knees were still rather weak, and were apt to give out all of a sudden,
and to let a fellow sit down when he didn't want to. And the dry leaves
and little sticks kept sliding around under one's feet so that one never
knew what was going to happen next. It was very different from the
hollow tree, and they were glad when their mother picked them up one at
a time by the back of the neck, carried them home, gave them their
supper, and told them to lie still and take a nap while she went after
another rabbit.

But they had really done very well, considering that it was their first
day out. One of them in particular was very smart and precocious, and
she had taken much pleasure in watching the independent way in which he
went staggering about, looking for impressions. And the other was not
far behind him. Her long hours of still-hunting had brought their rich
reward, and her babies were all that she could ask.

She was in the habit of occasionally bringing something home for them to
play with--a wood-mouse, perhaps, or a squirrel, or a partridge, or even
a larger animal; and they played with it with a vengeance, shaking and
worrying it, and spitting and growling and snarling over it in the most
approved fashion. And you should have seen them the first time they saw
their mother catch a rabbit. They did not try to help her, for she had
told them not to, but they watched her as if it was a matter of life and
death--as, indeed, it was, but not to them. The rabbit was nibbling some
tender young sprouts. The old lynx crept up behind him very quietly and
stealthily, and the kittens' eyes stuck out farther and farther as they
saw her gradually work up within leaping distance. They nearly jumped
out of their skins with excitement when at last she gave a bound and
landed with both forepaws on the middle of his back. And when the rabbit
screamed out in his fright and pain, they could not contain themselves
any longer, but rushed in and helped finish him. They seemed to
understand the game as perfectly as if they had been practising it for
years. I suppose that was where their tendencies came in.

A few days later they had another experience--or at least one of them
did. Their mother happened to see two little wood-mice run under a
small, half-decayed log, and she put her forefeet against it and rolled
it half-way over; and then, while she held it there, the larger
Kitten--the one who had made the better record the day they first left
the den--thrust his paw under and grabbed one of them. The other mouse
got away, but I don't think the Kitten cared very much. He had made his
first kill, and that was glory enough for one day.

From wood-mice the kittens progressed to chipmunks, and from them to
larger game. With use and exercise their soft baby muscles grew hard and
strong, and it was not long before they were able to follow the old lynx
almost anywhere, to the tops of the tallest trees, over the roughest
ground, and through the densest thickets. And they learned other things
besides how to walk and climb and hunt. Their mother was a good teacher
and a rather rigid disciplinarian, and very early in life they were
taught that they must obey promptly and without question, and that on
certain occasions it was absolutely necessary to keep perfectly still
and not make the slightest sound. For instance, there was the time when
the whole family lay sprawled out on a limb of a tree, fifteen or
twenty feet up from the ground, and watched the land-looker go by with
his half-axe over his shoulder, his compass in his hand, and a note-book
sticking out of his pocket. They were so motionless, and the grayish
color of their fur matched so well with the bark of the tree, that he
never saw them, although for a moment they were right over his head, and
could have leaped to his shoulders as easily as not.

In short, the kittens were learning to take care of themselves, and it
was well that they were, for one day their mother was taken from them in
a strange, sad way, and there was nothing they could do but cry, and try
to follow her, and at last see her pass out of sight, still looking back
and calling to them pitifully. It was the river that carried her off,
and it was a floating saw-log that she rode upon, an unwilling
passenger. The trouble began with a steel trap, just as it did in their
father's case. Traps are not nearly as much to be feared in summer or
early fall as in winter, for the simple reason that one's fur is not as
valuable in warm weather as in cold. The lynx's, for instance, was
considerably shorter and thinner than it had been in the preceding
December, when she and her mate first met, and it had taken on a
reddish tinge, as if the steel had begun to rust a trifle. But the
killing machines are to be found occasionally at all seasons of the
year, and somebody had set this one down by the edge of the water--not
the Glimmerglass, but a branch of the Tahquamenon River--and had chained
it to a log that had been hung up in last spring's drive. When she first
felt its grip on her leg she yelled and tore around just as her mate had
done, while the kittens looked on in wonder and amazement. They had seen
their mother in many moods, but never in one like this. But by and by
she grew weary, and a little later it began to rain. She was soon
soaking wet, and as the hours dragged on every ounce of courage and
gumption seemed to ooze out of her. If the trapper had come then he
would have found her very meek and limp. Possibly she would have been
ready to fight him for her children's sakes, but nothing else could have
nerved her to it. But she was not put to any such test; the trapper did
not come.

It rained very hard, and it rained very long. In fact it had been
raining most of the time for two or three days before the lynx found the
trap, and in a few more hours the Great Tahquamenon Swamp was as full
of water as a soaked sponge, and the river was rising rapidly. The lynx
was soon lying in a puddle, and to get out of it she climbed upon the
log and stretched herself out on the wet, brown bark. Still the river
rose, and by and by the log began to stir in its bed, as if it were
thinking of renewing its voyage. At last, when she had been there nearly
twenty-four hours, and was faint with hunger, as well as cold and wet,
it quietly swung out into the current and drifted away down the stream.
She was an excellent swimmer, and she promptly jumped overboard and
tried to reach the shore, but of course the chain put a stop to that.
Weakened by fasting, and borne down by the weight of the trap, she came
very near drowning before she could scramble up again over the end of
the log and seat herself amidships.

The kittens were foraging among the bushes, but she called to them in a
tone which told them plainly enough that some new trouble had befallen
her, and they hurried down to the water's edge, and stood there, mewing
piteously. She implored them to follow her, and after much persuasion
the bigger and bolder of the two plunged bravely in. But he didn't get
very far. It was very cold and very wet, and he wasn't used to
swimming. Besides, the water got into his nose and made him sneeze,
which distracted his attention so that for a moment he forgot all about
his mother, and just turned around and hustled back to the shore as fast
as he could go. After that he, contented himself with following along
the bank and keeping as near her as he could. Once the log drifted in so
close that she thought she could jump ashore, and the Kitten watched
eagerly as she gathered herself for the spring. But the chain was too
short, and she fell into the water. Her forepaw just grazed the
grass-tuft where the Kitten was standing, and for an instant she felt
the blades slipping between her toes; but the next moment she was
swimming for the log again, and the Kitten was mewing his sympathy at
the top of his voice.

They journeyed on for nearly an hour longer, she on her prison-ship, and
he on land; and then, before either of them knew just what had happened,
the little tributary had emptied itself into the main stream of the
Tahquamenon, and they suddenly realized that they were much farther
apart than they had been at any time before. This new river was several
times as broad as the one on which the voyage had begun, and the wind
was steadily carrying her away from the shore, while the current bore
her resistlessly on in its long, slow voyage to Lake Superior. She was
still calling to him, but her voice was growing fainter and fainter in
the distance, and so, at last, she passed out of his sight and hearing
forever.

[Illustration: "_He was a very presentable young lynx._"]

And then, for the first time, he missed his brother. The other kitten
had always been a trifle the slower of the two, and in some way he had
dropped behind. Our friend was alone in the world.

But the same river that had carried his mother away brought him a little
comfort in his desolation, for down by the water's edge, cast up on the
sand by a circling eddy, he found a dead sucker. He ate it with relish,
and felt better in spite of himself. It made a very large meal for a
lynx of his size, and by the time he had finished it he began to be
drowsy, so he picked out the driest spot he could find, under the thick
branches of a large hemlock, and curled himself up on the brown needles
and went to sleep.

The next day he had to hustle for a living, and the next it was the
same, and the next, and the next. As the weeks and the months went by
there was every indication that life would be little else than one long
hustle--or perhaps a short one--and in spite of all he could do there
were times when he was very near the end of the chapter. But his
mother's lessons stood him in good stead, and he was exceedingly well
armed for the chase. It would have been hard to find in all the woods
any teeth better adapted than his to the work of pulling a
fellow-creature to pieces. In front, on both the upper and lower jaws,
were the chisel-shaped incisors. Flanking them were the canines, very
long and slender, and very sharply pointed, thrusting themselves into
the meat like the tines of a carving-fork, and tearing it away in great
shreds. And back of the canines were other teeth that were still larger,
but shorter and broader, and shaped more like notched knife-blades.
Those of the lower jaw worked inside those of the upper, like shears,
and they were very handy for cutting the large chunks into pieces small
enough to go down his throat. By the time he got through with a
partridge there was not much left of it but a puddle of brown feathers.
His claws, too, were very long and white, and very wickedly curved; and
before starting out on a hunt he would often get up on his hind legs
and sharpen those of his forefeet on a tree-trunk, just as your
house-cat sharpens hers on the leg of the kitchen-table. When he wasn't
using them he kept them hidden between his toes, so that they would not
be constantly catching and breaking on roots and things; but all he had
to do when he wanted them was to pull certain muscles, and out they
came, ready to scratch and tear to his heart's content. They were not by
any means full grown as yet, but they bade fair to equal his father's
some day. He was warmly and comfortably clothed, of course, and along
his sides and flanks the hair hung especially thick and long, to protect
his body when he was obliged to wade through light, fluffy snow. When
there was a crust he didn't need it, for his paws were so big and broad
and hairy that at such times they bore him up almost as well as if they
had been two pairs of snow-shoes.

But, well armed, well clad, and well shod though he was, it was
fortunate for the Kitten that his first winter was a mild one--mild,
that is, for the Glimmerglass country. Otherwise things might have gone
very hard with him, and they were none too easy as it was. There were
days when he was even hungrier than his mother had been the night she
serenaded the land-looker, and it was on one of these occasions that he
found a porcupine in a tree and tried to make a meal of him. That was a
memorable experience. The porky was sitting in a crotch, doing nothing
in particular, and when the Kitten approached he simply put his nose
down and his quills up. The Kitten spat at him contemptuously, but
without any apparent effect. Then he put out a big forepaw and tapped
him lightly on the forehead. The porcupine flipped his tail, and the
Kitten jumped back, and spat and hissed harder than ever. He didn't
quite know what to make of this singular-looking creature, but he was
young and rash, besides being awfully, awfully hungry, and in another
minute he pitched in.

The next thing they knew, the porcupine had dropped to the ground, where
he lit in a snow-bank, and presently picked himself up and waddled off
to another tree, while the Kitten--well, the Kitten just sat in the
crotch and cried as hard as ever he could cry. There were quills in his
nose, and quills in his side, and quills in both his forepaws; and every
motion was agony. He himself never knew exactly how he got rid of them
all, so of course I can't tell you. A few of those that were caught only
by their very tips may possibly have dropped out, but it is probable
that most of them broke off and left their points to work deeper and
deeper into the flesh until the skin finally closed over them and they
disappeared. I have no doubt that pieces of those quills are still
wandering about in various parts of his anatomy, like the quart of lead
that "Little Bobs" carries around with him, according to Mr. Kipling. It
was weeks before he ceased to feel the pain of them.

For several days after this mishap it was impossible for him to hunt,
and he would certainly have starved to death if it had not been for a
cougar who providentially came to the Glimmerglass on a short visit. The
Kitten found his tracks in the snow the very next day, and cautiously
followed them up, limping as he went, to see what the big fellow had
been doing. For a mile or more the large, round, shapeless
footprints--very much like his own, but on a bigger scale--were spaced
so regularly that it was evident the cougar had been simply walking
along at a very leisurely gait, with nothing to disturb his frame of
mind. But after a while the record showed a remarkable change. The
footprints were only a few inches apart, and his cougarship had carried
himself so low that his body had dragged in the snow and left a deep
furrow behind. The Kitten knew what that meant. He had been there
himself, though not after the same kind of prey. And then the trail
stopped entirely, and for a space the snow lay fresh and virgin and
untrodden. But twenty feet away was the spot where the cougar had come
down on all-fours, only to leap forward again like a ricochetting
cannon-ball; and twenty-five feet farther lay the greater part of the
carcass of a deer.

The Kitten stuffed himself as full as he could hold, and then climbed a
tree and watched. About midnight the cougar appeared, and after he had
eaten his fill and gone away again the Kitten slipped down and ate some
more. He was making up for lost time. For four successive nights the
cougar came and feasted on venison, but after that the Kitten never saw
him or heard of him again. There was still a goodly quantity of meat
left, and it seems somewhat curious that he did not return for it, but
he was a stranger in those parts, and it is probable that he went back
to his old haunts, up toward Whitefish Point, perhaps, or the Grand
Sable. Anyhow, it was very nice for the Kitten, for that deer kept him
in provisions until he was able to take up hunting once more.

