calf was
in it. He took careful aim from his covert. At the report the wolf shot
into the air, straightened out, and fell upon the snow, kicking dumbly, a
bullet through his neck. As the light faded from his fierce eyes, with it
faded out a vision of the cave in the painted rocks. In half a minute he
lay still; and the cow-moose, startled by his convulsive leaps more than
by the rifle-shot, blew and snorted, eyeing him with new suspicion. Her
spacious flank was toward the hunter. He, with cool but hasty fingers,
slipped a fresh cartridge into the breech, and aimed with care at a spot
low down behind the fore-shoulder.

Again rang out the thin, vicious report, slapping the great silences in
the face. The woodsman’s aim was true. With a cough the moose fell
forward on her knees. Then, with a mighty, shuddering effort, she got up,
turned about, and fell again with her head over the edge of the crevice.
Her awkward muzzle touched and twitched against the neck of the
frightened calf, and with a heavy sigh she lay still.

The settler stepped out from his hiding-place, and examined with deep
satisfaction the results of his night’s hunting. Already he saw the
colour coming back into the pale cheeks of the woman and the child. The
wolf’s pelt and snout, too, he thought to himself, would get them both
some little things they’d like, from the cross-roads store, next time he
went in for corn-meal. Then, there was the calf—no meat like moose-veal,
after all. He drew his knife from its sheath. But, no; he hated
butchering. He slipped the knife back, reloaded his rifle, stepped to the
side of the pit, and stood looking down at the baby captive, where it
leaned nosing in piteous bewilderment at the head of its dead mother.

Again the woodsman changed his mind. He bit off a chew of black tobacco,
and for some moments stood deliberating, stubbly chin in hand. “I’ll save
him for the boy to play with and bring up,” he at last decided.

[Illustration: THE HOMESICKNESS OF KEHONKA]

                      The Homesickness of Kehonka

The April night, softly chill and full of the sense of thaw, was closing
down over the wide salt marshes. Near at hand the waters of the
Tantramar, resting at full tide, glimmered through the dusk and lapped
faintly among the winter-ruined remnants of the sedge. Far off—infinitely
far it seemed in that illusive atmosphere, which was clear, yet full of
the ghosts of rain—the last of daylight lay in a thin streak, pale and
sharp, along a vast arc of the horizon. Overhead it was quite dark; for
there was no moon, and the tenuous spring clouds were sufficient to shut
out the stars. They clung in mid-heaven, but kept to their shadowy ranks
without descending to obscure the lower air. Space and mystery, mystery
and space, lay abroad upon the vague levels of marsh and tide.

Presently, from far along the dark heights of the sky, came voices,
hollow, musical, confused. Swiftly they journeyed nearer; they grew
louder. The sound—not vibrant, yet strangely far-carrying—was a clamorous
monotony of honk-a-honk, honk-a-honk, honka, honka, honk, honk. It hinted
of wide distance voyaged over on tireless wings, of a tropic winter
passed in feeding amid remote, high-watered meadows of Mexico and Texas,
of long flights yet to go, toward the rocky tarns of Labrador and the
reed beds of Ungava. As the sound passed straight overhead the listener
on the marsh below imagined, though he could not see, the strongly
beating wings, the outstretched necks and heads, the round, unswerving
eyes of the wild goose flock in its V-shaped array, winnowing steadily
northward through the night. But this particular flock was not set, as it
chanced, upon an all-night journey. The wise old gander winging at the
head of the V knew of good feeding-grounds near by, which he was ready to
revisit. He led the flock straight on, above the many windings of the
Tantramar, till its full-flooded sheen far below him narrowed and
narrowed to a mere brook. Here, in the neighbourhood of the uplands, were
a number of shallow, weedy, fresh-water lakes, with shores so choked with
thickets and fenced apart with bogs as to afford a security which his
years and broad experience had taught him to value. Into one of these
lakes, a pale blur amid the thick shadows of the shores, the flock
dropped with heavy splashings. A scream or two of full-throated content,
a few flappings of wings and rufflings of plumage in the cool, and the
voyagers settled into quiet.

All night there was silence around the flock, save for the whispering
seepage of the snow patches that still lingered among the thickets. With
the first creeping pallor of dawn the geese began to feed, plunging their
long black necks deep into the water and feeling with the sensitive inner
edges of their bills for the swelling root-buds of weed and sedge. When
the sun was about the edge of the horizon, and the first rays came
sparkling, of a chilly pink most luminous and pure, through the lean
traceries of the brushwood, the leader raised his head high and screamed
a signal. With answering cries and a tempestuous splashing the flock
flapped for a few yards along the surface of the water. Then they rose
clear, formed quickly into rank, and in their spacious V went honking
northward over the half-lighted, mysterious landscape. But, as it
chanced, not all of the flock set out with that morning departure. There
was one pair, last year’s birds, upon whom had fallen a weariness of
travel. Perhaps in the coils of their brains lurked some inherited memory
of these safe resting-places and secluded feeding-grounds of the Midgic
lakes. However that may have been, they chose to stay where they were,
feeling in their blood no call from the cold north solitudes. Dipping and
bowing, black neck by neck, they gave no heed to the leader’s signal, nor
to the noisy going of the flock. Pushing briskly with the black webs of
their feet against the discoloured water, they swam to the shore and cast
about for a place to build their nest.

There was no urgent hurry, so they chose not on that day nor the next.
When they chose, it was a little bushy islet off a point of land, well
tangled with alder and osier and a light flotsam of driftwood. The nest,
in the heart of the tangle, was an apparently haphazard collection of
sticks and twigs, well raised above the damp, well lined with moss and
feathers. Here, in course of days, there accumulated a shining cluster of
six large white eggs. But by this time the spring freshet had gone down.
The islet was an islet no longer, but a mere adjunct of the point, which
any inquisitive foot might reach dry shod. Now just at this time it
happened that a young farmer, who had a curious taste for all the wild
kindred of wood, and flood, and air, came up from the Lower Tantramar
with a wagon-load of grist for the Midgic mill. While his buckwheat and
barley were a-grinding, he thought of a current opinion to the effect
that the wild geese were given to nesting in the Midgic lakes. “If so,”
said he to himself, “this is the time they would be about it.” Full of
interest, a half-hour’s tramp through difficult woods brought him to the
nearest of the waters. An instinct, an intuition born of his sympathy
with the furtive folk, led him to the point, and out along the point to
that once islet, with its secret in the heart of the tangle. Vain were
the furious hissings, the opposing wings, the wide black bills that
threatened and oppugned him. With the eager delight of a boy he pounced
upon those six great eggs, and carried them all away. “They will soon
turn out another clutch,” said he to himself, as he left the bereaved
pair, and tramped elatedly back to the mill. As for the bereaved pair,
being of a philosophic spirit, they set themselves to fulfil as soon as
possible his prophecy.

On the farm by the Lower Tantramar, in a hogshead half filled with straw
and laid on its side in a dark corner of the tool-shed, those six eggs
were diligently brooded for four weeks and two days by a comfortable gray
and white goose of the common stock. When they hatched, the good gray and
white mother may have been surprised to find her goslings of an olive
green hue, instead of the bright golden yellow which her past experience
and that of her fellows had taught her to expect. She may have marvelled,
too, at their unwonted slenderness and activity. These trivial details,
however, in no way dampened the zeal with which she led them to the goose
pond, or the fidelity with which she pastured and protected them. But
rats, skunks, sundry obscure ailments, and the heavy wheels of the farm
wagon, are among the perils which, the summer through, lie in wait for
all the children of the feathered kin upon the farm; and so it came about
that of the six young ones so successfully hatched from the wild goose
eggs, only two lived till the coming of autumn brought them full plumage
and the power of flight. Before the time of the southward migration came
near, the young farmer took these two and clipped from each the strong
primaries of their right wings. “They seem contented enough, and tame as
any,” he said to himself, “but you never can tell what’ll happen when the
instinct strikes ’em.”