He had one rather exciting experience during this period. One day, just
as he was finishing a very enjoyable meal of venison tenderloin, he
heard the tramp of snow-shoes on the crust, and in a moment more that
same land-looker came pacing down a section line and halted squarely in
front of him. Now there are trappers who say that a Canada lynx is a
fool and a coward, that he will run from a small dog, and that he makes
his living entirely by preying on animals that are weaker and more
poorly armed than he. I admit, of course, that the majority of lynxes do
not go ramming around the woods with chips on their shoulders, looking
for hunters armed with bowie-knives and repeating rifles. You wouldn't,
either--not as long as there were rabbits to be had for the stalking.
But on this occasion the Kitten's conduct certainly savored of
recklessness, if not of real bravery. Being entirely unacquainted with
the land-looking profession, he naturally supposed that the man had come
for his deer. And he didn't propose to let him have it. He considered
that that venison belonged to him, and he took his stand on the carcass,
laid his ears back, showed his white teeth, made his eyes blaze, and
spit and growled and snarled defiantly. The land-looker didn't quite
know what to do. His section line lay straight across the deer's body,
and he did not want to leave it for fear of confusing his reckoning, but
the Kitten, though only half grown, looked uncommonly business-like. He
had no gun, nor even a revolver, for he was hunting for pine, not fresh
meat. He had left his half-axe in camp, and when he felt in his pocket
for his jack-knife it was not there. Then he looked about for a club. He
had been told that lynxes always had very thin skulls, and that a light
blow on the back of the head was enough to kill the biggest and fiercest
of them, let alone a kitten. But he couldn't even find a stick that
would answer his purpose.

"Well," he said, when they had stared at each other a minute or two
longer without coming to any understanding, "I suppose if you won't turn
out for me, I'll have to turn out for you"; and he made a careful
circuit at a respectful distance, picked up his line again, and went on
his way.

The winter dragged on very slowly, with many ups and downs, but it was
gone at last. Summer was easier, if only because he was not obliged to
use up any of his vitality in keeping warm. Sometimes, indeed, he was
really too warm for comfort, so he presently changed his coat and put
on a thinner one. People like to talk about the coolness of the deep
woods, but the truth is that there isn't any place much hotter and
stuffier than a dense growth of timber, where the wind never comes, and
where the air is heavy and still. And then there are the windfalls and
the old burnings, where the sun beats fiercely down among the fallen
trees till the blackened soil is hot as a city pavement, and where dead
trunks and half-burned logs lie thrown together in the wildest
confusion--places which are almost impassable for men, and which even
the land-lookers avoid whenever they can, but which a cat will thread as
readily as the locomotive follows the rails. These were the localities
which the Kitten was most fond of frequenting, and here his youth
slipped rapidly away. He was fast becoming an adult lynx.

The summer passed, and half the autumn; the first snow came and went,
and again the Kitten put on his winter coat of gray, with the white
underneath, and the dark trimmings up and down his legs and along his
back. What with his mustachios, and his whiskers, and the tassels on his
ears, he was a very presentable young lynx. It would be many years
before he could hope to be as large and powerful as his father, but,
nevertheless, he was making remarkably good progress. And the time was
at hand when he would need both his good looks and his muscle.

Since his mother had left him he had seen only two or three lynxes, and
those were all much older and larger than he, and not well suited to be
his companions. But history repeats itself. One Indian-summer afternoon
he was tramping along the northern bank of the Glimmerglass, just as his
father had done two years before, and as he rounded a bend in the path
he came face to face with someone who was enough like him to have been
his twin sister. And they did as his parents had done, stood still for a
minute or two and looked at each other as if they had just found out
what they were made for. After all, life is something more than hustling
for a living, even in the woods.

But just then something else happened, and another ruling passion came
into play--the old instinct of the chase, which neither of them could
very long forget. A faint "Quack, quack, quack," came up from the lake,
and they crept to the edge of the bank, side by side, and looked down.
Above them the trees stood dreamily motionless in the mellow sunshine.
Below was a steep slope of ten or fifteen feet; beyond it a tiny strip
of sandy beach, and then the quiet water. A squadron of ducks, on their
way from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf, had taken stop-over checks for
the Glimmerglass; and now they came loitering along through the dead
bulrushes, murmuring gently, in soft, mild voices, of delicious minnows
and snails, and pausing a moment now and then to put their heads under
and dabble in the mud for some particularly choice morsel. The lynxes
crouched and waited, while their stubby tails twitched nervously, their
long, narrow pupils grew still narrower, and their paws fumbled about
among the dry pine-needles, feeling for the very best footing for the
flying leap. The ducks came on, still prattling pleasantly over their
own private affairs. Closer and closer they swam, without a thought of
death waiting for them at the top of the bank, and suddenly four
splendid sets of muscles jerked like bowstrings, four long hind-legs
straightened with a mighty thrust and shove, and two big gray creatures
shot out from the brink and came sailing down through the air with their
heads up, their tails on end, their eyes blazing, and their forepaws
stretched out to grab the nearest unhappy duck. The flock broke up with
frightened cries and a wonderful whirring of wings, and in a moment
more they were far away and going like the very wind.

[Illustration: "_They both stood still and looked at each other._"]

But two of its members stayed behind, and presently the lynxes waded out
on the beach and sat down to eat their supper together. They talked as
much over that meal as the ducks had over theirs, but the lynx language
is very different from that of the water-fowl. Instead of soft, gentle
murmurings there were low growls and snarls as the long, white claws and
teeth tore the warm red flesh from the bones. It could hardly have been
a pleasant conversation to anyone but themselves, but I suppose they
enjoyed it as much as the choicest repartee. In truth they had good
reason to be satisfied and contented with themselves and each other, and
with what they had just done, for not every flying leap is so
successful, and not every duck is as plump and juicy as the two that
they were discussing. So they talked on in angry, threatening tones,
that sounded like quarrelling, but that really meant only a fierce,
savage kind of pleasure; and when the meal was ended, and the very last
shred of duck-flesh had disappeared, they washed their faces, and
purred, and lay still a while to visit and get acquainted.

There were many other meetings during the weeks that followed--some
under as pleasant circumstances as the first, and some not. Perhaps the
best were those of the clear, sharp days of early winter, when the sky
was blue, and the sunshine was bright, and a thin carpet of fine, dry
snow covered the floor of the forest. It was cold, of course; but they
were young and strong and healthy, and their fur was thick and warm,
like the garments of a Canadian girl. The keen air set the live blood
leaping and dancing, and they frisked and frolicked, and romped and
played, and rolled each other over and over in the snow, and were as
wildly and deliciously happy as it is ever given to two animals to be.

It was too good to last long without some kind of an interruption, and
one glorious winter evening, when the full moon was flooding the woods
with the white light that brings a touch of madness, a third young lynx
came upon the scene. And then there was trouble. The Kitten's new friend
sat back in the bushes and looked on, while he and his rival squatted
face to face in the snow and sassed each other to the utmost limits of
the lynx vocabulary, their voices rising and falling in a hideous duet,
and their eyes gleaming and glowing with a pale, yellow-green fire.
Presently there was a rush, and the fur began to fly. The snow flew,
too; and the woods rang and rang again with yelling and caterwauling,
and spitting and swearing, and all manner of abuse. The rabbits heard
it, and trembled; and the partridges, down in the cedar swamp, glanced
furtively over their shoulders and were glad it was no nearer. They bit
and scratched and clawed like two little devils, and the onlooker in the
bushes must have felt a thrill of pride over the strenuous way in which
they strove for her favors. First one was on top, and then the other.
Now our Kitten had his rival by the ears, and now by the tail. One
minute heads, legs, and bodies were all mixed up in such a snarl that it
seemed as if they could never be untangled, and the next they backed off
just long enough to catch their breath, and then flew at each other's
throats more savagely than ever. It was really more difficult than you
would suppose for either of them to get a good hold of the other, partly
because their fur was so thick, and partly because Nature had purposely
made their skins very loose, with an eye to just such performances as
this. But they managed to do a good deal of damage, nevertheless; and in
the end the pretender was thoroughly whipped, and fled away in disgrace
down the long, snowy aisles of the forest, howling as he went, while
the Kitten turned slowly and painfully to the one who was at the bottom
of all this unpleasantness. His ears were slit; one eye was shut, and
the lid of the other hung very low; he limped badly with his right
hind-leg, and many were the wounds and scratches along his breast and
sides. But he didn't care. He had won his spurs.

The story of the Kitten is told, for he was a kitten no longer.

POINTERS FROM A PORCUPINE QUILL

HE wasn't handsome--the original owner of this quill--and I can't say
that he was very smart. He was only a slow-witted, homely old porky who
once lived by the Glimmerglass. But in spite of his slow wits and his
homeliness a great many things happened to him in the course of his
life.

He was born in a hollow hemlock log, on a wild April morning, when the
north wind was whipping the lake with snow, and when winter seemed to
have come back for a season. The Glimmerglass was neither glimmering nor
glassy that morning, but he and his mother were snug and warm in their
wooden nest, and they cared little for the storm that was raging
outside.

It has been said by some that porcupines lay eggs, the hard, smooth
shells of which are furnished by a kind and thoughtful Providence for
the protection of the mothers from their prickly offspring until the
latter have fairly begun their independent existence. Other people say
that two babies invariably arrive at once, and that one of them is
always dead before it is born. But when my Porcupine discovered America
he had neither a shell on his back nor a dead twin brother by his side.
Neither was he prickly. He was covered all over with soft, furry,
dark-brown hair. If you had searched carefully along the middle of his
back you might possibly have found the points of the first quills, just
peeping through the skin; but as yet the thick fur hid them from sight
and touch unless you knew just where and how to look for them.

He was a very large baby, larger even than a new-born bear cub, and no
doubt his mother felt a justifiable pride in his size and his general
peartness. She was certainly very careful of him and very anxious for
his safety, for she kept him out of sight, and no one ever saw him
during those first days and weeks of his babyhood. She did not propose
to have any lynxes or wild-cats or other ill-disposed neighbors fondling
him until his quills were grown. After that they might give him as many
love-pats as they pleased.

He grew rapidly, as all porcupine babies do. Long hairs, tipped with
yellowish-white, came out through the dense fur, and by and by the
quills began to show. His teeth were lengthening, too, as his mother
very well knew, and between the sharp things in his mouth and those on
his back and sides he was fast becoming a very formidable nursling.
Before he was two months old she was forced to wean him, but by that
time he was quite able to travel down to the beach and feast on the
tender lily-pads and arrow-head leaves that grew in the shallow water,
within easy reach from fallen and half-submerged tree-trunks.

One June day, as he and his mother were fishing for lily-pads, each of
them out on the end of a big log, a boy came down the steep bank that
rose almost from the water's edge. He wasn't a very attractive boy. His
clothes were dirty and torn--and so was his face. His hat was gone, and
his hair had not seen a comb for weeks. The mosquitoes and black-flies
and no-see-'ems had bitten him until his skin was covered with blotches
and his eyelids were so swollen that he could hardly see. And worst of
all, he looked as if he were dying of starvation. There was almost
nothing left of him but skin and bones, and his clothing hung upon him
as it would on a framework of sticks. If the Porcupine could have
philosophized about it he would probably have said that this was the
wrong time of year for starving; and from his point of view he would
have been right. June, in the woods, is the season of plenty for
everybody but man. Man thinks he must have wheat-flour, and that doesn't
grow on pines or maple-trees, nor yet in the tamarack swamp. But was
there any wild, fierce glare in the boy's eyes, such a light of hunger
as the story-books tell us is to be seen in the eyes of the wolf and the
lynx when they have not eaten for days and days, and when the snow lies
deep in the forest, and famine comes stalking through the trees? I don't
think so. He was too weak and miserable to do any glaring, and his
stomach was aching so hard from eating green gooseberries that he could
scarcely think of anything else.

But his face brightened a very little when he saw the old she-porcupine,
and he picked up a heavy stick and waded out beside her log. She clacked
her teeth together angrily as he approached; but he paid no attention,
so she drew herself into a ball, with her head down and her nose covered
by her forepaws. Reaching across her back and down on each side was a
belt or girdle of quills, the largest and heaviest on her whole body,
which could be erected at will, and now they stood as straight as young
spruce-trees. Their tips were dark-brown, but the rest of their length
was nearly white, and when you looked at her from behind she seemed to
have a pointed white ruffle, edged with black, tied around the middle of
her body. But the boy wasn't thinking about ruffles, and he didn't care
what she did with her quills. He gave her such a thrust with his stick
that she had to grab at the log with both hands to keep from being
shoved into the water. That left her nose unprotected, and he brought
the stick down across it once, twice, three times. Then he picked her up
by one foot, very gingerly, and carried her off; and our Porky never saw
his mother again.

Perhaps we had best follow her up and see what finally became of her.
Half a mile from the scene of the murder the boy came upon a woman and a
little girl. I sha'n't try to describe them, except to say that they
were even worse off than he. Perhaps you read in the papers, some years
ago, about the woman and the two children who were lost for several
weeks in the woods of northern Michigan.

"I've got a porky," said the boy.