Both the young wild geese were fine males. Their heads and long, slim
necks were black, as were also their tails, great wing feathers, bills,
and feet. Under the tail their feathers were of snowiest white, and all
the other portions of their bodies a rich grayish brown. Each bore on the
side of its face a sharply defined triangular patch of white, mottled
with faint brown markings that would disappear after his first moult. In
one the white cheek patches met under the throat. This was a large,
strongly built bird, of a placid and domestic temper. He was satisfied
with the undistinguished gray companions of the flock. He was content,
like them, to gutter noisily with his discriminating bill along the
shallow edges of the pond, to float and dive and flap in the deeper
centre, to pasture at random over the wet meadow, biting off the short
grasses with quick, sharp, yet gracefully curving dabs. Goose pond and
wet meadow and cattle-trodden barnyard bounded his aspirations. When his
adult voice came to him, all he would say was honk, honk,
contemplatively, and sometimes honk-a-honk when he flapped his wings in
the exhilarating coolness of the sunrise. The other captive was of a more
restless temperament, slenderer in build, more eager and alert of eye,
less companionable of mood. He was, somehow, never seen in the centre of
the flock—he never seemed a part of it. He fed, swam, rested, preened
himself, always a little apart. Often, when the others were happily
occupied with their familiar needs and satisfactions, he would stand
motionless, his compact, glossy head high in air, looking to the north as
if in expectation, listening as if he awaited longed-for tidings. The
triangular white patch on each side of his head was very narrow, and gave
him an expression of wildness; yet in reality he was no more wild, or
rather no more shy, than any others of the flock. None, indeed, had so
confident a fearlessness as he. He would take oats out of the farmer’s
hand, which none of the rest quite dared to do.

[Illustration: “HE WOULD STAND MOTIONLESS, HIS COMPACT, GLOSSY HEAD HIGH
IN AIR.”]

Until late in the autumn, the lonely, uncomraded bird was always silent.
But when the migrating flocks began to pass overhead, on the long
southward trail, and their hollow clamour was heard over the farmstead
night and morning, he grew more restless. He would take a short run with
outspread wings, and then, feeling their crippled inefficiency, would
stretch himself to his full height and call, a sonorous, far-reaching
cry—ke-honk-a, ke-honk-a. From this call, so often repeated throughout
October and November, the farmer named him Kehonka. The farmer’s wife
favoured the more domesticated and manageable brother, who could be
trusted never to stray. But the farmer, who mused deeply over his
furrows, and half wistfully loved the wild kindred, loved Kehonka, and
used to say he would not lose the bird for the price of a steer. “That
there bird,” he would say, “has got dreams away down in his heart. Like
as not, he remembers things his father and mother have seen, up amongst
the ice cakes and the northern lights, or down amongst the bayous and the
big southern lilies.” But all his sympathy failed to make him repent of
having clipped Kehonka’s wing.

During the long winter, when the winds swept fiercely the open marshes of
the Tantramar, and the snow piled in high drifts around the barns and
wood piles, and the sheds were darkened, and in the sun at noonday the
strawy dungheaps steamed, the rest of the geese remained listlessly
content. But not so Kehonka. Somewhere back of his brain he cherished
pre-natal memories of warm pools in the South, where leafy screens grew
rank, and the sweet-rooted water-plants pulled easily from the deep black
mud, and his true kindred were screaming to each other at the oncoming of
the tropic dark. While the flock was out in the barnyard, pulling lazily
at the trampled litter, and snatching scraps of the cattle’s chopped
turnips, Kehonka would stand aloof by the water-trough, his head erect,
listening, longing. As the winter sun sank early over the fir woods back
of the farm, his wings would open, and his desirous cry would go echoing
three or four times across the still
countryside—ke-honk-a—ke-honk-a—ke-honk-a! Whereat the farmer’s wife,
turning her buckwheat pancakes over the hot kitchen stove, would mutter
impatiently; but the farmer, slipping to the door of the cow-stable with
the bucket of feed in his hand, would look with deep eyes of sympathy at
the unsatisfied bird. “He wants something that we don’t grow round here,”
he would say to himself; and little by little the bird’s restlessness
came to seem to him the concrete embodiment of certain dim outreachings
of his own. He, too, caught himself straining his gaze beyond the marsh
horizons of Tantramar.

When the winter broke, and the seeping drifts shrank together, and the
brown of the ploughed fields came through the snow in patches, and the
slopes leading down to the marshland were suddenly loud with running
water, Kehonka’s restlessness grew so eager that he almost forgot to
feed. It was time, he thought, for the northward flight to begin. He
would stand for hours, turning first one dark eye, then the other, toward
the soft sky overhead, expectant of the V-shaped journeying flock, and
the far-off clamour of voices from the South crying to him in his own
tongue. At last, when the snow was about gone from the open fields, one
evening at the shutting-in of dark, the voices came. He was lingering at
the edge of the goose pond, the rest having settled themselves for the
night, when he heard the expected sounds. Honk-a-honk, honk-a-honk,
honka, honka, honk, honk, they came up against the light April wind,
nearer, nearer, nearer. Even his keen eye could not detect them against
the blackness; but up went his wings, and again and again he screamed to
them sonorously. In response to his call, their flight swung lower, and
the confusion of their honking seemed as if it were going to descend
about him. But the wary old gander, their leader, discerned the roofs,
man’s handiwork, and suspected treachery. At his sharp signal the flock,
rising again, streamed off swiftly toward safer feeding-grounds, and left
Kehonka to call and call unanswered. Up to this moment all his
restlessness had not led him to think of actually deserting the farmstead
and the alien flock. Though not of them he had felt it necessary to be
with them. His instinct for other scenes and another fellowship had been
too little tangible to move him to the snapping of established ties. But
now, all his desires at once took concrete form. It was his, it belonged
to himself—that strong, free flight, that calling through the sky, that
voyaging northward to secret nesting-places. In that wild flock which had
for a moment swerved downward to his summons, or in some other flock, was
his mate. It was mating season, and not until now had he known it.

Nature does sometimes, under the pressure of great and concentrated
desires, make unexpected effort to meet unforeseen demands. All winter
long, though it was not the season for such growth, Kehonka’s clipped
wing-primaries had been striving to develop. They had now, contrary to
all custom, attained to an inch or so of effective flying web. Kehonka’s
heart was near bursting with his desire as the voices of the unseen flock
died away. He spread his wings to their full extent, ran some ten paces
along the ground, and then, with all his energies concentrated to the
effort, he rose into the air, and flew with swift-beating wings out into
the dark upon the northward trail. His trouble was not the lack of wing
surface, but the lack of balance. One wing being so much less in spread
than the other, he felt a fierce force striving to turn him over at every
stroke. It was the struggle to counteract this tendency that wore him
out. His first desperate effort carried him half a mile. Then he dropped
to earth, in a bed of withered salt-grass all awash with the full tide of
Tantramar. Resting amid the salt-grass, he tasted such an exultation of
freedom that his heart forgot its soreness over the flock which had
vanished. Presently, however, he heard again the sound that so thrilled
his every vein. Weird, hollow, echoing with memories and tidings, it came
throbbing up the wind. His own strong cry went out at once to meet
it—ke-honk-a, ke-honk-a, ke-honk-a. The voyagers this time were flying
very low. They came near, nearer, and at last, in a sudden silence of
voices, but a great flapping of wings, they settled down in the
salt-grass all about him.

The place was well enough for a night’s halt—a shallow, marshy pool which
caught the overflow of the highest spring tides, and so was not emptied
by the ebb. After its first splashing descent into the water, which
glimmered in pale patches among the grass stems, every member of the
flock sat for some moments motionless as statues, watchful for unknown
menace; and Kehonka, his very soul trembling with desire achieved, sat
motionless among them. Then, there being no sign of peril at hand, there
was a time of quiet paddling to and fro, a scuttling of practised bills
among the grass-roots, and Kehonka found himself easily accepted as a
member of the flock. Happiness kept him restless and on the move long
after the others had their bills tucked under their wings. In the
earliest gray of dawn, when the flock awoke to feed, Kehonka fed among
them as if he had been with them all the way on their flight from the
Mexican plains. But his feeding was always by the side of a young female
who had not yet paired. It was interrupted by many little courtesies of
touching bill and bowing head, which were received with plain favour; for
Kehonka was a handsome and well marked bird. By the time the sky was red
along the east and strewn with pale, blown feathers of amber pink toward
the zenith, his swift wooing was next door to winning. He had forgotten
his captivity and clipped wing. He was thinking of a nest in the wide
emptiness of the North.