[Illustration: "_High up in the top of a tall hemlock._"]

He dropped his burden on the ground, and they all stood around and
looked at it. They were hungry--oh, so hungry!--but for some reason they
did not seem very eager to begin. An old porcupine with her clothes on
is not the most attractive of feasts, and they had no knife with which
to skin her, no salt to season the meat, no fire to cook it, and no
matches with which to start one. Rubbing two sticks together is a very
good way of starting a fire when you are in a book, but it doesn't work
very well in the Great Tahquamenon Swamp. And yet, somehow or other--I
don't know how, and I don't want to--they ate that porcupine. And it did
them good. When the searchers found them, a week or two later, the woman
and the boy were dead, but the little girl was still alive, and for all
I know she is living to this day.

Let us return to the Glimmerglass. The young Porcupine ought to have
mourned deeply for his mother, but I grieve to say that he did nothing
of the kind. I doubt if he was even very lonesome. His brain was
smaller, smoother, and less corrugated than yours is supposed to be; its
wrinkles were few and not very deep; and it may be that the bump of
filial affection was quite polished, or even that there wasn't any such
bump at all. Anyhow, he got along very well without her, dispensing with
her much more easily than the woman and the boy and girl could have.
He watched stolidly while the boy killed her and carried her off, and a
little later he was eating lily-pads again.

As far as his future prospects were concerned, he had little reason for
worrying. He knew pretty well how to take care of himself, for that is a
kind of knowledge which comes early to young porcupines. Really, there
wasn't much to learn. His quills would protect him from most of his
enemies, if not from all of them; and, what was still better, he need
never suffer from a scarcity of food. Of all the animals in the woods
the porcupine is probably the safest from starvation, for he can eat
anything from the soft green leaves of the water-plants to the bark and
the small twigs of the tallest hemlock. Summer and winter, his
storehouse is always full. The young lions may lack, and suffer hunger,
and seek their meat from God; but the young porky has only to climb a
tree and set his teeth at work. All the woods are his huckleberry.

And, by the way, our Porcupine's teeth were a great institution,
especially the front ones, and were well worthy of a somewhat detailed
description. They were long and sharp and yellow, and there were two in
the upper jaw and two in the lower, with a wide gap on each side between
them and the molars. They kept right on growing as long as he lived, and
there is no telling how far they would have gone if there had been
nothing to stop them. Fortunately, he did a great deal of eating and
chewing, and the constant friction kept them worn down, and at the same
time served to sharpen them. Like a beaver's, they were formed of thin
shells of hard enamel in front, backed up by softer pulp behind; and of
course the soft parts wore away first, and left the enamel projecting in
sharp, chisel-like edges that could gnaw crumbs from a hickory
axe-handle.

The next few months were pleasant ones, with plenty to eat, and nothing
to do but keep his jaws going. By and by the leaves began to fall, and
whenever the Porky walked abroad they rustled around him like silk
skirts going down the aisle of a church. A little later the beechnuts
came down from the sky, and he feasted more luxuriously than ever. His
four yellow chisels tore the brown shells open, his molars ground the
sweet kernels into meal, and he ate and ate till his short legs could
hardly keep his fat little belly off the ground.

Then came the first light snow, and his feet left tracks which bore a
faint resemblance to a baby's--that is, if your imagination was
sufficiently vigorous. The snow grew deeper and deeper, and after a
while he had to fairly plough his way from the hollow log to the tree
where he took his meals. It was hard work, for his clumsy legs were not
made for wading, and at every step he had to lift and drag himself
forward, and then let his body drop while he shifted his feet. A
porcupine's feet will not go of themselves, the way other animals' do.
They have to be picked up one at a time and lifted forward as far as
they can reach--not very far at the best, for they are fastened to the
ends of very short legs. It almost seems as if he could run faster if he
could drop them off and leave them behind. One evening, when the snow
was beginning to freeze again after a thawing day, he lay down to rest
for a few minutes; and when he started on, some of his quills were fast
in the hardening crust and had to be left behind. But no matter how
difficult the walk might be, there was always a good square meal at the
end of it, and he pushed valiantly on till he reached his dinner-table.

Sometimes he stayed in the same tree for several days at a time,
quenching his thirst with snow, and sleeping in a crotch.

He was not by any means the only porcupine in the woods around the
Glimmerglass, although weeks sometimes passed without his seeing any of
his relations. At other times there were from one to half a dozen
porkies in the trees close by, and when they happened to feel like it
they would call back and forth to each other in queer, harsh, and often
querulous voices.

One afternoon, when he and another porcupine were occupying trees next
each other, two land-lookers came along and camped for the night between
them. Earlier in the day the men had crossed the trail of a pack of
wolves, and they talked of it as they cut their firewood, and, with all
the skill of the _voyageurs_ of old, cooked their scanty supper, and
made their bed of balsam boughs. The half-breed was much afraid that
they would have visitors before morning, but the white man only laughed
at the idea.

The meal was hardly finished when they lay down between their
blankets--the white man to sleep, and the half-breed to listen, listen,
listen for the coming of the wolves. Beyond the camp-fire's little
circle of ruddy light, vague shadows moved mysteriously, as if living
things were prowling about among the trees and only waiting for him to
fall asleep. Yet there was no wolf-howl to be heard, nor anything else
to break the silence of the winter night, save possibly the dropping of
a dead branch, or the splitting open of a tree-trunk, torn apart by the
frost. And by and by, in spite of himself, the half-breed's eyelids
began to droop.

But somebody else was awake--awake, and tempted with a great temptation.
The porcupine--not ours, but the other one--had caught the fragrance of
coffee and bacon. Here were new odors--different from anything that had
ever before tickled his nostrils--strange, but indescribably delicious.
He waited till the land-lookers were snoring, and then he started down
the tree. Half-way to the ground he encountered the cloud of smoke that
rose from the camp-fire. Here was another new odor, but with nothing
pleasant about it. It stung his nostrils and made his eyes smart, and he
scrambled up again as fast as he could go, his claws and quills rattling
on the bark. The half-breed woke with a start. He had heard
something--he was sure he had--the wolves were coming, and he gave the
white man a punch in the ribs.

"Wake up, wake up, m'shoor!" he whispered, excitedly. "The wolves are
coming. I can hear them on the snow."

The white man was up in a twinkling, but by that time the porcupine hod
settled himself in a crotch, out of reach of the smoke, and the woods
were silent again. The two listened with all their ears, but there was
not a sound to be heard.

"You must have been dreaming, Louis."

The half-breed insisted that he had really heard the patter of the
wolves' feet on the snow-crust, but the timber cruiser laughed at him,
and lay down to sleep again. An hour later the performance was repeated,
and this time the white man was angry.

"Don't you wake me up again, Louis. You're so rattled you don't know
what you're doing."

Louis was silenced, but not convinced, and he did not let himself go to
sleep again. The fire was dying down, and little by little the
smoke-cloud grew thinner and thinner until it disappeared entirely. Then
the half-breed heard the same sound once more, but from the tree
overhead, and not from across the snow. He waited and watched, and
presently a dark-brown animal, two or three feet in length and about
the shape of an egg, came scrambling cautiously down the trunk. The
porky reached the ground in safety, and searched among the tin plates
and the knives and forks until he found a piece of bacon rind; but he
got just one taste of it, and then Louis hit him over the head with a
club. Next morning the land-lookers had porcupine soup for breakfast,
and they told me afterward that it was very good indeed.

Our Porky had seen it all. He waited till the men had tramped away
through the woods, with their packs on their backs and their snow-shoes
on their feet, and then he, too, came down from his tree on a tour of
investigation. His friend's skin lay on the snow not very far away--if
you had pulled the quills and the longer hairs out of it, it would have
made the pelt which the old fur-traders sometimes sold under the name of
"spring beaver"--but he paid no attention to it. The bacon rind was what
interested him most, and he chewed and gnawed at it with a relish that
an epicure might have envied. It was the first time in all his
gluttonous little life that he had ever tasted the flavor of salt or
wood-smoke; and neither lily-pads, nor beechnuts, nor berries, nor
anything else in all the woods could compare with it. Life was worth
living, if only for this one experience; and it may be that he stowed a
dim memory of it away in some dark corner of his brain, and hoped that
fortune would some day be good to him and send him another rind.

The long, long winter dragged slowly on, the snow piled up higher and
deeper, and the cold grew sharper and keener. Night after night the
pitiless stars seemed sucking every last bit of warmth out of the old
earth and leaving it dead and frozen forever. Those were the nights when
the rabbits came out of their burrows and stamped up and down their
runways for hours at a time, trying by exercise to keep from freezing to
death, and when the deer dared not lie down to sleep. And hunger came
with the cold and the deep snow. The buck and the doe had to live on
hemlock twigs till they grew thin and poor. The partridges were buried
in the drifting snow, and starved to death. The lynxes and the wild-cats
hunted and hunted and hunted, and found no prey; and it was well for the
bears and the woodchucks that they could sleep all winter and did not
need food. Only the Porcupine had plenty and to spare. Starvation had no
terrors for him.

But the hunger of another may mean danger for us, as the Porcupine
discovered. In ordinary times most of the animals let him severely
alone. They knew better than to tackle such a living pin-cushion as he;
and if any of them ever did try it, one touch was generally enough. But
when you are ready to perish with hunger, you will take risks which at
other times you would not even think about; and so it happened that one
February afternoon, as the Porky was trundling himself deliberately over
the snow-crust, a fierce-looking animal with dark fur, bushy tail, and
pointed nose sprang at him from behind a tree and tried to catch him by
the throat, where the quills did not grow, and there was nothing but
soft, warm fur. The Porcupine knew just what to do in such a case, and
he promptly made himself into a prickly ball, very much as his mother
had done seven or eight months before, with his face down, and his
quills sticking out defiantly. But this time his scheme of defence did
not work as well as usual, for the sharp little nose dug into the snow
and wriggled its way closer and closer to where the jugular vein was
waiting to be tapped. That fisher must have understood his business, for
he had chosen the one and only way by which a porcupine may be
successfully attacked. For once in his life our friend was really
scared. Another inch, and the fisher would have won the game, but he was
in such a hurry that he grew careless and reckless, and did not notice
that he had wheeled half-way round, and that his hind-quarters were
alongside the Porcupine's. Now, sluggish and slow though a porky may be,
there is one of his members that is as quick as a steel trap, and that
is his tail. Something hit the fisher a whack on his flank, and he gave
a cry of pain and fury, and jumped back with half a dozen spears
sticking in his flesh. He must have quite lost his head during the next
few seconds, for before he knew it his face also had come within reach
of that terrible tail and its quick, vicious jerks. That ended the
battle, and he fled away across the snow, almost mad with the agony in
his nose, his eyes, his forehead, and his left flank. As for the Porky,
he made for the nearest tree as fast as he could go, hardly trusting in
his great deliverance. And I don't believe there is any sight in all the
Great Tahquamenon Swamp much funnier than a porky in a hurry--a porky
who has really made up his mind that he is in danger and must hustle for
dear life. He is the very personification of haste and a desire to go
somewhere quick, and he picks his feet up and puts them down again as
fast as ever he can; and yet, no matter how hard he works, his legs are
so short and his body so fat that he can't begin to travel as fast as he
wants to.

Another day the lynx tried it, and fared even worse than the fisher--not
the Canada lynx, with whom we are already somewhat acquainted, but the
bay lynx. The fisher had had some sense, and would probably have
succeeded if he had been a little more careful, but the lynx was a fool.
He didn't know the very first thing about the proper way to hunt
porcupines, and he ought never to have tried it at all, but he was
literally starving, and the temptation was too much for him. Here was
something alive, something that had warm red blood in its veins and a
good thick layer of flesh over its bones, and that was too slow to get
away from him; and he sailed right in, tooth and claw, regardless of the
consequences. Immediately he forgot all about the Porcupine, and his own
hunger, and everything else but the terrible pain in his face and his
forepaws. He made the woods fairly ring with his howls, and he jumped up
and down on the snow-crust, rubbing his head with his paws, and driving
the little barbed spears deeper and deeper into the flesh. And then,
all of a sudden, he ceased his leaping and bounding and howling, and
dropped on the snow in a limp, lifeless heap, dead as last summer's
lily-pads. One of the quills had driven straight through his left eye
and into his brain. Was it any wonder if in time the Porcupine came to
think himself invulnerable?

Even a northern Michigan winter has its ending, and at last there came
an evening when all the porcupines in the woods around the Glimmerglass
were calling to each other from one tree to another. They couldn't help
it. There was something in the air that stirred them to a vague
restlessness and uneasiness, and our own particular Porky sat up in the
top of a tall hemlock and sang. Not like Jenny Lind, nor like a thrush
or a nightingale, but his harsh voice went squealing up and down the
scale in a way that was all his own, without time or rhythm or melody,
in the wildest, strangest music that ever woke the silent woods. I don't
believe that he himself quite knew what he meant or why he did it.
Certainly no one else could have told, unless some wandering Indian or
trapper may have heard the queer voices and prophesied that a thaw was
coming.