[Illustration: “FELL WITH A GREAT SPLASH INTO THE CHANNEL OF THE
TANTRAMAR.”]

When the signal-cry came, and the flock took flight, Kehonka rose with
them. But his preliminary rush along the water was longer than that of
the others, and when the flock formed into flying order he fell in at the
end of the longer leg of the V, behind the weakest of the young geese.
This would have been a humiliation to him, had he taken thought of it at
all; but his attention was all absorbed in keeping his balance. When the
flock found its pace, and the cold sunrise air began to whistle past the
straight, bullet-like rush of their flight, a terror grew upon him. He
flew much better than he had flown the night before; but he soon saw that
this speed of theirs was beyond him. He would not yield, however. He
would not lag behind. Every force of his body and his brain went into
that flight, till his eyes blurred and his heart seemed on the point of
bursting. Then, suddenly, with a faint, despairing note, he lurched
aside, shot downward, and fell with a great splash into the channel of
the Tantramar. With strong wings, and level, unpausing flight, the flock
went on to its North without him.

Dazed by the fall, and exhausted by the intensity of his effort, Kehonka
floated, moveless, for many minutes. The flood-tide, however, racing
inland, was carrying him still northward; and presently he began to swim
in the same direction. In his sick heart glowed still the vision of the
nest in the far-off solitudes, and he felt that he would find there,
waiting for him, the strong-winged mate who had left him behind. Half an
hour later another flock passed honking overhead, and he called to them;
but they were high up, and feeding time was past. They gave no sign in
answer. He made no attempt to fly after them. Hour after hour he swam on
with the current, working ever north. When the tide turned he went
ashore, still following the river, till its course changed toward the
east; whereupon he ascended the channel of a small tributary which flowed
in on the north bank. Here and there he snatched quick mouthfuls of
sprouting grasses, but he was too driven by his desire to pause for food.
Sometimes he tried his wings again, covering now some miles at each
flight, till by and by, losing the stream because its direction failed
him, he found himself in a broken upland country, where progress was slow
and toilsome. Soon after sunset, troubled because there was no water
near, he again took wing, and over dark woods which filled him with
apprehension he made his longest flight. When about spent he caught a
small gleaming of water far below him, and alighted in a little woodland
glade wherein a brook had overflowed low banks.

[Illustration: “THE DISCOURAGER OF QUESTS DARTED STEALTHILY FORTH.”]

The noise of his abrupt descent loudly startled the wet and dreaming
woods. It was a matter of interest to all the furry, furtive ears of the
forest for a half-mile round. But it was in no way repeated. For perhaps
fifteen minutes Kehonka floated, neck erect, head high and watchful, in
the middle of the pool, with no movement except the slight, unseen oaring
of his black-webbed feet, necessary to keep the current from bearing him
into the gloom of the woods. This gloom, hedging him on every side,
troubled him with a vague fear. But in the open of the mid-pool, with two
or three stars peering faintly through the misted sky above him, he felt
comparatively safe. At last, very far above, he heard again that wild
calling of his fellows,—honk-a-honk, honk-a-honk, honka, honka, honk,
honk,—high and dim and ghostly, for these rough woodlands had no appeal
for the journeying flocks. Remote as the voices were, however, Kehonka
answered at once. His keen, sonorous, passionate cry rang strangely on
the night, three times. The flock paid no heed to it whatever, but sped
on northward with unvarying flight and clamour; and as the wizard noise
passed beyond, Kehonka, too weary to take wing, followed eagerly to the
northerly shore of the pool, ran up the wet bank, and stood straining
after it.