The thaw arrived next day, and it proved to be the beginning of spring.
The summer followed as fast as it could, and again the lily-pads were
green and succulent in the shallow water along the edge of the
Glimmerglass, and again the Porcupine wandered down to the beach to feed
upon them, discarding for a time his winter diet of bark and twigs. Why
should one live on rye-bread when one can have cake and ice-cream?

And there among the bulrushes, one bright June morning, he had a fight
with one of his own kind. Just as he was approaching his favorite log,
two other porcupines appeared, coming from different directions, one a
male, and the other a female. They all scrambled out upon the log, one
after another, but it soon became evident that three was a crowd. Our
Porky and the other bachelor could not agree at all. They both wanted
the same place and the same lily-pads, and in a little while they were
pushing and shoving and growling and snarling with all their might, each
doing his best to drive the other off the log and into the water. They
did not bite--perhaps they had agreed that teeth like theirs were too
cruel to be used in civilized warfare--but they struggled and chattered
and swore at each other, and made all sorts of queer noises while they
fought their funny little battle--all the funnier because each of them
had to look out for the other's quills. If either had happened to push
the wrong way, they might both have been in serious trouble. It did not
last long. Our Porky was the stronger, and his rival was driven backward
little by little till he lost his hold completely and slipped into the
lake. He came to the surface at once, and quickly swam to the shore,
where he chattered angrily for a few minutes, and then, like the
sensible bachelor that he was, wandered off up the beach in search of
other worlds more easily conquered. There was peace on our Porky's log,
and the lily-pads that grew beside it had never been as fresh and juicy
as they were that morning.

Two months later, on a hot August afternoon, I was paddling along the
edge of the Glimmerglass in company with a friend of mine, each of us in
a small dug-out canoe, when we found the Porky asleep in the sunshine.
He was lying on the nearly horizontal trunk of a tree whose roots had
been undermined by the waves till it leaned far out over the lake,
hardly a foot from the water.

My friend, by the way, is the foreman of a lumber-camp. He has served in
the British army, has hunted whales off the coast of Greenland, married
a wife in Grand Rapids, and run a street-car in Chicago; and now he is
snaking logs out of the Michigan woods. He is quite a chunk of a man,
tall and decidedly well set up, and it would take a pretty good
prize-fighter to whip him, but he learned that day that a porcupine at
close quarters is worse than a trained pugilist.

"Look at that porky," he called to me. "I'm going to ram the canoe into
the tree and knock him off into the water. Just you watch, and you'll
see some fun."

I was somewhat uncertain whether the joke would ultimately be on the
Porcupine or the man, but it was pretty sure to be worth seeing, one way
or the other, so I laid my paddle down and awaited developments. Bang!
went the nose of the dug-out against the tree, and the Porcupine
dropped, but not into the water. He landed in the bow of the canoe, and
the horrified look on my friend's face was a delight to see. The Porky
was wide awake by this time, for I could hear his teeth clacking as he
advanced to the attack.

"Great Scott! He's coming straight at me!"

The Porcupine was certainly game. I saw the paddle rise in the air and
come down with a tremendous whack, but it seemed to have little effect.
The Porky's coat of quills and hair was so thick that a blow on the back
did not trouble him much. If my friend could have hit him across the
nose it would have ended the matter then and there, but the canoe was
too narrow and its sides too high for a crosswise stroke. He tried
thrusting, but that was no better. When a good-sized porcupine has
really made up his mind to go somewhere he may be slow, but it takes
more than a punch with the end of a stick to stop him; and this Porky
had fully determined to go aft and get acquainted with the foreman.

[Illustration: "_He quickly made his way to the beach._"]

My friend couldn't even kick, for he was kneeling on the bottom of the
dug-out, with his feet behind him, and if he tried to stand up he would
probably capsize.

"Say, Hulbert, what am I going to do?"

I didn't give him any advice, for my sympathies were largely with the
Porcupine. Besides, I hadn't any advice to give. Just then the canoe
drifted around so that I could look into it, and I beheld the Porcupine
bearing down on my helpless friend like Birnam Wood on its way to
Dunsinane, his ruffle of quills erect, fire in his little black eyes,
and a thirst for vengeance in his whole aspect. My friend made one or
two final and ineffectual jabs at him, and then gave it up.

"It's no use!" he called; "I'll have to tip over!" and the next second
the canoe was upside down and both belligerents were in the water. The
Porcupine floated high--I suppose his hollow quills helped to keep him
up--and he proved a much better swimmer than I had expected, for he
quickly made his way to the beach and disappeared in the woods, still
chattering disrespectfully. My friend waded ashore, righted his canoe,
and we resumed our journey. I don't think I'll tell you what he said. He
got over it after a while, and in the end he probably enjoyed his joke
more than if it had turned out as he had intended.

The summer followed the winter into the past, and the Moon of Falling
Leaves came round again. The Porcupine was not alone. Another porky was
with him, and the two seemed very good friends. In fact, his companion
was the very same lady porcupine who had stood by while he fought the
battle of the log and the lily-pads, though I do not suppose that they
had been keeping company all those months, and I am by no means certain
that they remembered that eventful morning at all. Let us hope they
did, for the sake of the story. Who knows how much or how little of love
was stirring the slow currents of their sluggish natures--of such love
as binds the dove or the eagle to his mate, or of such steadfast
affection as the Beaver and his wife seem to have felt for each other?
Not much, perhaps; yet they climbed the same tree, ate from the same
branch, and drank at the same spring; and the next April there was
another arrival in the old hollow log--twins, this time, and both of
them alive.

But the Porcupine never saw his children, for a wandering fit seized
him, and he left the Glimmerglass before they were born. Two or three
miles away was a little clearing where a mossback lived. A railway
crossed one edge of it, between the hill and the swamp, and five miles
away was a junction, where locomotives were constantly moving about,
backing, hauling, and making up their trains. As the mossback lay awake
in the long, quiet, windless winter nights, he often heard them puffing
and snorting, now with slow, heavy coughs, and now quick and sharp and
rapid. One night when he was half asleep he heard something that said,
"chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew," like an engine that has its train
moving and is just beginning to get up speed. At first he paid no
attention to it. But the noise suddenly stopped short, and after a pause
of a few seconds it began again at exactly the same speed; stopped
again, and began a third time. And so it went on, chewing and pausing,
chewing and pausing, with always just so many chews to the second, and
just so many seconds to each rest. No locomotive ever puffed like that.
The mossback was wide awake now, and he muttered something about
"another of those pesky porkies." He had killed the last one that came
around the house, and had wanted his wife to cook it for dinner and see
how it tasted, but she wouldn't. She said that the very sight of it was
enough for her, and more than enough; and that it was all she could do
to eat pork and potatoes after looking at it.

He turned over and tried to go to sleep again, but without success. That
steady "chew-chew-chew" was enough to keep a woodchuck awake, and at
last he got up and went to the door. The moonlight on the snow was
almost as bright as day, and there was the Porcupine, leaning against
the side of the barn, and busily rasping the wood from around the head
of a rusty nail. The mossback threw a stick of stove-wood at him, and
he lumbered clumsily away across the snow. But twenty minutes later he
was back again, and this time he marched straight into the open shed at
the back of the house, and began operations on a wash-tub, whose mingled
flavor of soap and humanity struck him as being very delicious. Again
the mossback appeared in the doorway, shivering a little in his
night-shirt.

The Porcupine was at the foot of the steps. He had stopped chewing when
the door opened, and now he lifted his forepaws and sat half-erect, his
yellow teeth showing between his parted lips, and his little eyes
staring at the lamp which the mossback carried. The quills slanted back
from all around his diminutive face, and even from between his
eyes--short at first, but growing longer toward his shoulders and back.
Long whitish bristles were mingled with them, and the mossback could not
help thinking of a little old, old man, with hair that was grizzly-gray,
and a face that was half-stupid and half-sad and wistful. He was not yet
two years of age, but I believe that a porcupine is born old. Some of
the Indians say that he is ashamed of his homely looks, and that that is
the reason why, by day, he walks so slowly, with hanging head and
downcast eyes; but at night, they say, when the friendly darkness hides
his ugliness, he lifts his head and runs like a dog. In spite of the
hour and the cheering influence of the wash-tub, our Porky seemed even
more low-spirited than usual. Perhaps the lamplight had suddenly
reminded him of his personal appearance. At any rate he looked so
lonesome and forlorn that the mossback felt a little thrill of pity for
him, and decided not to kill him after all, but to drive him away again.
He started down the steps with his lamp in one hand and a stick of wood
in the other, and then--he never knew how it happened, but in some way
he stumbled and fell. Never in all his life, not even when his wildest
nightmare came and sat on him in the wee, sma' hours, had he come so
near screaming out in terror as he did at that moment. He thought he was
going to sit down on the Porcupine. Fortunately for both of them, but
especially for the man, he missed him by barely half an inch, and the
Porky scuttled away as fast as his legs could carry him.

In spite of this unfriendly reception, the Porcupine hung around the
edges of the clearing for several months, and enjoyed many a meal such
as seldom falls to the lot of the woods-people. One night he found an
empty pork-barrel out behind the barn, its staves fairly saturated with
salt, and hour after hour he scraped away upon it, perfectly content.
Another time, to his great satisfaction, he discovered a large piece of
bacon rind among some scraps that the mossback's wife had thrown away.
Later he invaded the sugar-bush by night, gnawing deep notches in the
edges of the sap buckets and barrels, and helping himself to the sirup
in the big boiling-pan.

Life was not all feasting, however. There was a dog who attacked him two
or three times, but who finally learned to keep away and mind his own
business. Once, when he had ventured a little too close to the house,
and was making an unusual racket with his teeth, the mossback came to
the door and fired a shotgun at him, cutting off several of his quills.
And still another night, late in the spring, when he was prowling around
the barn, a bull calf came and smelled him. Next morning the mossback
and his boys threw that calf down on the ground and tied his feet to a
stump, and three of them sat on him while a fourth pulled the quills
from his nose with a pair of pincers. You should have heard him grunt.

Then came the greatest adventure of all. Down beside the railway was a
small platform on which supplies for the lumber-camps were sometimes
unloaded from the trains. Brine and molasses and various other
delectable things had leaked out of the barrels and kegs and boxes, and
the Porcupine discovered that the planks were very nicely seasoned and
flavored. He visited them once too often, for one summer evening, as he
was gnawing away at the site of an ancient puddle of molasses, the
accommodation train rolled in and came to a halt. He tried to hide
behind a stump, but the trainmen caught sight of him, and before he knew
it they had shoved him into an empty box and hoisted him into the
baggage-car. They turned him loose among the passengers on the station
platform at Sault Ste. Marie, and his arrival created a sensation.

When the first excitement had subsided, all the girls in the crowd
declared that they must have some quills for souvenirs, and all the
young men set to work to procure them, hoping to distinguish themselves
by proving their superiority in strength and courage over this poor
little twenty-pound beast just out of the woods. Most of them succeeded
in getting some quills, and also in acquiring some painful
experience--especially the one who attempted to lift the Porcupine by
the tail, and who learned that that interesting member is the very
hottest and liveliest portion of the animal's anatomy. They finally
discovered that the best way to get quills from a live porcupine is to
hit him with a piece of board. The sharp points penetrate the wood and
stick there, the other ends come loose from his skin, and there you have
them. Our friend lost most of his armor that day, and it was a good
thing for him that departed quills, like clipped hair, will renew
themselves in the course of time.

One of the brakemen carried him home, and he spent the next few months
in the enjoyment of city life. Whether he found much pleasure in it is,
perhaps, a question, but I am rather inclined to think that he did. He
had plenty to eat, and he learned that apples are very good indeed, and
that the best way to partake of them is to sit up on your haunches and
hold them between your forepaws. He also learned that men are not always
to be regarded as enemies, for his owner and his owner's children were
good to him and soon won his confidence. But, after all, the city was
not home, and the woods were; so he employed some of his spare time in
gnawing a hole through the wall in a dark corner of the shed where he
was confined, and one night he scrambled out and hid himself in an empty
barn. A day or two later he was in the forest again.

The remaining years of his life were spent on the banks of St. Mary's
River, and for the most part they were years of quietness and
contentment. He was far from his early home, but the bark of a birch or
a maple or a hemlock is much the same on St. Mary's as by the
Glimmerglass. He grew bigger and fatter as time went on, and some weeks
before he died he must have weighed thirty or forty pounds.

Once in a while there was a little dash of excitement to keep life from
becoming too monotonous--if too much monotony is possible in a
porcupine's existence. One night he scrambled up the steps of a little
summer cottage close to the edge of the river, and, finding the door
unlatched, he pushed it open and walked in. It proved to be a cottage
full of girls, and they stood around on chairs and the tops of
wash-stands, bombarded him with curling-irons, poked feebly with
bed-slats, and shrieked with laughter till the farmers over on the
Canadian shore turned in their beds and wondered what could be happening
on Uncle Sam's side of the river. The worst of it was that in his
travels around the room he had come up behind the door and pushed it
shut, and it was some time before even the red-haired girl could muster
up sufficient courage to climb down from her perch and open it again.

At another time an Indian robbed him of the longest and best of his
quills--nearly five inches in length some of them--and carried them off
to be used in ornamenting birch-bark baskets. And on still another
occasion he narrowly escaped death at the hands of an irate canoe-man,
in the side of whose Rob Roy he had gnawed a great hole.

The end came at last, and it was the saddest, hardest, strangest fate
that can ever come to a wild creature of the woods. He--who had never
known hunger in all his life, who was almost the only animal in the
forest who had never looked famine in the eye, whose table was spread
with good things from January to December, and whose storehouse was full
from Lake Huron to the Pictured Rocks--he of all others, was condemned
to die of starvation in the midst of plenty. The Ancient Mariner, with
water all around him and not a drop to drink, was no worse off than our
Porcupine; and the Mariner finally escaped, but the Porky didn't.

One of the summer tourists who wandered up into the north woods that
year had carried with him a little rifle, more of a toy than a weapon,
a thing that a sportsman would hardly have condescended to laugh at. And
one afternoon, by ill luck, he caught sight of the Porcupine high up in
the top of a tall tree. It was his first chance at a genuine wild beast,
and he fired away all his cartridges as fast as he could load them into
his gun. He thought that every shot missed, and he was very much ashamed
of his marksmanship. But he was mistaken. The very last bullet broke one
of the Porcupine's lower front teeth, and hurt him terribly. It jarred
him to the very end of his tail, and his head felt as if it was being
smashed to bits. For a minute or two the strength all went out of him,
and if he had not been lying in a safe, comfortable crotch he would have
fallen to the ground.

The pain and the shock passed away after a while, but when supper-time
came--and it was almost always supper-time with the Porcupine--his left
lower incisor was missing. The right one was uninjured, however, and for
a while he got on pretty well, merely having to spend a little more time
than usual over his meals. But that was only the beginning of trouble.
The stump of the broken tooth was still there and still growing, and it
was soon as long as ever, but in the meantime its fellow in the upper
jaw had grown out beyond its normal length, and the two did not meet
properly. Instead of coming together edge to edge, as they should have
done, each wearing the other down and keeping it from reaching out too
far, each one now pushed the other aside, and still they kept on
growing, growing, growing. Worst of all, in a short time they had begun
to crowd his jaws apart so that he could hardly use his right-hand
teeth, and they too were soon out of shape. The evil days had come, and
the sound of the grinding was low. Little by little his mouth was forced
open wider and wider, and the food that passed his lips grew less and
less. His teeth, that had all his life been his best tools and his most
faithful servants, had turned against him in his old age, and were
killing him by inches. Let us not linger over those days.

He was spared the very last and worst pangs--for that, at least, we may
be thankful. On the last day of his life he sat under a beech-tree, weak
and weary and faint. He could not remember when he had eaten. His coat
of hair and quills was as thick and bushy as ever, and outwardly he had
hardly changed at all, but under his skin there was little left but
bones. And as he sat there and wished that he was dead--if such a wish
can ever come to a wild animal--the Angel of Mercy came, in the shape
of a man with a revolver in his pistol pocket--a man who liked to kill
things.

"A porky!" he said. "Guess I'll shoot him, just for fun."

The Porcupine saw him coming and knew the danger; and for a moment the
old love of life came back as strong as ever, and he gathered his feeble
strength for one last effort, and started up the tree. He was perhaps
six feet from the ground when the first report came.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" Four shots, as fast as the self-cocking
revolver could pour the lead into his body. The Porky stopped climbing.
For an instant he hung motionless on the side of the tree, and then his
forepaws let go, and he swayed backward and fell to the ground. And that
was the end of the Porcupine.

THE ADVENTURES OF A LOON

HIS name was Mahng, and the story which I am about to relate is the
story of his matrimonial career--or at least of a portion of it.

One snowy autumn night, three years ago, he was swimming on the
Glimmerglass in company with his first wife--one of the first, that is.
There may possibly have been others before her, but if so I wasn't
acquainted with them. It was a fine evening--especially for loons. There
was no wind, and the big, soft flakes came floating lazily down to lose
themselves in the quiet lake. The sky, the woods, and the shores were
all blotted out; and the loons reigned alone, king and queen of a dim
little world of leaden water and falling snow. And right royally they
swam their kingdom, with an air as if they thought God had made the
Glimmerglass for their especial benefit. Perhaps He had.

[Illustration: "_He went under as simply as you would step out of
bed._"]

It was very, very lonely, but they liked it all the better for that. At
times they even lost sight of each other for a little while, as one
dived in search of a herring or a young salmon trout. I wish we could
have followed Mahng down under the water and watched him at his hunting.
He didn't dive as you do, with a jump and a plunge and a splash. He
merely drew his head back a little and then thrust it forward and
downward, and went under as simply and easily as you would step out of
bed, and with a good deal more dignity. It was his feet that did it, of
course. They were not good for much for walking, but they were the real
thing when it came to swimming or diving. They were large and broad and
strongly webbed, and the short stout legs which carried them were
flattened and compressed that they might slip edgewise through the
water, like a feathered oar-blade. The muscles which worked them were
very powerful, and they kicked backward with so much vigor that two
little jets of spray were often tossed up in his wake as he went under,
like the splash from a steamer's paddles. And he had a rudder, too, for
in the after part of his body there were two muscles just like
tiller-ropes, fastened to his tail in such a way that they could twist
it to either side, and steer him to port or starboard as occasion
demanded. With his long neck stretched far out in front, his wings
pressed tightly against his sides, and his legs and feet working as
if they went by steam, he shot through the water like a submarine
torpedo-boat. "The Herdsman of the Deep," the Scottish Highlanders used
to say, when in winter a loon came to visit their lochs and fiords.
Swift and strong and terrible, he ranged the depths of the Glimmerglass,
seeking what he might devour; and perhaps you can imagine how hastily
the poor little fishes took their departure whenever they saw him coming
their way. Sometimes they were not quite quick enough, and then his long
bill closed upon them, and he swallowed them whole without even waiting
to rise to the surface.

The chase thus brought to a successful conclusion, or perhaps the supply
of air in his lungs giving out, he returned to the upper world, and
again his voice rang out through the darkness and the falling snow. Then
his wife would answer him from somewhere away off across the lake, and
they would call back and forth to each other with many a laugh and
shout, or, drawing closer and closer together, they would cruise the
Glimmerglass side by side, with the big flakes dropping gently on their
backs and folded wings, and the ripples spreading out on either hand
like the swell from the bow of a ship.

Once Mahng stayed down a little longer than usual, and when he came up
he heard his wife calling him in an excited tone, as if something had
happened to her. He hurried toward her, and presently he saw a light
shining dimly through the throng of moving snow-flakes, and growing
brighter and brighter as he approached until it was fairly dazzling. As
he drew nearer still he caught sight of his wife sitting on the water
squarely in front of that light, and watching it with all her eyes. She
was not calling now. She had forgotten Mahng, she had forgotten to
paddle, she had forgotten everything, in her wonder at this strange,
beautiful thing, the like of which had never before been seen upon the
Glimmerglass. She herself was a rarely beautiful sight--if she had only
known it--with the dark water rippling gently against her bosom, her big
black head thrust forward, and the feathers of her throat and breast
glistening in the glare of the headlight, white as the snow that was
falling around her.

All this Mahng saw. What he did not see, because his eyes were dazzled,
was a boat in the shadow behind the light, and a rifle-barrel pointing
straight at his wife's breast. There was a blinding flash, a sharp,
crashing report, and a cloud of smoke; and Mahng dived as quick as a
wink. But his wife would never dive again. The bullet had gone tearing
through her body, and she lay stretched out on the water, perfectly
motionless, and apparently dead. And then, just as Mahng came to the
surface a hundred yards away, and just as my partner put out his hand to
pick her up, she lifted her head and gave a last wild cry. Mahng heard
it and answered, but he was too far away to see what happened. He dared
not return till the light had disappeared, and by that time she was
gone. She had straggled violently for a moment, and had struck savagely
at the hunter's hand, and then she had as suddenly collapsed, the water
turned red, and her eyes closed forever. Did you know that among all
God's creatures the birds are the only ones whose eyes close naturally
in death? Even among men it is not so, for when our friends die we lay
our hands reverently upon their faces, and weight their stiff lids with
gold. But for the bird, Nature herself performs the last kindly office,
and as the light fades out from the empty windows of the soul, the
curtain falls of its own accord.

[Illustration: "_She herself was a rarely beautiful sight._"]

During the next two or three days Mahng's voice was frequently to be
heard, apparently calling his wife. Sometimes it was a mournful,
long-drawn cry--"Hoo-WOOOO-ooo"--that might have been heard a mile
away--a cry that seemed the very essence of loneliness, and that went
right down where you lived and made you feel like a murderer. And
sometimes he broke into a wild peal of laughter, as if he hoped that
that might better serve to call her back to him.

His children had gone south some time before. They had seemed anxious to
see the world. Perhaps, too, they had dreaded the approach of colder
weather more than the older birds, who had become somewhat seasoned by
previous autumns. Anyhow, they had taken the long trail toward the Gulf
of Mexico, and now that his wife was gone Mahng was entirely alone. At
last he seemed to make up his mind that he might as well follow them,
and one afternoon, as he was swimming aimlessly about, I saw him
suddenly dash forward, working his wings with all their might, beating
the water at every stroke, and throwing spray like a side-wheeler.
Slowly--for his body was heavy, and his wings were rather small for his
size--slowly he lifted himself from the water, all the time rushing
forward faster and faster. He couldn't have made it if he hadn't had
plenty of sea-room, but by swinging round and round in long, wide
circles he managed to rise little by little till at last he was clear of
the tree-tops. He passed right over my head as he stood away to the
south--his long neck stretched far out in front, his feet pointing
straight back beyond the end of his short tail, and his wings beating
the air with tremendous energy. How they did whizz! He made almost as
much noise as a train of cars. He laughed as he went by, and you would
have said that he was in high spirits; but before he disappeared that
lonely, long-drawn cry came back once more--"Hoo-WOOOO-ooo."

In the course of his winter wanderings through the South he happened to
alight one day on a certain wild pond down in Mississippi, and there he
found another loon--a widow whose former husband had lost his life the
previous summer under rather peculiar circumstances.

Beside a small lake in Minnesota there lives an old Dutchman who catches
fish with empty bottles. On any calm, still day you may see a lot of
them floating upright in the water, all tightly corked, and each with
the end of a fishing-line tied around its neck. They seem very decorous
and well-behaved, but let a fish take one of the hooks and begin to
pull, and immediately that particular bottle turns wrong end up, and
acts as if it had taken a drop too much of its own original contents.
Then the Dutchman paddles out in his little scow, and perhaps by the
time he has hauled in his fish and re-baited the hook another bottle is
excitedly standing on its head. But never before nor since have any of
them behaved as wildly as the one that a loon got hold of.

The loon--not Mahng, you understand, but the first husband of his new
acquaintance--had dived in search of his dinner, and the first thing he
saw that looked as if it might be good to eat was the bait on one of the
Dutchman's hooks. He swallowed it, of course, and for the next five
minutes he went charging up and down that pond at a great rate, followed
by a green glass monster with the name of a millionnaire brewer blown in
its side. Sometimes he was on the surface, and sometimes he was under
it; but wherever he went that horrible thing was close behind him,
pulling so hard that the sharp cord cut the corners of his mouth till it
bled. Once or twice he tried to fly, but the line caught his wing and
brought him down again. When he dived, it tangled itself around his legs
and clogged the machinery; and when he tried to shout, the hook in his
throat would not let him do anything more than cough. The Dutchman got
him at last, and eventually Mahng got his widow, as you shall see.

She had her children to take care of, and for a time she was very busy,
but after a few weeks they flew away to the south, as Mahng's had done,
and she was free to go where she liked and do what she pleased. For a
while she stayed where she was, like a sensible person. Minnesota suited
her very well, and she was in no hurry to leave. But, of course, she
could not stay on indefinitely, for some frosty night the lake would
freeze over, and then she could neither dive for fish nor rise upon the
wing. A loon on ice is about as helpless as an oyster. And so at last
she, too, went south. She travelled by easy stages, and had a pleasant
journey, with many a stop, and many a feast in the lakes and rivers
along the route. I should like to know, just out of curiosity, how many
fish found their way down her capacious gullet during that pilgrimage
through Illinois and Kentucky and Tennessee.