His wings were half spread as he stood there, quivering with his passion.
In his heart was the hunger of the quest. In his eyes was the vision of
nest and mate, where the serviceberry thicket grew by the wide sub-arctic
waters. The night wind blew steadily away from him to the underbrush
close by, or even in his absorption he would have noticed the approach of
a menacing, musky smell. But every sense was now numb in the presence of
his great desire. There was no warning for him.

The underbrush rustled, ever so softly. Then a small, delicately moving,
fine-furred shape, the discourager of quests, darted stealthily forth,
and with a bound that was feathery in its blown lightness, seeming to be
uplifted by the wide-plumed tail that balanced it, descended on Kehonka’s
body. There was a thin honk, cut short by keen teeth meeting with a
crunch and a twist in the glossy slim blackness of Kehonka’s neck. The
struggle lasted scarcely more than two heart-beats. The wide wings
pounded twice or thrice upon the ground, in fierce convulsion. Then the
red fox, with a sidewise jerk of his head, flung the heavy, trailing
carcass into a position for its easy carrying, and trotted off with it
into the darkness of the woods.

[Illustration: SAVOURY MEATS]

                             Savoury Meats

In the bushy thicket the doe stood trembling over the young one to which
she had given birth in the early part of the night. A light wind began to
breathe just before dawn, and in its languid throbbing the slim twigs and
half unfolded leaves from time to time rustled stiffly. Over the
tree-tops, and from the open spaces in the wood, could be seen the first
pallor of approaching day; and one pink thread, a finger long, outlined a
lonely fragment of the horizon. But in the bushy thicket it was dark. The
mother could not see her little one, but kept feeling it anxiously and
lightly with her silken nose. She was waiting till it should be strong
enough to rise and nurse.

As the pink thread became scarlet and crept along a wider arc, and the
cold light spread, there came from a far-off hillside the trailing echo
of a howl. It was the cry of a wolf hunting alone. It hardly penetrated
the depths of the bushy thicket, but the doe heard it, and faced about to
the point whence it came, and stamped angrily with slim, sharp hoof. Her
muzzle was held high, and her nostrils expanded tensely, weighing and
analysing every scent that came on the chill air. But the dread cry was
not repeated. No smell of danger breathed in her retreat. The light stole
at last through the tangled branches. Then the little one struggled to
its feet, its spotted sides still heaving under the stress of their new
expansion; and the doe, with lowered head and neck bent far around,
watched it with great eyes as it pressed its groping mouth against her
udder and learned to feed.

Presently the sides of branch and stem and leaf facing the dawn took on a
hue of pink. A male song-sparrow, not yet feeling quite at home after his
journey from the South, sang hesitatingly from the top of a bush. A pair
of crows squawked gutturally and confidentially in a tree-top, where they
contemplated nesting. Everything was wet, but it was a tonic and
stimulating wetness, like that of a vigorous young swimmer climbing
joyously out of a cool stream. The air had a sharp savour, a smell of
gummy aromatic buds, and sappy twigs, and pungent young leaves. But the
body of the scent, which seemed like the very person of spring, was the
affluence of the fresh earth, broken and turned up to the air by millions
of tiny little thrusting blades. Presently, when the light fell into the
thicket with a steeper slant, the doe stepped away, and left her little
one lying, hardly to be discerned, on a spotted heap of dead leaves and
moss. She stole noiselessly out of the thicket. She was going to pasture
on the sprouting grasses of a neighbouring wild meadow, and to drink at
the amber stream that bordered it. She knew that, in her absence, the
little one’s instinct would teach him to keep so still that no marauder’s
eye would be likely to detect him.

Two or three miles away from the thicket, in the heart of the same
deep-wooded wilderness, stood a long, low-roofed log cabin, on the edge
of a narrow clearing. The yard was strewn with chips, some fresh cut and
some far gone in decay. A lean pig rooted among them, turning up the
black soil that lay beneath. An axe and black iron pot stood on the
battered step before the door. In the window appeared the face of an old
man, gazing blankly out upon the harsh-featured scene.