Well, no matter about that. The Mississippi pond was in sight, and she
was just slanting down toward the water, when a hunter fired at her from
behind a clump of trees. His aim was all too true, and she fell headlong
to the ground, with a broken wing dangling helplessly at her side.

Now, as you probably know, a loon isn't built for running. There is an
old story, one which certainly has the appearance of truth, to the
effect that when Nature manufactured the first of these birds she forgot
to give him any legs at all, and that he had started off on the wing
before she noticed her mistake. Then she picked up the first pair that
came to hand and threw them after him. Unfortunately they were a misfit,
and, what was, perhaps, still worse, they struck his body in the wrong
place. They were so very short and so very far aft that, although he
could stand nearly as straight as a man, it was almost impossible for
him to move about on them. When he had to travel on land, which he
always avoided as far as he could, he generally shoved himself along on
his breast, and often used his wings and his bill to help himself
forward. All his descendants are just like him, so you can see that the
widow's chances were pretty small, with the hunter bursting out of the
bushes, and a broad strip of beach between her and the friendly pond.

But she was a person of resource and energy, and in this great emergency
she literally rose to the occasion, and did something that she had
never done before in all her life, and probably will never do again. The
astonished hunter saw her lift herself until she stood nearly upright,
and then actually _run_ across the beach toward the water. She was
leaning forward a trifle, her long neck was stretched out, her two short
legs were trotting as fast as they could go, and her one good wing was
wildly waving in a frantic endeavor to get on. It was a sight that very
few people have ever seen, and it would have been comical if it hadn't
been a matter of life and death. The hunter was hard after her, and his
legs were a yard long, while hers were only a few inches, so it was not
surprising that he caught her just as she reached the margin. She
wriggled out of his grasp and dashed on through the shallow water, and
he followed close behind. In a moment he stooped and made another grab
at her, and this time he got his arms around her body and pinned her
wings down against her sides. But he had waded out a little too far, and
had reached the place where the bottom suddenly shelves off from fifteen
inches to seventy-two. His foot slipped, and in another moment he was
splashing wildly about in the water, and the loon was free.

A broken wing is not necessarily as serious a matter as you might
suppose. The cold water kept the inflammation down, and it seemed as if
all the vital forces of her strong, healthy body set to work at once to
repair the damage. If any comparative anatomist ever gets hold of the
widow and dissects her, he will find a curious swelling in the principal
bone of her left wing, like a plumber's join in a lead pipe, and he will
know what it means. It is the place where Nature soldered the broken
pieces together. And it was while Nature was engaged in this soldering
operation that Mahng arrived and began to cultivate the widow's
acquaintance.

          "_In the spring a fuller crimson
                      comes upon the robin's breast,_"

and in the spring the loon puts on his wedding-garment, and his fancy,
like the young man's, "lightly turns to thoughts of love."

But speaking of Mahng's wedding-garment reminds me that I haven't told
you about his winter dress. His back and wings were very dark-brown, and
his breast and under-parts were white. His head and the upper portion of
his neck were black; his bill was black, or blackish, and so were his
feet. His coat was very thick and warm, and his legs were feathered
right down to the heel-joint. More than five feet his wings stretched
from tip to tip, and he weighed at least twelve pounds, and would be
still larger before he died.

As to his nuptial finery, its groundwork was much the same, but its
trimmings were different and were very elegant. White spots appeared all
over his back and the upper surfaces of his wings, some of them round,
and some square. They were not thrown on carelessly, but were arranged
in gracefully curving lines, and they quite changed his appearance,
especially if one were as near him as one is supposed to be during a
courting. His spring neckwear, too, was in exceedingly good taste, for
he put on a sort of collar of very narrow vertical stripes, contrasting
beautifully with the black around and between them. Higher up on his
neck and head the deep black feathers gleamed and shone in the sunlight
with brilliant irridescent tints of green and violet. He was a very
handsome bird.

And now everything was going north. The sun was going north, the wind
was going north, the birds were going, and summer herself was sweeping
up from the tropics as fast as ever she could travel. Mahng was getting
very restless. A dozen times a day he would spread his wings and beat
the air furiously, dashing the spray in every direction, and almost
lifting his heavy body out of the water. But the time was not yet come,
and presently he would fold his pinions and go back to his courting.

Do you think he was very inconstant? Do you blame him for not being more
faithful to the memory of the bird who was shot at his side only a few
months before? Don't be too hard on him. What can a loon do when the
springtime calls and the wind blows fresh and strong, when the new
strong wine of life is coursing madly through his veins, and when his
dreams are all of the vernal flight to the lonely northland, where the
water is cold and the fish are good, and where there are such delightful
nesting-places around the marshy ponds?

But how did his new friend feel about it? Would she go with him? Ah!
Wouldn't she? Had not she, too, put on a wedding-garment just like his?
And what was she there for, anyhow, if not to be wooed, and to find a
mate, and to fly away with him a thousand miles to the north, and there,
beside some lonely little lake, brood over her eggs and her young? Her
wing was gaining strength all the time, and at last she was ready. You
should have heard them laugh when the great day came and they pulled out
for Michigan--Mahng a little in the lead, as became the larger and
stronger, and his new wife close behind. There had been nearly a week of
cooler weather just before the start, which had delayed them a little,
but now the south wind was blowing again, and over and over it seemed to
say,

          "_And we go, go, go away from here!
            On the other side the world we're overdue!
               'Send the road lies clear before you
                When the old Spring-fret comes o'er you,
            And the Red Gods call for you._"

And the road was clear, and they went. Up, and up, and up; higher and
higher, till straight ahead, stretching away to the very edge of the
world, lay league after league of sunshine and air, only waiting the
stroke of their wings. Now steady, steady! Beat, beat, beat! And the old
earth sliding southward fifty miles an hour! No soaring--their wings
were too short for that sort of work--and no quick wheeling to right or
left, but hurtling on with whizzing pinions and eager eyes, straight
toward the goal. Was it any wonder that they were happy, and that
joyful shouts and wild peals of laughter came ringing down from the sky
to tell us poor earthbound men and women that somewhere up in the blue,
beyond the reach of our short-sighted eyes, the loons were hurrying
home?

[Illustration: "_The old earth sliding southward fifty miles an hour._"]

Over the fresh fields, green with the young wheat; over the winding
rivers and the smiling lakes; over the--shut your eyes, and dream a
little while, and see if you can imagine what it was like. Does it make
you wish you were a loon yourself? Never mind; some day, perhaps, we too
shall take our wedding-journeys in the air; not on feathered pinions,
but with throbbing engines and whizzing wheels, and with all the power
of steam or electricity to lift us and bear us onward. We shall skim the
prairies and leap the mountains, and roam over the ocean like the
wandering albatross. To-day we shall breathe the warm, spicy breath of
the tropic islands, and to-morrow we shall sight the white gleam of the
polar ice-pack. When the storm gathers we shall mount above it, and
looking down we shall see the lightning leap from cloud to cloud, and
the rattling thunder will come upward, not downward, to our ears. When
the world below is steeped in the shadows of coming night, we shall
still watch the sunset trailing its glories over the western woods
and mountains; and when morning breaks we shall be the first to welcome
the sunrise as it comes rushing up from the east a thousand miles an
hour. The wind of the upper heavens will be pure and keen and strong,
and not even a sleigh-ride on a winter's night can set the live blood
dancing as it will dance and tingle up there above the clouds. And
riding on the air, alone with the roaring engines that have become for
the time a part of ourselves, we shall know at last what our earth is
really like, for we shall see it as the loons see it--yes, as God and
His angels see it--this old earth, on which we have lived for so many
thousand years, and yet have never seen.

But, after all, the upper heavens will not be home; and some day, as we
shoot northward, or southward, or eastward, or westward, we shall see
beneath us the spot that is to be for us the best and dearest place in
all the world, and dropping down out of the blue we shall find something
that is even better than riding on the wings of the wind. That was what
happened to Mahng and his wife, for one spring evening, as they came
rushing over the pine-tops and the maples and birches, they saw the
Glimmerglass just ahead. The water lay like polished steel in the fading
light, and the brown ranks of the still leafless trees stood dark and
silent around the shores. It was very quiet, and very, very lonely; and
the lake and the woods seemed waiting and watching for something. And
into that stillness and silence the loons came with shouting and
laughter, sweeping down on a long slant, and hitting the water with a
splash. The echoes awoke and the Glimmerglass was alive, and summer had
come to the northland.

They chose a place where the shore was low and marshy, and there, only
two or three yards from the water's edge, they built a rude nest of
grass and weeds and lily-pads. Two large greenish eggs, blotched with
dark-brown, lay in its hollow; and the wife sat upon them week after
week, and covered them with the warm feathers of her broad, white
breast. Once in a while she left them long enough to stretch her wings
in a short flight, or to dive in search of a fish, but she was never
gone very long. It was a weary vigil that she kept, but she sat there in
daylight and darkness, through sunshine and storm, till at last the day
came when there were four loons instead of two at the Glimmerglass.

The chicks were very smart and active, and they took to the water almost
as soon as they were out of the shell, swimming and diving as if they
had been accustomed to it for weeks instead of hours. In some ways,
however, they required a good deal of care. For one thing, their little
stomachs were not quite equal to the task of assimilating raw fish, and
the parents had to swallow all their food for them, keep it down till it
was partly digested, and then pass it up again to the hungry children.
It made a good deal of delay, and it must have been very unpleasant, but
it seemed to be the only practicable way of dealing with the situation.
I am glad to say that it did not last very long, for by the time they
were two weeks old the young loons were able to take their fish and
reptiles and insects at first hand.

When they first arrived the chicks were covered all over with stiff
down, of a dark, sooty gray on their backs, and white underneath. But
this did not last long, either. The first feathers soon appeared, and
multiplied rapidly. I can't say that the young birds were particularly
handsome, for even when their plumage was complete it was much quieter
and duller of hue than their parents'. But they were fat and plump, and
I think they thoroughly enjoyed life, especially before they discovered
that there were enemies as well as friends in the world. That was a kind
of knowledge that could not be avoided very long, however. They soon
learned that men, and certain other animals such as hawks and skunks,
were to be carefully shunned; and you should have seen them run on the
water whenever a suspicious-looking character hove in sight. Their wings
were not yet large enough for flying, but they flapped them with all
their might, and scampered across the Glimmerglass so fast that their
little legs fairly twinkled, and they actually left a furrow in the
water behind them. But the bottom of the lake was really the safest
refuge, and if a boat or a canoe pressed them too closely they would
usually dive below the surface, while the older birds tried to lure the
enemy off in some other direction by calling and shouting and making all
sorts of demonstrations.

Generally these tactics were successful, but not always. Once some boys
cornered the whole family in a small, shallow bay, where the water was
not deep enough for diving; and before they could escape one of the
youngsters was driven up onto the beach. He tried to hide behind a log,
but he was captured and earned off, and I wish I had time to tell you
of all the things that happened to him before he was finally killed and
eaten by a dog. It was pretty tough on the old birds, as well as on him,
but they still had one chick left, and you can't expect to raise _all_
your children as long as bigger people are so fond of kidnapping and
killing them.

Not all the people who came to see them were bent on mischief, however.
There was a party of girls and boys, for instance, who camped beside the
Glimmerglass for a few weeks, and who liked to follow them around the
lake in a row-boat and imitate their voices, just for the fun of making
them talk back. One girl in particular became so accomplished in the
loon language that Mahng would often get very much excited as he
conversed with her, and would sometimes let the boat creep nearer and
nearer until they were only a few rods apart. And then, all of a sudden,
he would duck his head and go under, perhaps in the very middle of a
laugh. The siren was getting a little too close. Her intentions might
possibly be all right, but it was just as well to be on the safe side.

The summer was nearly gone, and now Mahng did something which I fear you
will strongly disapprove. I didn't want to tell you about it, but I
suppose I must. Two or three male loons passed over the Glimmerglass
one afternoon, calling and shouting as they went, and he flew up and
joined them, and came back no more that summer. It looked like a clear
case of desertion, but we must remember that he had stood by his wife
all through the trying period of the spring and early summer, and that
the time was at hand when the one chick that was left would go out into
the world to paddle his own canoe, and when she would no longer need his
help in caring for a family of young children. But you think he might
have stayed with her, anyhow? Well, so do I; I'm sorry he didn't. They
say that his cousins, the Red-throated Loons, marry for life, and live
together from the wedding-day till death, and I don't see why he
couldn't have done as well as they. But it doesn't seem to be the custom
among the Great Northern Divers. Mahng was only following the usual
practice of his kind, and if his first wife had not been shot it is
likely that they would have separated before they had gone very far
south. And yet it does not follow that the marriage was not a
love-match. If you had seen them at their housekeeping I think you would
have pronounced him a very good husband and father. Perhaps the conjugal
happiness of the spring and early summer was all the better for a taste
of solitude during the rest of the year.

As I said, the time was near when the chick would strike out for
himself. He soon left his mother, and a little later she too started for
the Gulf of Mexico. Summer was over, and the Glimmerglass was lonelier
than ever.

Mahng came back next spring, and of course he brought a wife with him.
But was she the same wife who had helped him make the Glimmerglass ring
with his shouting twelve months before? Well, I--I don't quite know. She
looked very much like her, and I certainly hope she was the same bird. I
should like to believe that they had been reunited somewhere down in
Texas or Mississippi or Louisiana, and that they had come back together
for another season of parental cares and joys. But when I consider the
difficulties in the way I cannot help feeling doubtful about it. The two
birds had gone south at different times and perhaps by different routes.
Before they reached the lower Mississippi Valley they may have been
hundreds of miles apart. Was it to be reasonably expected that Mahng,
when he was ready to return, would search every pond and stream from
the Cumberland to the Gulf? And is it likely that, even if he had tried
for weeks and weeks, he could ever have found his wife of the previous
summer? His flight was swift and his sight keen, and his clarion voice
rang far and wide over the marshes; but it is no joke to find one
particular bird in a region covering half a dozen States. If they had
arranged to come north separately, and meet at the Glimmerglass, there
would not have been so many difficulties in the way, but they didn't do
that. Anyhow, Mahng brought a wife home. That much, at least, is
established. They set to work at once to build a nest and make ready for
some new babies; but, alas! there was little parental happiness or
responsibility in store for them that year.

If you had been there you might have seen them swimming out from shore
one bright, beautiful spring morning, when the sun had just risen, and
the woods and waters lay calm and peaceful in the golden light, fairer
than words can tell. They were after their breakfast, and presently they
dived to see what was to be had. The light is dim down there in the
depths of the Glimmerglass, the weeds are long and slimy, and the mud of
the bottom is black and loathsome. But what does that matter? One can
go back whenever one pleases. A few quick, powerful strokes will take
you up into the open air, and you can see the woods and the sky. Aha!
There is a herring, his scales shining like silver in the faint green
light that comes down through the water. And there is a small salmon
trout, with his gray-brown back and his golden sides. A fish for each of
us.

The loons darted forward at full speed; but the two fish made no effort
to escape, and did not even wriggle when the long, sharp bills closed
upon them. They were dead, choked to death by the fine threads of a
gill-net. And now those same threads laid hold of the loons themselves,
and a fearful struggle began.

Mahng and his wife did not always keep their wings folded when they were
under water. Sometimes they used them almost as they did in flying, and
just now they had need of every muscle in their bodies. How their
pinions lashed the water, and how their legs kicked and their long necks
writhed, and how the soft mud rose in clouds and shut out the dim light!
But the harder they fought the more tightly did the net grapple them,
winding itself round and round their bodies, and soon lashing their
wings down against their sides. Expert divers though they were, the
loons were drowning. There was a ringing in their ears and a roaring in
their heads, and the very last atoms of oxygen in their lungs were
almost gone. Death was drawing very near, and the bright, sunshiny world
where they had been so happy a moment before, the world to which they
had thought they could return so quickly and easily, seemed a thousand
miles away. One last effort, one final struggle, and if that failed
there would be nothing more to do but go to sleep forever.

Fortunately for Mahng, his part of the net had been mildewed, and much
of the strength had gone out of the linen threads. He was writhing and
twisting with all his might, and suddenly he felt something give. One of
the rotten meshes had torn apart. He worked with redoubled energy, and
in a moment another thread gave way, and then another, and another. A
second more and he was free. Quick, now, before the last spark goes out!
With beating wings and churning paddles he fairly flew up through the
green water toward the light, and on a sudden he shot out into the air,
panting and gasping, and staring wildly around at the blue sky, and the
quiet woods, and the smiling Glimmerglass. And how royally beautiful
was the sunshine, and how sweet was the breath of life!

But his mate was not with him, and a few hours later the fisherman found
in his net the lifeless body of a drowned loon.

Mahng went north. He had thought that his spring flight was over and
that he would go no farther, but now the Glimmerglass was no longer
home, and he spread his wings once more and took his way toward the
Arctic Circle. Over the hills, crowded with maple and beech and birch;
over the Great Tahquamenon Swamp, with its cranberry marshes, its
tangles of spruce and cedar, and its thin, scattered ranks of tamarack;
over the sandy ridges where the pine-trees stand tall and stately, and
out on Lake Superior. The water was blue, and the sunshine was bright;
the wind was fresh and cool, and the billows rolled and tumbled as if
they were alive and were having a good time together. Together--that's
the word. They were together, but Mahng was alone; and he wasn't having
a good time at all. He wanted a home, and a nest, and some young ones,
but he didn't find them that year, though he went clear to Hudson Bay,
and looked everywhere for a mate. There were loons, plenty of them, but
they had already paired and set up housekeeping, and he found no one who
was in a position to halve his sorrows and double his joys.

Something attracted his attention one afternoon when he was swimming on
a little lake far up in the Canadian wilderness--a small red object that
kept appearing and disappearing in a very mysterious fashion among the
bushes that lined the beach. Mahng's bump of curiosity was large and
well developed, and he gave one of his best laughs and paddled slowly in
toward the shore. I think he had a faint and utterly unreasonable hope
that it might prove to be what he was looking and longing for, though he
knew very well that no female loon of his species ever had red
feathers--nor a male, either, for that matter. It was a most absurd
idea, and his dreams, if he really had them, were cut short by the
report of a shotgun. A little cloud of smoke floated up through the
bushes, and a charge of heavy shot peppered the water all around him.
But if Mahng was curious he was also quick to take a hint. He had heard
the click of the gun-lock, and before the leaden hail could reach him he
was under water. His tail feathers suffered a little, but otherwise he
was uninjured, and he did not come to the surface again till he was far
away from that deceitful red handkerchief.

The summer was an entire failure, and after a while Mahng gave it up in
despair, and started south much earlier than usual. At the Straits of
Mackinac he had another narrow escape, for he came very near killing
himself by dashing head first against the lantern of a lighthouse, whose
brilliant beams, a thousand times brighter than the light which had
lured his first wife to her death, had first attracted and then dazzled
and dazed him. Fortunately he swerved a trifle at the last moment, and
though he brushed against an iron railing, lost his balance, and fell
into the water, there were no bones broken and no serious damage done.

The southland, as everybody knows, is the only proper place for a loon
courtship. There, I am pleased to say, Mahng found a new wife, and in
due time he brought her up to the Glimmerglass. That was only last
spring, and there is but one more incident for me to relate. This summer
has been a happy and prosperous one, but there was a time when it seemed
likely to end in disaster before it had fairly begun.

Just northeast of the Glimmerglass there lies a long, narrow, shallow
pond. I believe I mentioned it when I was telling you about the Beaver.
One afternoon Mahng had flown across to this pond, and as he was
swimming along close to the shore he put his foot into a beaver-trap,
and sprung it. Of course he did his best to get away, but the only
result of his struggling was to work the trap out into deeper and deeper
water until he was almost submerged. He made things almost boil with the
fierce beating of his wings, but it was no use; he might better have
saved his strength. He quieted down at last and lay very still, with
only his head and neck out of water, and there he waited two mortal
hours for something to happen.

Meanwhile his wife sat quietly on her eggs--there were three of them
this year--and drowsed away the warm spring afternoon. By and by she
heard a tramping as of heavy feet approaching, and glancing between the
tall grasses she saw, not a bear nor a deer, but something far worse--a
man. She waited till he was within a few yards, and then she jumped up,
scuttled down to the water as fast as she could go, and dived as if she
was made of lead. The trapper glanced after her with a chuckle.

"Seems pretty badly scared," he said to himself, but his voice was not
unkindly. His smile faded as he stood a moment beside the nest, looking
at the eggs, and thinking of what would some day come forth from them.
He was a solitary old fellow, with never a wife nor a child, nor a
relation of any kind. His life in the woods was just what he had chosen
for himself, and he would not have exchanged it for anything else in the
world; but sometimes the loneliness of it came over him, and he wished
that he had somebody to talk to. And now, looking at those eggs, and
thinking of the fledglings that were coming to the loons, he wondered
how it would seem if he had some children of his own. Pretty soon he
glanced out on the lake again, and saw Mahng's wife sitting quietly on
the water, just out of range.

"Hope she won't stay away till they get cold," he thought, and went on
his way across the swamp. The loon watched him till he passed out of
sight, and then she swam in to the beach and pushed herself up her
narrow runway to her old place. The eggs were still warm.

Half an hour later the trapper stepped out of the bushes beside the
pond, and caught sight of Mahng's head sticking out of the water. He
was considerably astonished, but he promptly laid hold of the chain and
drew bird, trap, and all up onto the bank, and then he sat down on a log
and laughed till the echoes went flying back and forth across the pond.
Plastered with mud, dripping wet, and with his left leg fast in the big
steel killing-machine, Mahng was certainly a comical sight. All the
fight was soaked out of him, and he lay prone upon the ground and waited
for the trapper to do what he pleased. But the trapper did nothing--only
sat on his log, and presently forgot to laugh. He was thinking of the
sitting loon whom he had disturbed a little while before. This was
probably her mate, and again there came over him a vague feeling that
life had been very good to these birds, and had given them something
which he, the man, had missed. He was growing old. A few more seasons
and there would be one trapper less in the Great Tahquamenon Swamp; and
he would die without--well, what was the use of talking or thinking
about it? But the loons would hatch their young, and care for them and
protect them until they were ready to go out into the world, and then
they would send them away to the south. A few weeks later they would
follow, and next spring they would come back and do it all over again.
That is--they would if he didn't kill them.

He rose from his log, smiling again at the abject look with which Mahng
watched him, and putting one foot on each of the two heavy steel
springs, he threw his weight upon them and crushed them down. Mahng felt
the jaws relax, and suddenly he knew that he was free. The strength came
back with a rush to his weary limbs, and he sprang up, scrambled down
the bank and into the water, and was gone. A few minutes later he
reappeared far down the pond, and rising on the wing he flew away with a
laugh toward the Glimmerglass.

THE MAKING OF A GLIMMERGLASS BUCK

I DON'T know that he was a record-breaker, but he was certainly much
larger and more powerful than the average buck, and he was decidedly
good-looking, even for a deer. There were one or two slight
blemishes--to be described later--in his physical make-up; but they were
not very serious, and except for them he was very handsome and
well-formed. I can't give you the whole story of his life, for that
would take several books, but I shall try to tell you how he became the
biggest buck and the best fighter of his day and generation in the woods
around the Glimmerglass. He was unusually favored by Providence, for
besides being so large and strong he was given a weapon such as very few
full-grown Michigan bucks have ever possessed.

He had a good start in life, and it is really no wonder that he
distanced all his relations. In the first place, he arrived in the woods
a little earlier in the year than deer babies usually do. This was
important, for it lengthened his first summer, and gave more opportunity
for growth before the return of cold weather. If the winter had
lingered, or if there had been late frosts or snow-storms, his early
advent might have been anything but a blessing; but the spring proved a
mild one, and there was plenty of good growing weather for fawns. Then,
too, his mother as in the very prime of life, and for the time being he
was her only child. If there had been twins, as there were the year
before, he would, of course, have had to share her milk with a brother
or sister; but as it was he enjoyed all the benefits of a natural
monopoly, and he grew and prospered accordingly, and was a baby to be
proud of.

[Illustration: "_He was a baby to be proud of._"]

And his mother took good care of him, and never tried to show him off
before the other people of the woods. She knew that it was far safer and
wiser to keep him concealed as long as possible, and not let anyone know
that she had him. So instead of letting him wander with her through the
woods when she went in search of food, she generally left him hidden in
a thicket or behind a bush or a fallen tree. There he spent many a long,
lonely hour, idly watching the waving branches and the moving shadows,
and perhaps thinking dim, formless, wordless baby thoughts, or looking
at nothing and thinking of nothing, but just sleeping the quiet sleep
of infancy, and living, and growing, and getting ready for hard times.

At first the Fawn knew no difference between friends and enemies, but
the instinct of the hunted soon awoke and told him when to be afraid. If
a hostile animal came by while the doe was gone, he would crouch low,
with his nose to the ground and his big ears laid back on his neck; or
if pressed too closely he would jump up and hurry away to some better
cover, with leaps and bounds so light and airy that they seemed the very
music of motion. But that did not happen very often. His hiding-places
were well chosen, and he usually lay still till his mother came back.

When she thought he was large enough, and strong and swift enough, she
let him travel with her; and then he became acquainted with several new
kinds of forest--with the dark hemlock groves, and the dense cedar
swamps; with the open tamarack, where the trees stand wide apart, and
between them the great purple-and-white lady's-slippers bloom; with the
cranberry marshes, where pitcher-plants live, and white-plumed grasses
nod in the breeze; with sandy ridges where the pine-trees purr with
pleasure when the wind strokes them; with the broad, beautiful
Glimmerglass, laughing and shimmering in the sunshine, and with all the
sights and the sounds of that wonderful world where he was to spend the
years of his deerhood.