The room where the old man sat was roughly ceiled and walled with brown
boards. The sunlight streamed in the window, showing the red stains of
rust on the cracked kitchen stove, and casting an oblong figure of
brightness on the faded patchwork quilt which covered the low bed in the
corner. Two years earlier John Hackett had been an erect and powerful
woodsman, strong in the task of carving himself a home out of the
unyielding wilderness. Then his wife had died of a swift consumption. A
few weeks later he had been struck down with paralysis, from which he
partly recovered to find himself grown suddenly senile and a helpless
invalid. On his son, Silas, fell the double task of caring for him and
working the scant, half-subjugated farm.

Streaks and twines of yellowish white were scattered thickly amid the
ragged blackness of the old man’s hair and beard. The strong, gaunt lines
of his features consorted strangely with the piteous weakness that now
trembled in his eyes and on his lower lip. He sat in a big home-made easy
chair, which Silas had constructed for him by sawing a quarter-section
out of a hogshead. This rude frame the lad had lined laboriously with
straw and coarse sacking, and his father had taken great delight in it.

A soiled quilt of blue, magenta, and white squares wrapped the old man’s
legs, as he sat by the window waiting for Silas to come in. His withered
hands picked ceaselessly at the quilt.

“I wish Si’d come! I want my breakfast!” he kept repeating, now
wistfully, now fretfully. His gaze wandered from the window to the stove,
from the stove to the window, with slow regularity. When the pig came
rooting into his line of vision, it vexed him, and he muttered peevishly
to himself.

“That there hog’ll hev the whole place rooted up. I wish Si’d come and
drive him out of that!”

At last Si came. The old man’s face smoothed itself, and a loving light
came into his eyes as the lad adjusted the pillow at his head. The doings
of the hog were forgotten.

Si bustled about to get breakfast, the old man’s eyes following every
movement. The tea was placed on the back of the stove to draw. A plate of
cold buckwheat cakes was brought out of the cupboard and set on the rude
table. A cup, with its handle broken off, was half filled with molasses,
for “sweetenin’,” and placed beside the buckwheat cakes. Then Si cut some
thick slices of salt pork and began to fry them. They “sizzled”
cheerfully in the pan, and to Si, with his vigorous morning appetite, the
odour was rare and fine. But the old man was troubled by it. His hands
picked faster at the quilt.

“Si,” said he, in a quavering voice, that rose and fell without regard to
the force of the words, “I know ye can’t help it, but my stomach’s turned
agin salt pork! It’s been a-comin’ on me this long while, that I couldn’t
eat it no more. An’ now it’s come. Pork, pork, pork,—I can’t eat it no
more, Si! But there, I know ye can’t help it. Ye’re a good boy, a kind
son, Si, and ye can’t help it!”

Si went on turning the slices with an old fork till the quavering voice
stopped. Then he cried, cheerfully:

“Try an’ eat a leetle mite of it, father. This ’ere tea’s _fine_, an’ll
sort of wash it down. An’ while I’m a-working in the back field this
morning I’ll try and think of somethin’ to kinder tickle your appetite!”

The old man shook his head gloomily.

“I can’t eat no more fried pork, Si,” said he, “not if I die fur it! I
know ye can’t help it! An’ it don’t matter, fur I won’t be here much
longer anyways. It’ll be a sight better fur you, Si, when I’m gone—but I
kinder don’t like to leave ye here all alone. Seems like I kinder keep
the house warm fur ye till ye come home! I don’t like to think of ye
comin’ in an’ findin’ the house all empty, Si! But it’s been powerful
empty, with jist you an’ me, sence mother died. It useter be powerful
good, Si, didn’t it, comin’ home and findin’ her a-waitin’ fur us, an’
hot supper ready on the table, an’ the lamp a-shinin’ cheerful? An’ what
suppers she could cook! D’ye mind the pies, an’ the stews, an’ the fried
deer’s meat? I could eat some of that fried deer’s meat now, Si. An’ I
feel like it would make me better. It ain’t no fault of yours, Si, but I
can’t eat no more salt pork!”