They were a very silent pair. When his breakfast was ready she would
sometimes call him with a low murmuring, and he would answer her with a
little bleat; but those were almost the only sounds that were ever heard
from them, except the rustling of the dry leaves around their feet. Yet
they understood each other perfectly, and they were very happy together.
There was little need of speech, for all they had to do the livelong day
was to wander about while the doe picked up her food, and then, when she
had eaten her fill, to lie down in some sheltered place, and there rest
and chew the cud till it was time to move again.

Life wasn't all sunshine, of course. There were plenty of hard things
for the baby Buck to put up with, and perhaps the worst were the
mosquitoes and the black-flies and "no-see-'ems" that swarmed in the
woods and swamps through the month of June. They got into his mouth and
into his nose; they gathered in circles around his eyes; and they
snuggled cosily down between the short hairs of his pretty, spotted
coat, and sucked the blood out of him till it seemed as if he would
soon go dry. For a while they were almost unbearable, but I suppose the
woods-people get somewhat hardened to them. Otherwise I should think our
friends would have been driven mad, for there was never any respite from
their attacks, except possibly a very stormy day, or a bath in the lake,
or a saunter on the shore.

At the eastern end of the Glimmerglass there is a broad strip of sand
beach, where, if there happens to be a breeze from the water, one can
walk and be quite free from the flies; though in calm weather, or with
an offshore wind, it is not much better than the woods. There, during
fly-time, the doe and her baby were often to be found; and to see him
promenading up and down the hard sand, with his mother looking on, was
one of the prettiest sights in all the wilderness. The ground-color of
his coat was a bright bay red, somewhat like that of his mother's summer
clothing; but deeper and richer and handsomer, and with pure white spots
arranged in irregular rows all along his neck and back and sides. He was
so sleek and polished that he fairly glistened in the sunshine, like a
well-groomed horse; his great dark eyes were brighter than a girl's at
her first ball; and his ears were almost as big as a mule's, and a
million times as pretty. But best and most beautiful of all was the
marvellous life and grace and spirit of his every pose and motion. When
he walked, his head and neck were thrust forward and drawn back again at
every step with the daintiest gesture imaginable; and his tiny pointed
hoofs touched the ground so lightly, and were away again so quickly,
that you hardly knew what they had done. If anything startled him, he
stamped with his forefoot on the hard sand, and tossed his head in the
air with an expression that was not fear, but alertness, and even
defiance. And when he leaped and ran--but there's no use in trying to
describe that.

By the middle of July most of the flies were gone, and the deer could
travel where they pleased without being eaten alive. And then, almost
before they knew what had happened, the summer was gone, too, and the
autumn had come. The Fawn's white spots disappeared, and both he and his
mother put off their thin red summer clothing and donned the blue coat
of fall, which would by and by fade into the gray of winter--a garment
made of longer, coarser hairs, which were so thick that they had to
stand on end because there wasn't room for them to lie down, and which
made such a warm covering that one who wore it could sleep all night in
the snow, and rise in the morning dry and comfortable.

The Fawn had thriven wonderfully. Already the budding antlers were
pushing through the skin on the top of his head, which alone is pretty
good proof that he was a remarkable baby. But, of course, the infancy of
a wild animal is always much shorter than that of a human child. It is
well that this is so, for if the period of weakness and helplessness was
not shortened for them, there would probably be very few who would ever
survive its dangers and reach maturity. The Fawn was weaned early in the
autumn; though he still ran with his mother, and she showed him what
herbs and leaves were pleasantest to the taste and best for building up
bone and muscle, and where the beechnuts were most plentiful. The mast
was good that fall, which isn't always the case, and that was another
lucky star in young Buck's horoscope. So much depends on having plenty
to eat the first year.

And now the doe was thriving as well as her son. Through the summer she
had been thin and poor, for the Fawn had fed on her life and strength,
and the best of all that came to her she had given to him; but the
strain was over at last, and there were granted her a few weeks in
which to prepare for the season of cold and storm and scanty food. She
made the best of them, and in an amazingly short time she was rolling
fat.

Everything was lovely and the goose hung high, when all of a sudden the
peace and quiet of their every-day lives were rudely broken. The hunting
season had come, and half-a-dozen farmers from lower Michigan had camped
beside the Glimmerglass. They were not really very formidable. If one
wants to kill deer, one should learn to shoot straight and to get around
in the woods without making quite as much noise as a locomotive. But
their racket was intolerable, and after a day or two the doe and the
Fawn left home and spent the next three or four weeks near a secluded
little pond several miles away to the southeast.

By the first of December these troublous times were over, and they had
returned to their old haunts in the beech and maple woods, where they
picked up a rather scanty living by scraping the light snow away with
their forefeet in search of the savory nuts. But before Christmas there
came a storm which covered the ground so deeply that they could no
longer dig out enough food to keep them from going hungry; and they
were forced to leave the high lands and make their way to the evergreen
swamps around the head-waters of the Tahquamenon. There they lived on
twigs of balsam and hemlock and spruce, with now and then a mouthful of
moss or a nutritious lichen. Little by little the fat on their ribs
disappeared, they grew lank and lean again, and the bones showed more
and more plainly through their heavy winter coats. If one of those
November hunters had succeeded in setting his teeth in their flesh he
would have found that it had a very pleasant, nutty flavor, but in
February it would have tasted decidedly of hemlock. Yet they were strong
and healthy, in spite of their boniness, and of course you can't expect
to be very fat in winter.

There were worse things than hunger. One afternoon they were following a
big buck down a runway--all three of them minding their own business and
behaving in a very orderly and peaceable manner--when a shanty-boy
stepped out from behind a big birch just ahead of them, and said, "Aah!"
very derisively and insultingly. The wind was blowing from them to him,
and they hadn't had the least idea that he was there until they were
within three rods of his tree. The buck was so startled that for an
instant he simply stood still and stared, which was exactly what the
shanty-boy had expected him to do. He had stopped so suddenly that his
forefeet were thrust forward into the snow, and he was leaning backward
a trifle. His head was up, his eyes were almost popping out of their
sockets, and there was such a look of astonishment on his face that the
man laughed as he raised his gun and took aim. In a second the deer had
wheeled and was in the air, but a bullet broke his back just as he left
the ground, and he came tumbling down again in a shapeless heap. His
spinal cord was cut, and half his body was dead; but he would not give
up even then, and he half rose on his forefeet and tried to drag himself
away. The shanty-boy stepped to his side with a knife in his hand, the
deer gave one loud bleat of fear and pain, and then it was all over.

But by that time the doe and the Fawn were far down the runway--out of
sight, and out of danger. Next day they passed that way again, and saw a
Canada lynx standing where the buck had fallen, licking his chops as if
he had just finished a good meal. It is hard work carrying a deer
through the woods, and the shanty-boy had lightened his load as much as
possible. Lynxes are not nice. The mother and son pulled their freight
as fast as they could travel.

When the world turned green again they went back to the Glimmerglass,
but they had not been there long before the young Buck had his nose put
out of joint by the arrival of two new babies. Thenceforth his mother
had all she could do to take care of them, without paying any further
attention to him. The days of his fawnhood were over, and it was time
for him to strike out into the world and make his own living.

However, I don't think he was very lonesome. There were plenty of other
deer in the woods, and though he did not associate with any of them as
he had with his mother, yet he may have enjoyed meeting them
occasionally in his travels. And there was ever so much to do and to
think about. Eating took up a good deal of time, for he was very active
and was still growing, and his strong young body was constantly calling
for more food. And it wasn't enough merely to find the food and swallow
it, for no sooner was his stomach full than he had to lie down and chew
the cud for an hour or so. And, of course, the black-flies and
mosquitoes and "no-see-'ems" helped to make things interesting, just as
they had the year before. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to be
lonely in the woods during fly-time. He changed his clothes, too, and
put on a much handsomer dress, though I doubt if he took as much
interest in that operation as most of us would. The change contributed
greatly to his comfort, for his light summer garment was much better
adapted to warm weather than his winter coat, but it did not require any
conscious effort on his part. On hot days he sometimes waded out into
the lake in search of lily-pads, and the touch of the cool water was
very grateful. Occasionally he would take a long swim, and once or twice
he paddled clear across the Glimmerglass, from one shore to the other.

And it was during this summer that he raised his first real antlers.
Those of the previous autumn had been nothing but two little buds of
bone, but these were pointed spikes, several inches in length, standing
straight up from the top of his head without a fork or a branch or a
curve. They did not add very much to his good looks, and, of course,
they dropped off early in the following winter, but they were the
forerunners of the beautiful branching antlers of his later years, and
if he thought about them at all they were probably as welcome as a
boy's first mustache.

Late in the following autumn an event occurred which left its mark on
him for the rest of his life. One night he wandered into a part of the
woods where some lumbermen had been working during the day. On the
ground where they had eaten their lunch he found some baked beans and a
piece of dried apple-pie, and he ate them greedily and was glad that he
had come. But he found something else, too. One of the road-monkeys had
carelessly left his axe in the snow with the edge turned up. The Buck
stepped on it, and it slipped in between the two halves of his cloven
hoof, and cut deep into his foot. The wound healed in the course of
time, but from that night the toes--they were those of his left hind
foot--were spread far apart, instead of lying close together as they
should have done. Sticks and roots sometimes caught between them in a
way that was very annoying, and his track was different from that of any
other deer in the woods, which was not a thing to be desired. He was not
crippled, however, for he could still leap almost, if not quite, as far
as ever, and run almost as fast.

He continued to grow and prosper, and the next summer he raised a pair
of forked antlers with two tines each.

And now he is well started down the runway of life, and we must leave
him to travel by himself for two or three years. He ranged the woods far
and near, and came to know them as a man knows his own house; but no
matter what places he visited, the old haunts that his mother had shown
him were the best of all, as the deer have learned by the experience of
generation after generation. He always came back again to the
Glimmerglass, and as the seasons went by I often saw his broad,
spreading hoof-print on the sandy beach where they two had so often
walked in that first summer. He evidently had plenty of company, and was
probably enjoying life, for all around were other foot-prints that were
narrow and delicately pointed, as a deer's should be. Some of them, of
course, were his own, left by his three perfect feet; but others were
those of his friends and acquaintances, and it is quite possible that
some of the tiniest and daintiest were made by his children.

That beach is a delightful place for a promenade on a summer night, and
besides the deer-tracks one can sometimes find there the trails of the
waddling porcupines, the broad, heavy print left by a black bear as he
goes shambling by, and the handwriting of many another of the
woods-people. Strange and interesting scenes must often be enacted on
the smooth, hard sand that lies between the woods and the water, and it
is a pity that the show always comes to a sudden close if any would-be
spectators appear, and that we never see anything but the foot-prints of
the performers.

With each recurring hunting season the Buck and the other deer that made
their homes around the Glimmerglass were driven away for a time. A few
stayed, or at least remained as near as they dared; but compared with
summer the neighborhood was almost depopulated. And in his fourth year,
in spite of all his efforts to keep out of harm's way, the Buck came
very near losing his life at the hands of a man who had really learned
how to hunt--not one of the farmers who went ramming about the woods,
shooting at everything in sight, and making noise enough to startle even
the porcupines.

One afternoon, late in the autumn, the judge left his court-room in
Detroit and started for his house. He bought an evening paper as he
boarded the street-car; and, as Fate would have it, the first thing that
met his eye as he unfolded it was the forecast for upper Michigan:
"Colder; slight snow-fall; light northerly winds." The judge folded the
paper again and put it in his pocket, and all the rest of the way home
he was dreaming of things that he had seen before--of the white and
silent woods, of deer-tracks in the inch-deep snow, of the long
still-hunt under dripping branches and gray November skies, of a huge
buck feeding unconcernedly beneath the beech-trees, of nutty venison
steaks broiling on the coals, and, finally, of another pair of antlers
for his dining-room. Court had adjourned for three days, and that night
he took the train for the north. And while he travelled, the snow came
down softly and silently, melting at first as fast as it fell, and then,
as the cold grew sharper, clothing the woods in a thin, white robe, the
first gift of the coming winter.

Next day the Buck was lying behind a fallen tree, chewing his cud, when
the breeze brought him a whiff of an unpleasant human odor. He jumped up
and hurried away, and the judge heard him crash through the bushes, and
searched until he had found his trail. An hour later, as the Buck was
nosing for beechnuts in the snow, a rifle cracked and a bullet went
zipping by and carried off the very tip of his left antler. He dropped
his white flag and was off like a shot.

Chase a wounded deer, and he will run for miles; leave him alone, and if
he is badly hurt he will soon lie down. The chances are that he will
never get up again. The judge knew that the Buck was hit, for he had
seen his tail come down. But was he hit hard? There was no blood on the