Si lifted the half-browned slices of yellow and crimson on to a plate,
poured the gravy over them, and set the plate on the table. Then he
dragged his father’s chair over to the table, helped him to tea and
buckwheat cakes and molasses, and sat down to his own meal. The fried
pork disappeared swiftly in his strong young jaws, while his father
nibbled reluctantly at the cold and soggy cakes. Si cleared the table,
fed the fire, dragged his father back to the sunny window, and then took
down the long gun, with the powder-horn and shot-pouch, which hung on
pegs behind the door.

The old man noticed what he was doing.

“Ain’t ye goin’ to work in the back field, Silas?” he asked, plaintively.

“No, father,” said the lad, “I’m goin’ a-gunnin’. Ef I don’t have some of
that fried deer’s meat fur your supper to-night, like mother useter fix
fur ye, my name ain’t Silas Hackett!”

He set a tin of fresh water on the window ledge within reach of his
father’s hand, gave one tender touch to the pillow, and went out quickly.
The old man’s eyes strained after him till he disappeared in the woods.

Silas walked with the noiseless speed of the trained woodsman. His heart
was big with pity for his father, and heavy with a sense of approaching
loss. But instinctively his eyes took note of the new life beginning to
surge about him in myriad and tumultuous activity. It surged, too, in the
answering current of his strong young blood; and from time to time he
would forget his heaviness utterly for a moment, thrilled through and
through by a snatch of bird song, or a glimpse of rose-red maple buds, or
a gleam of ineffable blueness through the tree-tops, or a strange,
clean-smelling wind that made him stop and stretch his lungs to take it
in. Suddenly he came upon a fresh deer-track.

The sorcery of spring was forgotten. His heaviness was forgotten. He was
now just the hunter, keen upon the trail of the quarry. Bending low,
silent as a shadow, peering like a panther, he slipped between the great
trunks, and paused in the fringe of downy catkined willows that marked
the meadow’s edge. On the other side of the meadow he saw the form of a
doe, drinking. He heard on the wet air the sharp, chiming brawl of the
brook, fretted by some obstruction. He took a careful aim. The doe lifted
her head, satisfied, and ready to return to her young one in the thicket.
A shot rang out across the meadow, and she sprang into the air, to fall
back with her slender muzzle in the stream, her forelegs bent beneath
her, her hind legs twitching convulsively for a moment before they
stiffened out upon the grass.

As Silas staggered homeward he was no longer the keen hunter. He no
longer heard the summons of the spring morning. All he thought of was the
pleasure which would light up the wan and piteous face of the old man in
the chair by the window when the savoury smell of the frying deer’s meat
would fill the dusky air of the cabin. As he crossed the chip-strewn
yard, he saw his father’s face watching for him. He dropped his burden at
the door, and entered, panting and triumphant.

“I’ve got it fur ye, father!” he cried, softly touching the tremulous
hands with his big brown fingers.

“I’m right glad, Si,” quavered the old man, “but I’m a sight gladder to
see ye back! The hours is long when ye’re not by me! Oh, but ye do mind
me of your mother, Si!”

Si took the carcass to the shed, dressed it carefully, and then, after
cutting several thick slices from the haunch, stowed it in the little
black hole of a cellar, beneath the cabin floor. He put some fair
potatoes to boil, and proceeded to fry the juicy steaks which the old man
loved. The fragrance of them filled the cabin. The old man’s eyes grew
brighter, and his hands less tremulous. When the smoking and sputtering
dish was set upon the table, Silas again drew up the big chair, and the
two made a joyous meal. The old man ate as he had not eaten for months,
and the generous warmth of the fresh meat put new life into his withered
veins. His under lip grew firmer, his voice steadier, his brain more
clear. With a gladness that brought tears into his eyes, Silas marked the
change.

“Father,” he cried, “ye look more like yerself than I’ve seen ye these
two years past!”

And the old man replied, with a ring of returning hope in his voice: