On the edge of the wilderness; tales of our wild animal neighbors

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Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
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On the Edge of the Wilderness

Books by
WALTER P. EATON

The Boy Scouts of Berkshire — A story
of how the Chipmunk Patrol was started,
what they did and how they did it.

Colored frontispiece. 313 pages.

Boy Scouts in the Dismal Swamp —
A story of Boy Scouting in the Dismal
Swamp.

Colored Popes: 304 pages.

Boy Scouts in the White Mountains —
A story of a hike over the Franconia and
Presidential Ranges.

Colored frontispiece. 308 pages,

Boy Scouts of the Wildcat Patrol.
A Story of Boy Scouting.
Colored frontispiece. 315 pages.

Peanut—Cub Reporter—A Boy Scout’s
life and adventures on a newspaper.
Colored frontispiece. 320 pages.
Boy Scouts in Glacier Park
336 pages.

Cloth bound. Price, $1.75 net each

but he circled the little herd

and trotted away

efiance

He snarled a d

On the Edge of the
Wilderness

TALES OF OUR WILD
ANIMAL NEIGHBORS

‘By
WALTER PRICHARD EATON

ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL

A)

WwW. A. WILDE COMPANY
BOSTON CHICAGO

Lt

Copyrighted, 1920,
By W. A. Witpe Company
All rights reserved

On THE Epcs oF THE WILDERNESS

Note

i lines author acknowledges indebtedness to
more than one acquaintance for observed
records of animal behavior, which he has incor-
porated in these tales. His thanks are especially
due to William Sargood, Deputy Game Warden
for Southern Berkshire (Massachusetts), to
Hamilton Gibson, to Walter King Stone, and to
Warwick S. Carpenter, of the New York State
Conservation Commission. The primary object
of the stories being, however, to reconstruct
imaginatively the life of the wild creatures while
they are not under observation, but living out
their normal existence, the author would not seem
in any way to shift the responsibility for the

natural history herein contained.
W. P. E.

Twin Fires,
Sheffield, Massachusetts.

Contents

% THe RETURN OF THE NATIVE ”
Bic REeppy, STRATEGIST

THE Opyssey oF OLD BILL

Tue Lire anp DeatH oF Lucy
GENERAL JIM

Tue Matinc or Brownie

Tue Tamine oF Ot’ Buck

Rep SLAYER AND THE TERROR .
Rastus Earns His SLEEP .

“ Tye Last AMERICAN” , ‘

II

43

71
104
142
173
200
234
259
287

Illustrations

PAGE

“ Old Bill stood upon a bare, rocky mountain shoulder
and looked into Vermont” (Cover) . : . 101

“He snarled a defiance, but he circled the little herd
and trotted away” . . : : A a “a4

“ As their paths met, a both ee to a trot, side
by side” : . : : . 62

“Lucy cuffed the kittens back out of sight, and sneaked
out of the den” : . : : - 133

“The great owl was plainly visible—and plainly un-
comfortable ” . . : : : . 166

“Suddenly, both their ears and noses got unmistakable
warning” . ‘i : 3; . ‘ . 220

“ Father soon got back to the mountain cliffs and was

later privileged to see his five offspring, one
whom was Rastus ” . . : : 262

The nest inthe hemlock . . ° ° - 292

On the Edge of the Wilderness

CHAPTER I
“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE”

HE trouble with Swiftfoot, the big gray tim-

ber wolf, undoubtedly was that he didn’t
know he was extinct in that part of America. All
the wise books said he was, so, quite obviously, he
had'no business there. As a matter of fact,
neither he nor his companion was making any
public display. Swiftfoot had nothing to fear in
the deep woods. There were no panthers. The
Canada lynx might snarl at him, or fight him if
he tried to take away its kill—but he never tried.
From the lumbering black bears he could easily
run away, if there were any occasion. There
wouldn’t be, of course, unless he attempted to se-
cure a little juicy cub steak. For the rest, he
was master of the forest. But there was one

thing he dreaded, dreaded with an abiding fear,
11

12 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and that was a high-power rifle, the shining black
stick which men, those slow, two-legged creatures
with the peculiar smell, carry in their hands, and
which make a great noise, spit fire, and kill from
a long way off.

Swiftfoot’s earliest grown up recollections had
to do with men and rifles. He was one of a pack,
a fine, strong pack of nine gray wolves which
hunted and traveled together, well knowing the
value of union. They ranged a different forest
from this one where he now was, a forest of low
evergreens, with numerous bogs overlaid by a
shaking carpet of sphagnum moss, far up in the
cold north. The nine of them, tongues out, teeth
gleaming, eyes dilated, would run a young moose
or a deer for hours through this land, driving him
if they could to some bog at last where he broke
through, and Swiftfoot and his fellows, held up
on the shaking moss, caught him on flank and
throat and shoulder, and killed him, and feasted.
Then, one day, the two-legged creatures came,
with the funny smell. One of them had discov-
ered something yellow in the ground, and all the
rest followed, and began to dig the earth, and cut

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 13

the trees. Winter followed, the game grew
scarce. The great horned owls and the goshawks
got most of the rabbits before Swiftfoot and his
pack could round them up. The pack grew lean.
They closed in around the trail over which the
two-legged animals came, driving dog sleds.
When the dogs smelled the wolf pack they barked
and snarled and became ridiculously excited, and
the men animals got out their black sticks.

Swiftfoot remembered how old Whitefang, the
leader of the pack, grew cautious, and tried to
hold the other eight back, but they were lean with
hunger, and the dog meat smelled good, and even
the queer-smelling meat of the two-legged crea-
tures. So the pack followed, one mile, two miles,
three miles, just in the fringe of the evergreens
by the trail, waiting to close in when the whipped
and straining dogs should be too tired to fight,
and the queer creatures too tired to make those
strange noises.

At last Whitefang could hold them no longer.
With a snarl and a bark, they closed in out of the
dark woods, into the starlight of the snowy trail.
Instantly there were half a dozen flashes, half a

14 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

dozen loud reports, and even as he leaped at the
throat of a dog, Swiftfoot saw Whitefang rolling
over on the snow, and another wolf half leap into
the air and tumble back with blood spouting from
its mouth. But he kept on and had his teeth in
the woolly throat of a dog, harnessed and unable
to fight, while the air resounded with snarls,
barks, cries, and the terrible, loud explosions.
Suddenly something stung Swiftfoot in the tail,
near the base, the pain infuriating him. It
couldn’t have been the dog he had by the throat.
He let go his hold to turn on his new adversary,
and at the same instant something hit him on the
head—a shining black stick swung by one of the
two-legged creatures. He fell down unconscious.

When he came to he was conscious of the smell
of blood, wolf blood. Staggering up, he looked
about. 'The snow was stained where he himself
had Jain; and his tail ached and was clotted with
frozen blood. He sat down again and licked the
wound. The bullet, a small automatic pistol ball,
fortunately for him had only entered the tail
(where it was still lodged, as a matter of fact),
and had not injured the muscles of his hind quar-

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 15

ters. When he had licked the frozen blood away
and could feel the soothing of his own warm
tongue, Swiftfoot got up again and poked
around. There was no scent nor sound of the
men and dogs. The sleds had moved far on.
The bodies of four of his companions lay on the
snow. He sniffed them. Three were dead, the
_ fourth—Softfur, the mate of Fang—was alive.
Swiftfoot crouched beside her and began to lick
her face. She wasn’t his mate, but she was alive,
and he hated to be alone. You don’t fare so well
when you hunt alone. Suddenly he pricked up
his ears, and elevated his muzzle, baring his teeth
with an angry snarl. There was an answering
growl from the undergrowth by the trail, and the
gray form of Fang suddenly emerged. Swift-
foot’s ears went down, his tail moved, like a dog’s,
causing him a twinge of pain, and he resigned the
task of resuscitating Softfur to Fang, turning his
attention again to his own wound.

Softfur, like him, had been knocked uncon-
scious by the butt of a rifle. Fang was unhurt;
he had fled. If Swiftfoot had been a dog, he
would have called Fang a coward, and despised

16 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

him. But he was a wolf, and respected the in-
stinct of self-preservation. Beside, he was glad
enough to have companions. When Softfur had
recovered consciousness, the three of them, seeing
but three dead bodies, howled a signal to the other
three, the missing ones. There was no answer.
Fang had been the only one, so far as he knew, to
escape. One other, attempting it, had been shot
down. Evidently the two-legged creatures had
carried off three of the bodies. Without further
ado, the starved survivors fell on the carcases of
their own recent companions, and got back their
strength.

Even as they were eating, a flock of great
‘horned owls went by overhead, flying south.
Northward lay deeper snow, harder hunting, and
northward the terrible two-legged creatures with
guns had gone. Southward the owls must know
there was game, rabbits and partridges, anyway,
or they wouldn’t be flying that way. The three
wolves rose, shook themselves, slunk off the
trail into the timber, and trotted south.

They traveled and hunted chiefly at night, and
rested by day mm dry caves or under thick stands

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 17

of little balsams or spruces, where the snow was
light. Food was scarce, and often they went for
long periods with nothing at all to eat. Finally
they came to a great river, barring their south-
ward march. ‘This river was partly frozen, but
in mid-stream a belt of open current shone black
under the cold winter moon. Softfur howled her
disappointment, and there came an answering
howl from some dog not far off. They were
amid the homes of men now, with danger on
every side. Fang trotted deliberately out on the
ice, to the edge of the black water. Softfur and
Swiftfoot followed him. He was the leader, and
where he went, they went.

Then he moved up-stream till he came to a spot
where great floating ice cakes, like rafts, were
swirled in close by the current. He watched the
direction these cakes took after leaving the edge
again. Satisfied with what he saw, he gave a
short, sharp bark and leaped to a big cake, the
others following him. Standing on this raft, the
three wolves floated down-stream in the still moon-
light, till the opposite ice edge began to draw
near. When it was evident that the cake they

18 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

floated on was as close as it would get, Fang went
off into the water, and swam. A few strokes,
and he was struggling out, and shaking the water
hastily from his coat before it should freeze. The
other two followed, and then the three of them
trotted rapidly over the ice, to the wooded banks,
warming themselves with brisk motion.

The St. Lawrence was behind them.

Still they moved south, through a snow-buried
world. There was far less cover than they liked.
Great stretches of open country had to be
crossed, where there were strange, box-like things
full of lights and creatures with the odd smell.
There was little game in the woods. Hunger
drove them on, southward, after the owls, and the
goshawks, too. Once, on their tracks, they heard
a dog, asingledog. They fanned out, Fang and
his mate swinging back to the left, Swiftfoot to
the right, galloping rapidly, and reunited behind
the dog. Now the pursuer was pursued. 'The
three gray wolves, with a speed greater than his,
closed in on the cruising hound, so that he became
aware of it, and ran for his life. But he lacked
their speed and their wind. Before he reached the

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE”’ 19

fields about his house, they were upon him and
dragged him down, and his master never knew
why he didn’t come home.

That meal helped them on their southward
way.

They came presently to something quite new
in their experience—mountains. These moun-
tains, low at first, but soon getting higher and
higher, were covered with forests or scrub, and
though the valleys between held farms and roads
—the dreaded signs of the two-legged creatures
with the fire sticks—Swiftfoot and his two com-
panions learned speedily that by keeping well up
on the ridges they could travel long distances in
perfect safety. These ridges, too, led steadily
southward. And the hunting was good again!

In fact, they had scarcely entered this moun-
tain region before they picked up the fresh track
of a deer, and were off in full ery. It gave them
a long, hard run, taking them finally far up on a
rocky ledge, where they pulled the buck down,
and feasted royally on fresh venison, the first they
had tasted for three weeks. That day they slept
up in the warm rocks, on the southern slope of the

20 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

mountain ledges, and went on again at night with
renewed energy. Swiftfoot’s tail had quite
healed by now, his coat was thick and soft, his
wind was good, he had attained his full size, meas-
uring four feet, nine inches from nose to tail, and
the prospect of deer meat spurred him on, some-
times ahead of his little pack. He was even
thinking of disputing the leadership with Fang.
The hunting was so good, in fact, that they didn’t
get much farther south that season. There came
a day when the deep snow on the mountains be-
gan to get very wet and heavy, and like rock salt.
The brooks roared down over the rocks. In the
valleys below they could see great stretches of
bare earth, and men moving about. The sun was
hotter day by day, and one’s fur got damp and
sticky from the sloshy snow.

Then Swiftfoot grew unaccountably restless,
and so did his two companions. It wasn’t that he
wanted to hunt. He didn’t quite know what he
wanted, but it angered him to see Fang and Soft-
fur together, and once he even sprang at Fang.
But Fang knew his rights, and fought for them,
and Swiftfoot withdrew, nursing a torn throat

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 21

muscle. He was still a young wolf, who had
never mated—and there was no mate for him.
He felt lonely and unsatisfied.

Then, one day, Fang and Softfur disappeared
altogether. He sniffed along their trail, out of
curiosity, until he came to a warm ledge where,
under an overhanging rock, they had excavated a
hole. Being a gentleman, as such things go
among wolves, and also having a wholesome re-
spect for Fang’s jaws, Swiftfoot withdrew,
springing up the ledge to the top. Here the
timber was all below him, and he looked out over
a wide expanse of earth, over valleys and towns,
and other ranges of green mountains and a big
sheet of silvery water in the distance, with a wall
of blue peaks beyond it, that were, of course, the
Adirondacks. Well, if his pack was to den here,
he might as well spend the coming warm season
somewhere about, also. Trotting off, he finally
found himself a little half cave, under a ledge,
where last autumn’s leaves had blown in and
made a soft bed. He pawed them up a bit to
get the coolness of the under leaves next to his
skin, and lay down to sleep. This, he resolved,

22 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

should be his home for a while. He was tired of
wandering.

In the weeks that followed, Swiftfoot saw little
of Fang, and nothing at all of Softfur. It was
Fang’s task to hunt for his mate and the care of
his family was his own particular business, which
he shared with nobody. As summer came on, the
game, for some reason, grew scarcer, and Swift-
foot more than once met the other going down or
coming up the mountain; he was hunting now on
dangerous ground, around the clearings of the
two-legged creatures. Once he had a chicken in
his mouth, once a piece of juicy calf meat. They
both smelled good to Swiftfoot, but with only
himself to look after, he preferred to go a bit
hungry rather than take such chances. Still, he
did go down at night to the upper edges of the
pastures, in the hope that he might cut a calf out
of the herds, and once he came on a fox carrying
a chicken, and ran it for a mile, till the fox had to
drop his load in order to escape. That was an
easy meal!

All went well for some time, until one moon-
light night, while he was cruising through the

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 23

mountain timber, Swiftfoot heard a great baying
of dogs down by the pastures, and which came
rapidly up the slope. He pricked up his ears,
elevated his nose, assured himself that the dog-
pack could not be on his scent, and then trotted
swiftly toward the sound, impelled by a great
curiosity. The dogs were evidently moving up
toward Fang’s den. Keeping carefully down
wind, and above the dogs on the slope, Swiftfoot
drew in. Would Fang get to his den in time to
rouse Softfur and the two cubs (there were two,
he knew, for he had seen them playing in the sun
in front of the den), and start them quickly
enough to escape? Of course, the old wolves
could outrun the dogs easily, but the cubs
couldn’t. Or would they stay and fight?

Suddenly the hunt swerved off, and came to-
ward him. Hello, old Fang was going to give
the dogs a run! Well, he could do it, all right,
but Swiftfoot didn’t propose to have the trail
cross his. It was too hot a night for such violent
exercise. He ran back on his own tracks, ti]l he
came to a brook, and trotted up that a way, a trick
he had learned from the foxes.

24 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Fang, however, turned down the mountain
again, evidently intending to keep the dogs a long
way from the den. Suddenly a shot rang out.
It hurt Swiftfoot’s ears, even from this distance.
There was a cry such as the two-legged creatures
make, a sudden yelping and snarling of dogs—
and then silence. Somehow Swiftfoot knew that
Fang was dead. He hunted no more that night,
but on padded feet sneaked up to the very top of
the mountain and lay under a rock in the dry
moss.

It was evident that Fang had gone once too
often down the mountain after fresh calf meat.
Now the two-legged creatures and their dogs
would be making life miserable. Swiftfoot felt
like moving on at once, but Softfur and the two
cubs held him back. Not that he any longer had
a curious feeling when he looked at Softfur—that
feeling had passed with the spring. But she was
of his pack, and the two cubs, which would be
growing fast now, were of his pack, and one
hangs with the pack. Sooner or later, Softfur
and her cubs, big enough to hunt for themselves,
would come to him, and the four of them would

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 25

go out together and pull down a fat buck. By
himself, he tackled only does. That was why
Swiftfoot still remained in the neighborhood,
often meeting poor Softfur as she hunted for her
young at first, and later hunted with them, teach-
ing them to run, to follow the scent, to spring for
the throat or the flank.

It was one hot August morning that Swiftfoot
was awakened from his nap under a thick balsam
near timber line by the baying of dogs again.
They were once more headed for the den, evi-
dently on Softfur’s tracks of a few hours before.
Swiftfoot roused and trotted along a ledge from
which he could get a view of the woods and rocks
below. Softfur was out, bounding toward the
mountain top, the cubs behind her; but the cubs
could not keep her pace, and now and then she
had to stop and wait for them. ‘Two dogs, three
dogs, broke out of the woods a moment later, a
hound with his nose on the trail, a powerful Aire-
dale, and a big, rangy collie. The collie caught
sight of Softfur and her cubs high above, and
sprang into the lead, abandoning scent altogether.
Softfur was in a place where she could retreat in

26 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

no direction without encountering rocks too steep
and high for the cubs to take at one spring, and
in a few moments the dogs were on her. She
faced the oncoming rush, teeth bared, hair bris-
tling, the cubs behind her, and as the dogs arrived,
she went into them. 'The hound slipped past her
and closed on the he cub, which tore at him as he
was about to seize Softfur’s hind quarter. But
the collie and the Airedale went straight at her
throat, as she at theirs. ‘The Airedale, like all his
breed, was too reckless, and it was Softfur who
got him, not he her. With lightning speed and’
accuracy, she caught him just under the collar, so
her teeth could sink into his throat, and his scream
resounded over the lonely rocks of the mountain
as she laid him over. But that instant was the
collie’s chance, and he took it. He went through
Softfur’s ruff and got the hold he wanted, and as
she fought frantically to shake his strangling
grip, the hound, which had finished off the cub,
closed in on the other side. The three of them
rolled over and over on the rocks, one mass of
snarl and blood and foam.

Swiftfoot had seen it all begin from his perch

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 27

a quarter of a mile away. It was not his fight.
Yet it was his fight. There were no men there
with fire sticks—only the hated dogs. It was his
pack being attacked. Suddenly he let out a
long, snarling, terrible scream and came down the
rocks like a gray arrow, an arrow that flew
straight to its mark, the throat of the hound.
The hound let go its hold on Softfur, and tried to
meet its new antagonist, but Swiftfoot had the
advantage of weight and strength and initiative.
He had the hold he wanted, and slowly he laid the
hound over, his fangs sinking deeper in, till the
dog died beneath him. Then he sprang for the
collie. But the collie didn’t wait. He let go of
Softfur, and as Swiftfoot’s fangs bit for his
throat, getting tangled in the thick, protective
ruff, he ducked his head, slipped sidewise and
down, and bounded for the woods below. Swift-
foot didn’t follow him. He wasn’t fighting be-
cause he was hungry; he was fighting to defend
the pack. The enemy was driven off. He
turned to see the Airedale struggling to his feet,
and with a savage snarl, bowled him down again
and tore his throat half open. Then he went

28 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

over to Softfur and her cub. Both lay still on
the rocks. He licked them again and again.
They were dead. Swiftfoot lifted his muzzle to-
ward the blue horizon and howled.

There came an answering whine from up the
mountain. He changed his tone abruptly, and
the second cub came creeping back. It was a she
cub, a little, part-grown Softfur. It was all that
was left of his pack. It would grow up and be
his mate when the spring came round again.
Something inside of Swiftfoot made him lick the
cub, with his bloody tongue. It drew close to
him, with a whine like a little dog, after it had
sniffed the dead body of its mother. Swiftfoot
tore off a piece of dog meat and offered it food.

That night he moved south along the range,
the cub following him, after a good deal of urging
and some physical coercion. The place was get-
ting too hot, and he longed for some peaceful for-
est where men and their hated dogs—hated
doubly because they were really renegade wolves
who had submitted to the slavery of the man crea-
ture—did not know of his presence, and he could
hunt in peace. For two nights he traveled, part

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 29

of the time encountering signs even up here on
the range of the two-legged enemy—a dim blazed
trail through the woods, old camp fires, and once,
even, a fresh camp fire and men around it. He
and little Softfur gave that fire a wide berth,
going around it on soft, silent feet, while the
campers slept, secure in the knowledge that there
were no wolves in New England, and hadn’t been
for almost a hundred years.

At last he found the spot he wanted—a wild
mountain ravine, with a spring that showed tracks
of partridges, deer, coons, and other prey on the
margin, with good forest cover all about, and all
signs of man far away and far below. Here he
and little Softfur had immediate good fortune in
running down a rabbit, and then found them-
selves a cosy den of leaves under a big, fallen log,
and decided to call it home for a while.

Little Softfur soon forgot her mother, and
grew rapidly in size, strength and cunning. She
grew so rapidly, in fact, that one day in the crisp
autumn Swiftfoot decided, with her aid, to try
cutting away a fawn from its mother. They ran
the pair several miles before they got the doe cor-

30 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

nered, and then closed in for.the operation. The
doe, alive to the terrible danger, kept the fawn
behind her, almost between her hind legs, and by
whirling and threatening with her powerful and
cruelly sharp hoofs stood the wolves off. One on
one side, one on the other, they snarled and
leaped, just out of reach of those plunging hoofs,
trying to get at the fawn’s throat or shoulder.
Swiftfoot knew the game, and had no trouble in
escaping. He was willing to take his time, well
aware that his wind and strength would outlast
the deer’s. But little Softfur, impetuous and
tremendously excited, made one dash too close,
and down came the lance-like hoofs, crash on her
spine and ribs. She crumpled up. With a wild
snarl, Swiftfoot was at the doe’s throat, but it was
too late. One hoof had gone right through the
little wolf’s back and into her heart. She was
dead.

Swiftfoot, in a kind of blind fury, killed the
deer, but the meat was without savor. He stayed
near that spot for several days, till the deer was
finished, yet not so much to finish the meat as be-
cause he felt a dumb grief, a sense of loneliness.

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE”’ 31

He was without any companions now, any sense
of the comfort and protection of the pack. And
what would he do when the snows began to soften,
when the south wind came through the forests
and a warm mist gathered around the mountain
tops, and that great longing for a mate came over
him?

At last, up here on the ridges, three thousand
feet above the sea, what was rain in the valleys
was snow that settled over the rocks and sifted
down out of a cloud through the trees. The
north wind blew cold, and Swiftfoot was filled
with restlessness again, the wanderlust was upon
him. He would go on, and on, until he found
some other pack he could join. Perhaps because
it had become a habit, perhaps because he knew
the way was so long back to the northland he had
come from, across the great river, he turned
southward once more.

For many nights he traveled, keeping always
to the cover of the forests and ridges. Now and
then he had to cross a road, but for a long distance
he was practically in wilderness. ‘Then, one
moonlight night, he came upon a broad road, run-

32 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

ning east and west right over the big ridge. In
the distance he heard a great roaring, and caught
a strange, pungent odor. He shrank back into
the bushes, crouched and waiting. Two blinding
lamps, like huge eyes, came around a bend. An
iron thing, with the men creatures sitting in it,
thundered by, leaving the strange smell behind.

~ Swiftfoot rose and crossed the Mohawk Trail,
and no Mohawk that sneaked along that path
when it was a dim track in the ancient wilderness
ever stole with softer footsteps or vanished more
like a ghost into the dusk of the forest.

More than ever now Swiftfoot missed the pack.
The deer were numerous everywhere. Never
was such good hunting in his experience. Yet
for one lone wolf it was hard and dangerous
work. The fawns were getting their growth, to
be sure, and when one wandered away from its
mother he could pull it down easily enough. But
as yet they stuck pretty close still to the old deer,
and a solitary wolf has to work sometimes for
hours at a stretch to cut out a fawn, or even take
to his heels if the buck appears. There weren’t
many rabbits nor grouse. The hawks and owls,

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 33

the previous winter, had attended to them. With
a great hatred for all dogs in his heart, Swiftfoot
grew bold, sometimes even reckless, in running a
lone dog when he picked up the trail in the woods,
or even in the half-abandoned fields which ran in
and out of the broken hill country in which he
now found himself. All his savagery he vented
on these dogs, killing sometimes merely for the
sport of it, for the zest of battle, and licking his
own wounds well for a day or two thereafter, in
some nest of leaves under a mountain rock.

But he encountered no wolves, and no sign of
wolves. He was alone, in a strange land.

Then, suddenly, as he was trotting along
through a young forest of spruce, having earlier
that night skirted the hills to the east of a strange
light which seemed to steam up from a bow] in the
hills (it was a city) and crossed a railroad track,
he came on familiar tracks which he had not seen
nor smelled since he left his far northern home.
One, two, three tracks, a bull moose and two
cows! Moose meat! His tongue lolled out, and
drops of saliva trickled from his jaws! Oh, for a
pack to help him hunt! Alone, he was helpless.

84 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Surely there must be a pack somewhere, if there
were moose again. Moose belong to the big
woods. He trotted down the tracks, to have a
look at the quarry. As he drew in close to the
big creatures, feeding in a deep swamp, himself
having to leap from tussock to tussock, the bull got
his scent and reared angry antlers with a snort.
Swiftfoot, alone and unaided, had no intention of
a contest with those horns. He snarled a defi-
ance, but he circled the little herd and trotted
away, intent on finding a pack to help him.

As he moved off, from four or five miles away
came a thin whistle. It meant little to Swiftfoot.
He did not know it was a night freight leaving
the Lenox station. He was unaware of the start-
ling contrast between his presence here, and that
town of expensive villas and modern, luxuriant
civilization, so close beside him. He still trotted
southward. But he met no wolf pack. He did
not know there had been no wolf pack here for a
hundred years, that he, and he alone, was return-
ing now over the high hill ridges where the pio-
neers had built their villages and cleared their
farms, returning because protective laws had at

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE”’ 35

last brought back the deer for him to hunt, and
even, as we have just seen, a few moose; but re-
turning still more, perhaps, because railroads and
trolleys, the opening of the great western farms,
the exodus to the cities, have all combined to
throw back to wilderness again the hilltop land
our forefathers cleared. When the wilderness
comes back, the citizens of the wilderness come
back as well. Swiftfoot, the wolf, was returning
to his own.

But not quite to his own. He had just snug-
gled down to sleep the next morning, at day-
break, when he was awakened by the report of a
gun, far off, then quickly of another nearer him.
Like a dog, he was wide awake and on his feet in
a second, every sense alert. It was the first Mon-
day in December, the beginning of “ deer week,”
when, for six days, deer can be hunted in Massa-
chusetts, but only with shotguns and without
dogs. It was for the baying of dogs that Swift-
foot listened first. Hearing nothing, nor scent-
ing men near by, he was about to creep deeper into
his lair, when he caught both the scent and sound
of a deer. It was running as fast as it could,

36 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

with blood flowing from its side, and it went past
Swiftfoot without being aware of him, eyes blood-
shot, chest heaving, a pitiful sight. Swiftfoot,
however, did not pity it. He trotted into its trail
and loped easily after it. There was no great
hurry,—it couldn’t last long, and he could pull it
down when it was too exhausted to fight.

After a mile or so, the deer did fall, weak from
loss of blood, and Swiftfoot was upon it. He
scarcely had it well by the throat, however, before
he got the scent of his deadly enemies, the two-
legged creatures, drawing near. With an
angry snarl, he slunk quickly into the under-
brush.

When the men came up, he could hear their
strange noises, though he could not know they
were cursing the dog which had torn their game.
If Swiftfoot had known they thought him a dog,
his rage might have got the better of his pru-
dence. To him, that was the one unforgivable
insult. ‘The men—there were three of then—
carried his quarry away, which did not add to his
good nature, especially as he had tasted just
enough to make him hungry. Instead of going

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 37

back to his den, he trotted gloomily toward a high
hill he saw to the south, with the guns sounding
all around him in the woods, and found a cave
into which he crawled till he was in complete
darkness. Here he felt safe from the guns

The firing ceased at sunset. It was a cold,
clear night. He was hungry, and crept forth.
All that night he hunted, in vain, till nearly morn-
ing. Not even a rabbit crossed his path. But
toward daybreak, from far off, he suddenly heard
a familiar sound—familiar yet almost forgotten.
It was the honk of a wild goose! Turning
abruptly, his gray legs took him swiftly and si-
lently toward the sound, till the smell of water
came to him.

And then he came face to face with a high,
thick wire fence. The ground was frozen hard,
and he could not dig under it. He trotted along
it till at last he found a fallen log from which he
could leap and clear the wire. One bound, and
he was on the other side, and moving once more
toward the smell of water.

But he had not gone far when he caught an-
other scent, the pungent, unpleasant scent of

38 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

men. Turning, he went back to the fence and
made sure of a place where he could leap it from
this side in case of need. Then, stealthily, craft-
ily, keeping covered by shrubs and undergrowth,
he stalked back, impelled by his hunger, and his
curiosity.

It was dawn now. But though he heard dis-
tant shots, very far away, there was no gun fired
on this side of the wire fence. Once or twice a
deer went past him, but he didn’t dare give chase,
because the men were always somewhere about.
Dodging them, keeping them to windward, he
finally got near the water—a small pond, half
frozen, half open. On the frozen side, inside a
wire fence which stretched out over part of the
ice, were the wild geese, the very same birds he
knew from his early days in the far north. Fat
and good they were, too! His mouth watered at
the smell of them—but here they came in and out
of a strange, box-like structure evidently built by
the man creature, and only two hundred yards
away, over a knoll, smoke was rising, with that
pungent smell which comes from the fires the man
creature makes,

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 39

Swiftfoot slunk cautiously into the blueberry
bushes on the farther shore, and lay down to await
the coming of darkness. He had got to have one
of those geese! He was hungry, and the thought
of them, beside, filled him with memories. All
day he lay in his cover, growing hungrier and
colder, yet not daring to sleep with more than
half an eye, for he was aware of the men creatures
around him. At last, as the sun set behind the
low evergreens to the west, and twilight stole
down through the gray beeches above the goose
pen, he saw one, two, three men come from dif-
ferent directions, and move over the ridge toward
the thin wood smoke that curled up in the still,
cold air like the wraith of a twisted column. He
waited five mmutes more. No other men crea-
tures appeared. He smelled none. The ice on
the pond, covered with a light snow powder,
gleamed white. A big gander was walking out
over it, behind the wire. Swiftfoot rose, circled
the pond swiftly, but keeping well to cover, and
came silently down through the gray beech grove,
himself the color of the beech trunks, and ghostly
in the twilight.

40 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Skirting the fence rapidly and cautiously, he
came to a place where a good leap would carry
him to the top. Here he clung till he could get
a grip with his hind paws, and draw himself up
and over. As he dropped to the ground, there
was a great flutter and squawking and cackle of
ducks and geese. Quickly he sprang out on the
ice, straight for the great gander, a fifteen-pound
bird, and dove for its throat. The gander, with a
loud noise, half rose and tried to escape over the
fence, but Swiftfoot had his tail, and pulled him
down. Then the bill struck at him, the big wings
beat powerfully in his face, and he was busy
enough for the next two minutes, before he could
finally get that throat into his jaws. He had it
at last, he felt the bird’s resistance cease, and he
started to pull the heavy burden over the ice to-
ward the spot in the fence where he had climbed
over. He had, meanwhile, been only vaguely
aware of the tremendous uproar in the pen. In-
deed, his back had been toward the bank.

Now, as he faced about, the body ‘of the goose
dangling from his jaws and trailing on the ice, he
suddenly saw the gate of the pen open and a man

“THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE” 41

creature dash in, armed with one of those shining
sticks. Swiftfoot didn’t wait to sling his prey
over his shoulder, or even to make for the low part
of the fence. He dropped the goose and sprang,
with a lightning turn, back toward the nearest
piece of fence, on the ice, and leaped.

His powerful leg muscles would have taken
him over, too, had he been springing from
ground. But he leaped from ice, with only an
inch of powdery snow on it. His feet slipped as
he sprang, and he hit the fence only half-way up,
falling down on his back. With a snarl, he
righted himself and turned for another dash.
But now the man was upon him. He was fairly
cornered. All his savagery, all his rage, boiled
up. Baring his fangs, with a loud, deep, snarI-
ing growl, he sprang full at the man creature, his
blazing eyes fixed on the patch of white throat.

But even as he rose, mouth open, the shining
stick rose, too. There were two shattering re-
ports, so close they were almost one. The top of
Swiftfoot’s head was blown clean off. He
dropped dead on the snowy ice, close to the goose
he had killed, his blood making a black pool in the

42 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

gathering darkness. His southward journey had
ended.

The gamekeeper of the reservation was rather
pale, and trembled a little. When you enter
with a shotgun to kill a gray fox in your wild-
fowl pen, and are attacked by a hungry timber
wolf instead, an animal you never saw before in
your life, it is rather disconcerting. But the
gamekeeper took the body to his house over the
ridge, and he and his two special assistants, called
in for that one week to guard against deer poach-
ing, skinned it. Later, he showed the skin to a
visitor, who went away and told a newspaper re-
porter about it.

Then the newspaper told the public how a wolf
had been shot in Western Massachusetts, the first
one killed in the State, so far as anybody knew, for
a century. And the public laughed, and said it
was another “ newspaper story ”’; there couldn’t
be any wolves in Massachusetts. Wolves are ex-
terminated in that part of the world. Which
only goes to prove that Hamlet was quite right in
his remarks to Horatio.

CHAPTER II

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST

OU may talk about environment all you
please, and doubtless most you say will be
true; but there’s a lot in heredity, just the same.
There.is no question in my mind, for instance, but
Big Reddy, the fox who very nearly gave most of
our dogs nervous prostration, inherited his humor
as well as his fearlessness from his father, who, to
my certain knowledge, was a wag; and a good
deal of his peculiar cunning and his bravery—for
he could be brave as a dog—from his mother.

?

As for “ prenatal influences,” of course he was
born in a den in my sugar grove, not four hun-
dred yards from the barns (and, I might add, the
chicken coops), which may have explained his
complete ease and comfort near the haunts of
men and dogs. I suppose, however, it is only
fair to state that my barns are not in a village,
but out in the open country, close to the big

woods. I don’t want you to think Big Reddy
43

44 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

was a gutter snipe, though I verily believe he
could have crossed the Fifth Avenue traffic with
more skill and nonchalance than some dogs I’ve
seen try it!

But let me go back of Big Reddy to his father,
first. A true novelist would begin with his great-
grandfather, no doubt; but as this is only a short
story, his father is far enough back. Sometime
before Big Reddy was born, this parent, who was
also a big fox, with a magnificent brush (more
heredity, you see), used periodically to raid Zach
Corliss’s chicken yard. Zach set traps, he bought
a dog, he kept one gun by the kitchen door, an-
other in the barn. But the old fox walked past the
traps, he outran the dogs, when he couldn’t make
friends with them, and he kept out of gunshot.
Zach was growing ‘pretty desperate when, one
day, well after sun up in the morning, too, as he
was coming down the lane from shooting at a
woodchuck up in the new rye field, whom should
he meet, trotting toward him between the stone
walls, but the old fox. Aha! he had him cor-
nered! The fox couldn’t retreat without going
into the barnyard, and there were men there. On

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 45

cither side was open field or pasture. Zach be-
gan to run toward him, so he’d get a shot at close
range. The fox saw him and sprang up on the
stone wall. On the wall—and Zach will swear to
this with his hand on the family Bible—he faced
Zach, bared his teeth and laughed. “ Laughed
right out loud,” Zach says. ‘Then, before Zach
could raise the gun, he leaped to the farther side.
Zach sprang to the wall to fire.

He didn’t fire. The old fox had jumped
square into the middle of Zach’s flock of prize
Shropshire sheep, and was stampeding them
across the pasture, safe in the middle!

Now Zach understood why he laughed. And
maybe you can see where Big Reddy, his son, got
his sense of humor.

Big Reddy’s mother, too, is not to be ignored.
In fact, if it had not been for her bravery, Reddy
would never have grown to man’s estate a free
agent. It was this way. When the boys discov-
ered the den, on the far edge of the sugar bush,
they were all for digging the foxes out, for pets.
Considering the fact that there was a pile of
chicken bones beside the den, I consented. They

46 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

dug in from the entrance, one of them holding a
big sack constantly open to catch mother fox if
she tried to jump out. But she didn’t jump, and
before long the diggers reached the chamber, and
there were three little, round, furry, blinking,
frightened foxes, the prettiest pups you ever saw.
But no mother. There was fresh earth about,
and the hole went on!

“ She’s digging her way out!” the boys cried,
and attacked the new tunnel. The ground was
hard and full of roots from the maple trees, so
they couldn’t dig very rapidly, not so rapidly as
the mother moved, for they had to get down two
feet to reach her hole.

I saw what she was up to, but said nothing to
the boys. They followed her from behind as she
swung a loop, and made for the entrance to her
old den. The boys realized this at last, and
sprang to head her off. But they were too late.
Before they could snatch up the bag and get it
opened, she suddenly pawed her way frantically

through into daylight, one pup—all she could
carry—in her mouth, and sprang out. As the
dog had been carefully left at home, of course

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 47

there was no catching her. Off she went with
Big Reddy in her mouth.

“Gee, I ain’t sorry!” exclaimed young Bill.
“Some pep, she’s got!”

The boys took the three other little foxes home,
and kept them that summer in an old chicken
coop—but that is another story. This is to be
the tale of Big Reddy.

Reddy was apparently none the worse for this
exciting adventure of his early youth, for he grew
rapidly in the warm, dry hole which his father
and mother dug in an old, abandoned marble
quarry about a mile away, playing all day in the
sun before the door, and justifying by his thick
fur, his deep chest, his wonderful, snapping, alert
eyes, his mother’s choice of him out of all her fam-
ily tosave. By August he was learning to hunt,
and by the time the leaves fell in the woods and
you could see a rabbit far off as well as hear or
smell it, Big Reddy was able to shift for himself,
which he proceeded to do, learning every foot of
the land for several miles around. Both his
mother and his father impressed this lesson upon
him. The very first secret of success in securing

48 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

game or escaping enemies is to know your coun-
try. Run your rabbit into a blind alley, run the
pursuing dog to a steep hill that will take his
wind, or to a brook where he will lose the scent, or
to a big, flat rock where you can circle all around,
springing off and on again from various points,
finally to dash away with a long bound. That
leaves the dogs, when they arrive, baying madly
round and round the rock, like wound-up toys on
a table-top. It’s really rather amusing.

Big Reddy was certainly a handsome fellow.
His fur was rich and red gold, his legs were coal
black, his brush was magnificent, almost sweeping
the ground, he had a deep chest, splendid speed,
sharp ears that pricked up straight at the slight-
est interesting sound, and eyes that snapped with
intelligence. His ears were so good that if he
was crossing a field at night and a mouse
squeaked in the grass two hundred feet away—a
sound you or I couldn’t hear unless we were al-
most on top of it—he would freeze to a statue,
listening, and when he had the exact bearings, he
would steal softly, on padded feet, toward the
sound, keeping to any cover that was there, and

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 49

with the aid now of his keen scent and keen eyes
as well as his cars, he would suddenly go up in
the air, clear off the ground, and come down with
his two front paws on the mouse. A mouse, of
course, wasn’t more than a mouthful, but it
helped, between meals.

It didn’t take Reddy long, either, to learn what
dogs in his part of the world to fear, what dogs
to respect, and what dogs merely to laugh at. He
may have made still further distinctions, for all I
know, but these three he certainly conveyed by
his actions so even a man could see. The only
dog in the whole town he really feared was Lucy,
a smallish fox hound belonging to a “ gentleman
farmer ” down the road, who occasionally hunted.
Lucy came from Kentucky, and she was a thor-
oughbred in every bone and sinew. She had a
nose that knew no other smell when once it was
laid to a track. She had a challenging, trium-
phant, trumpet bay, and she had as much speed as
Reddy, on the level at least, and almost as much
endurance. Her he undoubtedly feared, and so
did every other fox in the region.

Then there were perhaps three or four more

60 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

dogs which he respected; that is to say, he ran if
they were on his track and used some strategy to
get rid of them, while he avoided, so far as pos-
sible, letting them get on his track. Two of them
were locally bred fox hounds, one was a beagle,
one was an Airedale who hunted with the hounds
and was a pest because he’d go right into a hole
and dig you out—Reddy knew of one case where
he did this, and so was careful never to let himself
get denned in when this dog was at his heels.

But, as for the rest of our dogs, Big Reddy
laughed at them.. They were, to him, most cer-
tainly a joke. This was especially the case with
a big, handsome, valuable collie owned by no less
a person than myself. Poor old Barney, he was
a show dog, a family pet, an adornment to any
rug or any garden, but as a hunter he was foolish,
and he had no nose; and Big Reddy knew it. He
knew it so well that when he couldn’t think of
anything else to do, he’d come down to -the edge
of the woods at twilight, or, still better, at mid-
night when we were all abed and asleep, and bark,
a peculiar, rasping, annoying bark. The collie
would leap out of his kennel with an answering

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 51

yip, yip, yip, that would have waked the Sleep-
ing Beauty, and go tearing off toward his tor-
mentor. Then Reddy, with a kind of chuckle,
would slink up the slope through the laurel, make
a wide loop, and while the collie was up on the
mountain somewhere, would resume his barking
close to the edge of the garden again! Back
would come the collie, and the whole operation
would be repeated, till Reddy’s sense of humor
was satisfied or somebody fired a gun. He had
an entire and wholesome respect for a gun,—not
for a man, mind you, but for a man’s gun. If
the man didn’t have a gun, Reddy didn’t hesitate
sometimes to follow along behind him, through
the woods or even across an open field, out of
sheer curiosity to see where he was going. If the
man turned, he was behind a tree or a tussock or
a bush before you could have clapped eyes on him,
Everything in the woods interested Reddy; he
thoroughly enjoyed life every minute.

But after Christmas, the first winter of his
adult life, a deep snow came, and it grew bitterly
cold. Reddy didn’t mind the cold so much—he
had a warm den under some rocks well up the

52 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

mountainside amid the laurel and limestone
ledges, and he made two entrances to it through
the snow, a direct front door, and a back door,
reached by a twenty-foot tunnel. From this den
he could work down the slope, under cover of the
laurel (in fact, he had a regular little path trod-
den down in the deep snow) and come sneaking
around to the south side of every boulder and
pounce on any ruffed grouse or pheasant that
might be sheltered there. No, the trouble was
that the deep snow, the cold, and the big flight of
goshawks from the north had seriously dimin-
ished the number of grouse and pheasants, as well
as the rabbits. Reddy hated the three great
horned owls which had come from the north to
the big dead hemlocks on his mountainside and
hunted rabbits all night long. He used to yearn
for the power to climb a tree and get the great,
sleepy fellows when, by day, they were occasion-
ally visible, roosting close to the brown trunks, on
a dead limb. Reddy had already raided about
all the chicken yards in the neighborhood, and
after one, or at most, two raids, he was shrewd
enough to know that traps would be set, and men

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 53

watching with guns. Clearly, he’d have to aban-
don his warm, familiar den for a time, and move
on to new hunting grounds. So one evening,
just after sundown, he started off.

He traveled about twenty miles that night—
that is, he reached at dawn a place twenty miles
from his starting point—and never got a thing,
though he tracked a cottontail a long way, only
to find it in a hole between two hemlock roots, too
small for him to enter. At dawn, however, he
came upon a farm on a back road, well up under
a mountainside. He heard the hens and rooster
from afar, and slunk up cautiously. No dog
barked. The farmer was up, for there was the
ves, he heard

smell of wood smoke in the air and
it now, the ring of milk ina pail. But that came
from the barn. The hens were in a house behind
the barn. In front was a high wire fence. Big
Reddy, from behind a bush, studied the situation.
The hen-house roof sloped down behind, and he
could jump to it from the snow. But how about
the other side? How would he get out again?
He sneaked a little farther around, till he could
see into the yard, a look of crafty satisfaction

54 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

spread over his face, he listened sharply a mo-
ment, sniffed, went back to the rear, and sprang
on the roof. A second later he landed with all
fours on a fat Rhode Island Red, got his teeth
into its neck while the rest of the fowls flapped
wildly about and set up an alarmed cackling, and
with a yank of his head flung the body over his
shoulder and went up a broken ladder which
leaned against the hen-house, left there by the
farmer after he patched the shingles in the au-
tumn. Reddy was down on the snow again and
well away toward the woods when he heard the
farmer behind him, shouting in the pen. He laid
the hen down and bit its neck again, softly, to
make sure it was dead. Looking back, he saw
the farmer coming on his tracks now, followed by
a boy with a gun. Reddy slung the heavy fowl
over his shoulder once more and started rapidly
off. He had cover for a few feet, but then had
to make a break across the open. There came a
cry, a report, the ping of shot near him, but he
was untouched, and a second later the woods
wrapped him. Up and up he went, over rocks
and through dense laurel, till he came at last to a

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 55

cosy little cave under an overhang on a southern
exposure. Here he dropped his burden, investi-
gated carefully, found no odor of wildcat, and
dragging in his game, sat down to a square meal.
After that he curled up in a ball and slept.

How long he had slept he didn’t know. It
seemed but a few moments, for he was weary with
his night’s tramp over the deep snow, when he
was roused by the baying of hounds. His ears
were instantly up, and he was out in front of his
den, listening. The sound came nearer. There
were one, two, hounds, and two other dogs. Yes,
they were undoubtedly on his trail. Reddy cast
his eyes around deliberately and his eves nar-
rowed in thought. He was in a strange country,
so they had him at a certain disadvantage. No
doubt that same farmer and the boy with the gun
—perhaps more men with guns now—would be
behind the hounds, waiting for them to run him
into view. He didn’t propose to be run into
view. He thought of the first principle his par-
ents had taught him, and, making sure he had
time for the manceuvre, he sprang straight up the
ledges above his den for two hundred yards, then

56 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

returned in his own tracks to the den again, took
a long leap out and downward to one side, so he
cleared twenty feet or more before he landed, and
then trotted deliberately off along the mountain-
side, keeping always in the most tangled laurel.
He heard the dogs presently, baying and yipping
excitedly above the den, where he had turned
back in his tracks, and grinned to himself.
Reddy had no intention of getting wearied, so
he moved at a quiet trot. It was some time be-
fore his ears told him the dogs had picked up his
real trail again, and would be hot at his heels in
a moment. He lengthened his stride and once
more turned up the mountain, at a steep incline,
meanwhile looking sharply about for strategic
aids. The dogs were nearing him again, their
barks showing signs of short windedness, when
Big Reddy suddenly saw something that made
him increase his speed. It was a white, gleaming
slide, on an extremely steep pitch of slope, per-
haps two hundred feet long and twenty feet wide.
On either side was a tangle of laurel and broken
tree trunks. The snow on the slide had been
crusted with water from some spring above, and

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 57

was almost glare ice. But at the bottom was a
big snow-drift. Reddy sprang to this drift, and
tried the slide. He slipped back, unable to climb
it. But by making a huge spring, he could reach
a bit of projecting rock eight feet up, and from
there leap to the side. This he did, climbed to
the top, and sat down on his haunches, behind a
tree, where he could peek out at the dogs coming
up from below. They reached the snow-drift,
and there, of course, lost the trail. Presently,
however, one of the hounds found it again, at the
point where Reddy had landed after his spring
from the rock, and up they all came, panting
through the tangled laurel and over the fallen
trees. Reddy waited quite calmly, till they were
almost on him. Then he sprang out before their
astonished eyes and crouching on all fours,
slipped over the icy lip of the slide and tobog-
ganed like a shot to the bottom. From the drift
below he looked up to see the four dogs, barking
madly, trying their front paws on the slippery
rim, and pulling back in terror. Reddy waited,
quite calm. A second later the four dogs were
in full ery after him, coming down through the

58 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

tangle at the side. When they were at the bot-
tom, he leaped to the rock, to the bank above
them, and went up the side to the top again. The
dogs had to turn and once more pant up after
him. A second time he slid down, a second time
they followed, scrambling over the logs at the
side. A third and a fourth time this was re-
peated, each time Reddy having plenty of chance
to get his wind at the top, but the dogs having no
chance at all.

They were well fagged by the end of Reddy’s
fifth slide, and he suddenly saw that only three
of them were following him down. Whether
that was because the fourth dog was too winded,
or had suddenly learned sense, Reddy didn’t
know. Anyhow, that particular sport was up.
He sprang out along the mountain at top speed,
ran for half a mile as fast as he could go, turned
up the slope again, then, still at top speed,
reached the bare, wind-swept ledges on the very
top of the mountain, ran back and forth over a
bare ledge three or four times, sprang far off
through the air, and trotted down on the other
side.

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 59

Then, panting, he sat down and listened.
There was no sound, even to his keen ears! The
dogs had given up the chase. Reddy hunted out
a warm hole in an old fallen log, and finished his
nap. To tell the truth, he was rather pleased
with himself.

A few nights later, having found poor hunting
elsewhere and being hungry, he was impelled to
go back over the ridge and have another try at
that same chicken yard, especially as he now felt
confident of being able to outwit and outrun the
dogs. Besides, those dogs didn’t live at that
farm, he felt sure. They had been brought in by
the farmer. Reddy may have seemed reckless,
but he really never was. He was merely self-con-
fident. He never relaxed his alertness for a
second.

Now, as he drew near the farm, from the rear, he
was suddenly aware of man tracks, and the smell
of meat. Investigating, he detected the presence
of a bone, buried under the snow beside the path
he had taken when he carried off the hen. Very
carefully he walked all around the spot, and there
was no smell at all there but meat. He thrust in

60 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

a paw, two paws, dug quickly, and two feet below

the surface unearthed a nice ham bone. There
was no need of running further risks. ‘The bone
in his mouth, he trotted back up the slope.

The next night he thought he’d see if there was
any such luck again. Sure enough, in the very
same place, he smelled more meat! This time it
was a chunk of lamb bones, with good, warming
fat on them, too! Reddy was delighted. He
returned a third, a fourth, a fifth night, and each
trip was rewarded. His belly was getting quite
rotund, and he slept heavily all day long. On
the sixth night, however, as his nose sniffed the
magic snow-drift, his eyes went narrow, and he
didn’t dig. Around and around the spot he
trotted, and down the man track toward the
house, where he discovered the ladder had been
removed from the coop, then back to sniff again.
There was meat under the snow, all right, but
there was something else, too, he couldn’t quite
tell what at first. ‘Then it came to him; he’d en-
countered it once or twice near a barn—it was
rusty iron. What was rusty iron doing there?
iYes, and a man’s fingers had touched it. Reddy

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 61

suddenly remembered a fox he’d seen caught in a
trap—that was made of rusty iron, too. He
turned tail and trotted away. It was better to
have four sound legs than one full belly!

This bit of wisdom on Reddy’s part gave him
quite a reputation in those parts, and the next
day another hunt was organized, and he was
wakened once more by the hounds on his trail.
Well, he’d had about enough of this particular
neighborhood. He didn’t like it as well, anyhow,
as the land of his birth. Maybe there was good
hunting at home again now. Besides, he’d been
thinking of late about a certain girl fox back
there, and it filled him with funny feelings.
Reddy rose, shook off the sleep, and without
further ado headed for home as fast as his legs
would carry him. That was so fast that he had
no need of strategy until, after four miles, he had
to come down into open country. Here, if the
hounds weren’t to run him into somebody’s gun,
he needed to throw them off. He cast about for
a way, smelled water, made toward it, and found
a small river half frozen over. Running out on
the thin ice, he trotted cautiously along till his

62 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

sure eye told him he could make the leap to ice
that would bear up his few pounds, on the other
side. Then he jumped. After that he trotted
south again much more leisurely, crossed the river
once more at a bridge, and never heard more from
the dogs.

It was one clear, starlit night in February,
when Reddy was roaming the woods, restless he
knew not quite why, that he heard a curious fox
bark not far away. It was the bark of Whitetip,
the she-fox he had been thinking about. It
seemed to call him. He answered with a blood-
curdling yell that would have done credit to a
panther (and was, indeed, thought to be a wildcat
by the people it woke up in a house by the edge of
the woods a quarter of a mile away), and leaped
‘into a bounding gallop. His tracks converged
upon Whitetip’s. As their paths met, they both
dropped to a trot, side by side, with little whines
and barks into each other’s ears. Thus they
trotted on, courting, over the snow, under the
leafless trees and the cold stars, till Whitetip, coy
at first, was won.

Dawn was coming when, still side by side, they.

he CARREY Lim STON BULL - |

AS THEIR PATHS MET, THLY BOTH DROPPED TOA TROT, SIDE BY SIDE

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 63

continued their trot in among the rock ledges of
a hillock in the woods. Here Reddy knew of a
spot where sun and leaves protected the ground
from frost, and he could dig. He set at once to
work, and far quicker than you would have
thought possible a hole went in under a stone, far
in to a little warm, safe, snug chamber. Side by
side he and Whitetip curled down together. The
funny, restless feeling had gone. He was filled
with a great content. He slept.

The next few months of Reddy’s life were
filled full with the routine of domestic cares and
responsibilities. He was a kind father, a loving
husband, and a good provider, though it required
no little effort to feed his voracious family. Dur-
ing the warm season, however, when his fur was
light, he had less to fear from traps and hunters,
and there was more game to be had. He and
Whitetip certainly raised a fine litter, and at last
saw them shifting for themselves.

After that, Reddy felt as if he had earned a va-
cation. It wasn’t that his affections had gone
wandering, that he was fickle—not at all. But
there was a sudden charm about bachelor free-

64 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

dom; doubtless you know how it is! The upshot
was that he drifted off again by himself for a
while, and had a little den a mile or so from the
recent family home. He was here when the win-
ter snows came, and living rather a solitary life,
finding his chief amusement in running European
hares, which had suddenly appeared that winter
in large numbers, coming over from a neighbor-
ing State—great, swift, long-legged and long-
eared creatures like our western jack-rabbits.
He also kept in practice leading dogs astray, and
made several successful chicken raids.

It was midwinter sometime that he was startled
early one morning by the sound of a gun, and
presently detected sounds of distress. Galloping
swiftly toward the sound, he found poor White-
tip with one hind foot crippled and torn with shot,
and bleeding. She was hobbling along on three
legs, trying to reach her den. When she saw
Reddy, she gave a little moan of greeting, and
sank in the snow, half exhausted, while he licked
her paw.

But he had scarcely got the clotted, frozen
blood off before they both heard a deep, warning

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 65

bay. It was Lucy, the one hound they dreaded!
The den was two miles or more away! And
Whitetip had only three legs to run on!

She struggled bravely to her feet, and hobbled
on as rapidly as she could behind her mate, while
he made his plans. It was plain Lucy was on
Whitetip’s trail. How to get her off was the
problem. At the head of an open pasture slope
Reddy stopped, just behind a big boulder which
concealed both foxes from the view of anything
following them. Lucy was now not more than
three hundred yards behind. He sent Whitetip
on up into the scrub, and waited.

On came Lucy, working in her own wonderful
way, burying her muzzle up to the eyes in the
snow for a step or two, then emerging to emit a
deep, trumpet bay, then down again in the scent,
and never stopping her steady progress. Reddy
waited till she was within fifteen feet of the boul-
der, then he suddenly stepped out directly in
front of her, so that she could not help seeing him.
Out of the snow came her muzzle, out of her
mouth came a silver challenge, and at him she
sprang. He was away like a shot, at an oblique

66 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

angle from the course his mate had taken, with
the hound in mad pursuit. Now she had him in
sight, the dog could let out every notch of her
wonderful speed, and Reddy knew he’d have to
run as he never ran before. For a mile or more
he kept in open fields, on the level, so he would be
in full view, and was hard put to keep a safe lead.
Finally, as his wind began to fail, he cut up a
sharp pitch, into timber, and kept on up till he
felt the dog drop back and lose sight of him—as
he could tell by her bay. Then he doubled around
on a loop, reached his old track, and raced back
in it for some distance. 'Then he took to cover,
and made for his starting point as fast as he
could go.

Behind the same boulder, he once more waited
Lucy’s coming, lying down to get all his wind
back possible. He well knew she would return
to this spot anyway, if he threw her off his scent,
and the only safe thing was for him to be here
again, lest she pick up the other track, and run
down Whitetip before she could den in. Sure
enough, Lucy, only temporarily delayed, was on
his scent once more, and coming on fast, her mel-

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 67

low bay resounding over the winter fields. As
she came up on the other side of the boulder,
Reddy sprang to the top of it, where she did not
see him, because her muzzle was in the snow. He
watched her every move with narrowed eyes.
Where he and Whitetip had stood, she stopped,
and sent out a perplexed, resounding bay or two.
Then, as he feared, she picked up her original
trail, and turned up Whitetip’s track.

Reddy made a tremendous spring, right over
her head, his hind feet almost grazing her ears as
he came down, and before her astonished eyes he
actually turned his head and looked at her! This
was too much for any dog! With a tremendous
enraged uproar she was after him again.

Once more Reddy shot off at a tangent to his
mate’s track, and leaped down the slope, over the
snowy fields. He had very little lead, and he
badly needed more. There was no thin ice any-
where near by, and no hill except that up which
Whitetip had gone. But half a mile away was a
road, packed hard by sleighs, and perhaps confus-
Ing to the scent. At any rate, it led to possibili-
ties, if he could increase his lead sufficiently.

68 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Reddy was four hundred feet to the good at
the road, thanks to the snow, which held him up
better than the dog, and to his brief rest. He
leaped a stone wall on the farther side, ran out a
hundred feet and back again, and crouched down
close. Over the wall sprang Lucy, and out on
his track. Like light he was up and over into the
road again, while the hound bayed her perplexity
at the dead end of his track. He made up the
road, hidden by the wall, and was out of sight
around a bend before the dog was once more on
his trail.

Far up the road just passing around the next
bend, Reddy saw an empty lumber sledge, jan-
gling along at a trot, the driver, of course, with
his back to the rear end. Reddy leaped ahead
with redoubled energy. As he caught up to the
sled, he made a long, light spring, and landed si-
lently upon it. The driver never heard him.
Crouching down, one eye on the driver, one on
the road behind, he could see Lucy come into
sight around the bend, and then suddenly lose the
. track. She emitted again her bay of perplexity,
which Reddy surely thought would attract the

BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 69

driver’s notice. But he paid no attention at first.
Human ears are poor things, anyway. At last,
however, he did turn slowly around, for a gust of
wind brought the hound’s deep call with sudden
added loudness. Reddy was still crouched low,
but all his legs were poised for action, and one eye
never left the two-footed enemy.

The man saw him, his mouth opened, sounds
came forth, that resembled very much, “ Well,
T'll be damned!” Then he reached for one of
the sticks that stood at the side of his sled to hold
the wood in. Reddy didn’t wait. He was off
the sled and over the wall before the man could
even stop his horses. He heard the man calling
loudly to Lucy now, but Lucy wasn’t his dog,
and paid no attention, even if she heard him
against the wind. She was busy trying to puzzle
out the mystery of that vanished scent.

Now, at last, Reddy grinned, a broad, pleased,
amiable grin, and trotted leisurely to the woods,
and then made directly for Whitetip’s den, which
he felt sure she had reached by now. He still
heard Lucy’s perplexed bay as he crested the
ridge. .

70 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Whitetip lay in the den, licking her injured
paw. Again she gave a little whinmg moan
when Big Reddy entered. He lay down beside
her and applied his warm tongue. She was his
mate. She was hurt. He had just saved her
life. Why had he saved her life? He could
hardly have told you that, but he knew the time
was drawing on when the snow would soften, the
wind at night would pull in from the south, and
that strange, powerful feeling would come over
him. He slept the rest of that day by her side.
At night he went out. The stars were hidden.
A south wind was soughing through the pines.
There was a peculiar smell in the air. The snow
was a little damp. Reddy tipped up his head
and emitted a long-drawn scream that would
have done credit to a panther. It was a warning
to all in the woods that his mate lay there, in the
den, and he, Big Reddy, was prepared to defend
her. Then, because she was injured, he went
forth into the dark, to get her meat. It was a
characteristic touch that he headed for the chicken
coops of Lucy’s master.

CHAPTER III
THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL

LD BILL, the biggest bull moose in Massa-
chusetts (and perhaps you will be surprised
to hear that there are any moose in Massachusetts
—most people are), was born in ignominious cap-
tivity. I say ignominious, because it is igno-
minious for any wild animal to be a captive, and
especially for so splendid an animal as the moose,
that great, deep-chested, powerful-limbed,
mighty-antlered survival of some giant race of
deer which inhabited the globe before the dawn
of any history we know, doubtless before the ad-
vent of Man at all. And yet, if Old Bill’s par-
ents hadn’t been led away into captivity in Mas-
sachusetts there would now be no moose in that
State, so there you are.
A moose does not take kindly to confinement.
You may give him everything in the world he

likes to eat, from rolled oats to spruce bark, but
ver

72 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

if he is shut up in a few acres, he presently dies
of a disease with a learned name, which in plain
language is indigestion. In his wild state he
roams thirty miles to get a meal, browsing here
and there, and thus keeps in condition. But the
rich man who caused Old Bill’s potential parents
to be captured had more than a few acres to con-
fine them in. He owned 14,000 acres of forest
and mountain just across the valley of the Housa-
tonic River from Lenox, up in the Berkshire
Hills. On a preserve of 14,000 acres you can
take quite a stroll, even if you have the legs of a
moose. This same rich man—he was a very rich
man indeed—wiped out all the farms which had
once made clearings on his 14,000 acres, leaving
only one or two houses for his gamekeepers to live
in, and building a “lodge” for himself, though
he never hunted the moose, and infrequently even
fished the brooks. Then he built a great fence
all around his property. High up on the moun-
tain at the centre of the reservation was a deep
swamp of spruce and hemlock and alder, with a
pond in the midst for which you might hunt hours
in vain. It was ideal moose country. Into this

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL %3

swamp plunged the old bulls and several cows
which comprised the captive herd. The elk, or
wapiti deer, were tamer, and used to hang around
the gamekeeper’s house, like cows. Not so the
moose. ‘They made for the deep swamp, and
finding plenty to eat and plenty of room to roam,
they escaped the fatal indigestion, and presently
‘into the world came a gawky, stiff-legged thing,
with a hump on his back and a tassel under his
chin, who was destined to be our hero.

It must be admitted that his father paid very
little attention to him, but his mother was ex-
tremely proud, and gave him the best of care,
teaching him, as soon as he was old enough, how
to spring into thickets that concealed at the ap-
proach of danger, how to nibble a bit of fresh
moosewood twig and then trot on maybe a mile
before reaching up and with pendulant upper lip
drawing down and into the mouth a cluster of
succulent hemlock, never eating too much in one
place lest one get lazy, with flabby muscles and
poor digestion. She taught him too, by example,
to sniff the wind before lying down to rest or even
before feeding, to sniff strange tracks in the earth

74 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

or the snow, to be ever alert, watchful, ready.
‘His was the Boy Scout motto—‘ Be prepared.”
If she had been rearing him in the deep woods,
far from’ mankind, he would have learned, no
doubt, to flee from the smell of a man on the
wind, or even from a man’s tracks in the mud—
to flee, perhaps, miles and miles to another forest.
But here on the Berkshire reservation a few men
—the keeper, his assistants, the owner and his
friends—were always passing about, and no harm
came from them. Indeed, in winter when the
snow was very deep, the men would come into the
swamp dragging loads of hay on a sled, and leave
it there for the moose to eat. Besides, there was
no way to flee very far, because of the great fence.
So Old Bill (of course, he wasn’t called Old Bill
then, nor even Willie) was never taught to flee
actively from man, nor greatly to dread him—
only to be cautious and slip into cover when the
man scent came down wind.

But one day strange things began to happen,
alarming things. Many men—strange men—
appeared on the reservation, and many and
strange horses, and there was running and shout-

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 15

ing and beating of the bush and woods, while
frightened animals of all sorts, deer, elk, moose,
and all the rest, were driven in toward the central
enclosure. None of them knew why, though the
reason was that the rich man. had died, as even
very rich men have to do, and now all the captive
animals were going to be rounded up and carried
away to another rich man’s reservation. The
moose, because by nature they are the wariest and
craftiest of all big animals, perhaps, though you
might suppose they would find it hardest to con-
ceal themselves, were the most difficult to round
up. Old Bill’s mother, especially, with the care
of her child on her mind, was tremendously
alarmed, and kept dashing into low, dense spruce
thickets with a warning bellow to Bill to follow
her, which he always did, with more speed than
grace. As they dashed over the mountain and
through the swamps and forest, always seeking to
avoid the scent of danger, they encountered Bill’s
father and another cow, employing successfully
the same tactics. The four of them kept together
after that, and presently they were roused sud-
denly from the bushes on the bank of a swampy

76 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

brook by the warning noise of the beaters some
distance off. The old bull led the way with a
tremendous leap into the thickets, away from the
noise, and brought them up sharp against the
eighteen-foot-high wire fence. The bull, in fact,
was going at such a gait, and was so excited with
alarm, that his horns actually collided with it, and
it sagged away from him. 4s it gave before the
impact of his great body (his antlers alone prob-
ably weighed fifty pounds or more), there was a
crashing noise, as of wood breaking.’ The bull
pulled back, and looked. Yes, one of the chest-
nut posts which held the fence up had rotted, and
cracked at the ground! He drew back with a
short, sharp snort, and then went into the fence
again, deliberately this time, and close to the
post. It gave completely, and the post sagged so
far out that the top of the fence was only six feet
above the ground. Once more the bull drew
back, gathered his great muscles for the spring,
and cleared it. The second cow followed, and
then Bill’s mother, with a kind of tooting noise
which Bill knew meant, “Come on!” gathered
herself and sprang.

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL G7

Poor little Bill uttered a protesting bellow, or
rather two bellows, like two raps with an ax on a
hollow tree. He couldn’t make that jump. He
just knew he couldn’t. He ran up and down be-
hind the half-fallen fence, looking for a lower
place, and seeing his father, the other cow, even
his mother, vanishing into the woods outside.
Yes, even his mother, she felt so sure he would
follow! But he couldnt follow! If Bill had
been a boy, he would certainly have burst into
sobs. But he wasn’t. He was a young bull
moose, and behind him, on the wind, he suddenly
caught fresh and strong that man scent his
mother had taught him to be wary of. It was
coming nearer. Over there, his mother was going
farther away. Little Bill drew back, made a
mighty dash and a spring with all the power of
his gawky, stiff, long legs, and though his hind
heels hit the wire and half spilled him, he stag-
gered up to find, to his surprise, that he was over
the fence! Then he kicked up those same hind
hoofs with a prance of joy and pride in his
achievement, and dashed madly off on the trail of
his parents.

78 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

His achievement had given him such a good
opinion of himself, in fact, that he didn’t even
whimper when he couldn’t seem to catch the
others, but only redoubled his efforts, ducking his
head craftily under low branches and dashing on
with astonishing speed. At last he did catch
sight of them, ahead in an open glade in the
woods, and with a final prance and kick of delight
he ran panting up to his mother. His father was
evidently satisfied that they were at least tem-
porarily safe here, for he was nibbling some hem-
lock shoots: Not long after, however, they
moved on, going down a rough, wooded slope of
the mountain.

At the bottom of this slope they came suddenly
upon a strange thing, with a yet stranger odor—a
kind of roadway (they were familiar with road-
ways), but with eight shining steel strips nailed
to it, upon wooden crossbars. With a snort, the
bull turned tail and began to climb the slope
again, the rest after him. They had gone but a
few feet, however, when a tremendous noise
smote their ears, and turning to see the cause,
they beheld a terrible monster coming down this

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 79

strange road, belching smoke. They all sprang
higher up the ledges, and beneath them the 20th
Century Limited (the Boston and Albany sec-
tion) thundered by. Men and women were sit-
ting at the windows of the parlor cars, in great
easy chairs, hurtling luxuriously through the
landscape. But they did not see the four wild
creatures bounding up the rocks above, their nos-
trils stung with the acrid coal smoke smell, their
eyes big with alarm.

Yet the strange monster had not hurt them,
apparently it had not tried to hurt them. It had
stayed right on that shining roadway. Even
little Bill realized this. It was their first lesson
in the new freedom.

However, it takes more than one lesson to
teach a cosmic truth even to so clever an animal
as a moose, and Bill’s father, the leader, was still
wary. He did his best to keep his little herd to
the cover of the woods. The trouble was, they
were always getting out of the cover of the woods,
and never knowing when it was going to happen,
either. In the next few days they stumbled on
roads, on houses, en odd animals which they didn’t

80 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

in the least fear, which men call cows, and once
they were chased by a dog. It was Little Bill
that the dog really chased. Bill had dropped
behind the rest a little, to feed on a succulent
young birch tree, for his appetite was good these
days; he was a growing boy. The dog, a huge
mongrel creature which he, of course, supposed
was one of those wolves his mother had told him
of, came suddenly at him, and he quite naturally
bolted for the maternal protection. It chanced
that the little herd was to the windward, with a
half gale blowing, and they didn’t get the dog
scent. Into the swampy glade where they stood
Bill burst without warning, the dog in full pur-
suit, and just as Bill broke into their midst, the
dog fastened on his rear leg. Bill turned about,
with a snort of pain, trying to reach the dog with
his bare little forehead. But there was no need
of that. Bill’s father stepped into the breach.
With lowered head and eyes that blazed, he made
one lunge, one toss of his great, strong neck, and
impaled on his pronged antlers the dog was torn
with a wild cry from his grip on Bill, and then
tossed into the air. Even as he fell, the antlers

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 81

again struck him, and when he reached the ground
a great, sharp hoof went crashing through his
chest. Then the old bull, with a short snort, led
the way rapidly into the deeper woods, Bill limp-
ing along behind. When they paused again,
Bill’s mother licked his wounds, and he lay down
stiffly to sleep that night, wishing he, too, had big,
powerful antlers.

Their escape together from the reservation,
and their subsequent wanderings, in the face
daily of the unknown, of threatening, strange
perils, always searching for some way out of the
ring of roads, houses, clearings, which seemed to
hem them in, had kept the tiny herd together, just
as common danger keeps men and women to-
gether. Yet the worst peril they had actually
faced was a dog, which the old bull feared no
more than an insect, and gradually the fear of
danger left them, and Bill’s father wandered
away by himself, after the manner of his kind,
looking no doubt for male companionship, while
Bill, though tempted to go with him, still clung
to his mother, who, in turn, browsed with the
other cow. Thus the days passed, while Little

82 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Bill grew and grew till his forehead began to itch
and he rubbed it on trees, thus making the joyous
discovery that his antlers were growing! It
was not until autumn that he saw his father
again.

He well remembered the night. It was twi-
light, fast deepening into dusk, when his mother
stood up suddenly on the shore of a lonesome
pond, where the summer campers had departed
from their cottages in the woods, and elevating
her head emitted a long-drawn, strange call. It
echoed faintly, and again yet more faintly, from
the woods on the farther banks. ‘Twice, three
times, four times, she repeated it, and a little
farther along the shore the other cow took it up.
Bill had never heard his mother make this noise
before, and he listened full of wonder.

It seemed a long time after that his sharp ears
heard a sound like two blows struck on a tree
across the lake, or like a double cough, and then
the unmistakable swish of something large enter-
ing water, and swimming. ‘This watery swish
came nearer. Bill heard now the panting of
breath. His mother called once more, excitedly.

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 83

The breathing grew louder, the swish more rapid.
A few minutes later, across the dim surface of the
lake, Bill saw the great, palmated antlers of a
bull moose, rising above the ripples, and just
below them, nose almost in the water, the splen-
did head. The bull reached bottom with his feet.
He began to struggle faster. Then he got to
knee depth, shook himself, and came, like a great,
black ghost risen from the deep, splashing up to
the shore. That was how Bill saw his father
again, and how he learned the meaning of the cow
moose call, the call that brings the fathers back
to the herds.

After that, the bull stayed with them again, as
the first snow came, and they continued their
wanderings, still looking for some escape into
deeper woods where men and roads and other
strange things did not annoy. So far, guns, how-
ever, were not in their experience of terrors. But
now, all suddenly, as they woke one morning and
set out to browse through a young second growth
hard wood, they ran full into a party of three men
whose presence they had not scented because of
the direction of the strong wind. The bull saw

84 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the men before he was seen, and turning, with a
swish of his antlers under the branches, made for
shelter. Bill was right after him, for by now he
was big and swift, too. Bill’s mother turned,
also, but before the second cow could get into
cover there were three terrific noises behind them,
and even as he looked back from a corner of his
eye to see the cow fall headlong, Bill heard a
strange whistle in the air around him and a ter-
rifying ripping in the foliage. He put on even
more speed, and soon the three of them were out
of danger. But they were only three now. They
waited for the other cow, but she did not come,
and presently the bull led the way, with long
strides, back toward the reservation. They had
never been shot at there. It was all he could
think of as a means of escape.

They reached the reservation fence in a few
hours, driven on by the sound of guns in the
woods about them, and discovered the spot where
they had jumped it a few months before. It had
not been repaired. In fact, two more parts had
now sagged over so far that they could step across
with their long legs, back into the familiar spruce

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 85

swamps. Here they had never been molested,
and here there was no sound of the terrifying
guns, except from a great distance. They looked
for the other moose who used to be there, the elk,
the deer, but none appeared, except a white-tailed
deer or two who were not familiar, and two elk,
who, like them, had escaped the round-up. The
three moose retreated to their old browsing
grounds by the pond, where, a day or two later,
the one keeper who still lived on in the white
farmhouse discovered their tracks. But it was
too late now to try to catch them and ship them
away. Instead, he smiled to himself, and got his
sled out to be ready with hay when the deep snows
came.

Meanwhile, something had happened to the
three men who had killed the cow moose. Bill
and his parents knew nothing about this, but all
the other hunters heard of it. The State game
warden for the district, Bill Snyder, on his rounds
through the forests, had come upon these men,
red handed, as they were trying to get their booty
out. As moose are absolutely protected in
Massachusetts, Bill hauled them into court, and

86 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the judge gave them each a fine which was far
larger than the value of the moose. It was so
large that it quite effectively discouraged any
other hunter from wanting to take a chance on a
moose. It made the three remaining animals
comparatively safe from rifles for some time to
come. The warden’s friends began to speak of
the moose as “ Bill’s pets.” And now, perhaps,
you begin to see how our hero came, later, to get
his name of Old Bill. The countryside chris-
tened him that, in honor of Bill Snyder.

Bill Snyder himself came up on the reservation
that first winter, to see the moose, and to help
feed them after the big blizzard. Little Bill,
hidden in a thicket, saw him pulling a sled load
of hay. He was a big, smiling man, and some-
how Bill wasn’t afraid. He was alone at the
time, and in his eagerness to get the hay, he moved
in his cover before the man had gone far away,
and Snyder caught a sight of him. The smile on
his face grew broader.

Spring came with no adventures to Bill’s credit
except another tussle with a stray dog, which
evidently mistook Bill for a deer and ran him

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 87

into a corner of the old fence, where Bill was
forced to turn and fight. He was alone, but
found himself already equal to the emergency.
He finished off that dog in two tosses and a
stamp, but tossed him a couple more times just
for the fun of it, because it felt so good. As a
rule, his temper was of the best, but nobody likes
a dog that chases you. In spring, too, another
little moose was added to the herd, making their
number four again, and Bill’s mother quite for-
sook him, for the care of her new offspring. So
then, at last, Bill cut away entirely from the
maternal apron strings, as it were, and went
wandering off with the old bull, quite a little man
now, and left the females (the new arrival was a
female) to themselves.

Having been quite unmolested all winter again,
the fear had left them, and once more now they
wandered out of the old reservation, where that
winter they had pretty well used up the tenderest
feed, over a fence falling still more into decay,
and into the free woods and wilder uplands.
They met men, but nobody fired at them. They
crossed roads and even browsed into rye and oat

88 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

fields near houses, at night, but no harm befell
them. Still, they were ever cautious, and kept
deep out of sight except on the rare occasions
when the man scent had not reached them in time.
Crossing everywhere so many man tracks, how-
ever, gradually broke down a good deal of their
instinctive shyness. Bill came to know the coun-
try for many miles around, and more than once
it was only the greater caution of the older bull
which kept him from following the promptings
of his native bump of curiosity and exposing him-
self to plain view.

That year Bill and his father were in a deep
swamp, quietly browsing, when far, far off they
heard the cow call, which, a year before, had
startled Bill’s ears as his mother sounded it be-
side the lake. Now it stirred him curiously.
His muscles tightened, he raised his head and
coughed loudly, he drew his forefeet from the
mud, and started for the firmer land. But the
old bull was ahead of him. As Bill came up to
the open woods on the bank, intent on rushing
toward the call, he saw the bull face round upon
him, with lowered antlers. Bill was surprised

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 89

and a little frightened. But he was angry, too.
His nostrils expanded, for an instant he saw red,
and lowering his own smaller antlers, which were
still mere prongs, with only a suggestion of the
palm formation, he charged full at the older
animal, who met his rush with another. The
result was inevitable. The stronger, heavier bull
knocked the smaller one back down the bank,
where poor Bill was content to remain, seeing his
father turn and with long, powerful strides and
a great swish as his triumphant antlers swept the
foliage, disappear toward the far-off call.
Presently Bill rose and followed deliberately.
He was young. He had plenty of time. Some
day his antlers would spread sixty inches, and
then
But it was not the next year, nor the next, nor
even the next. Three years passed when Bill did
not challenge his father’s supremacy. But he
grew—he grew in stature, and he grew in bold-
ness. Perhaps because he was born with such a

hump of curiosity, and a sense of humor, too,
Bill in his summer wanderings practiced less and
less sly concealment, till many people in the up-

90 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

land hamlets and farms and even a few in the
valleys came to know him by sight, and because.
he was now so large, and Bill Snydeyr’s pet boast,
he was universally called Old Bill. When any-
body saw him, he would call up Snyder on the
telephone, and tell the place and hour. Snyder
kept these records, and that was how he knew that
on some days Old Bill would travel as much as
thirty-five miles—that is, he was reported from
points thirty-five miles apart; he probably actu-
ally covered considerably more ground. As he
came to fear man less and less, Old Bill grew
more and more bold, and, a north woodsman
would say, less and less moose-like. One of his
favorite tricks, when he happened to be crossing
some back roadway up in the hill country and
chanced to hear or scent humans approaching,
was to stop in his tracks, head erect, antlers
spreading into the air, and look toward the sound
or scent. Presently, perhaps, around the bend
in the road would come a man in a wagon, or two
women on foot. If it was the former, the horse
would probably get up on his hind legs, or start
backing, much to the discomforture of the driver,

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 91

which amused Bill greatly. If the horse showed
a proper degree of alarm, he would often take a
step or two forward, tossing his great antlers, and
then watch the driver try to turn around and go
the other way. If it was foot passengers he met,
he would raise one front hoof and paw the
ground, whereupon the humans would turn and
start rapidly in the opposite direction. Then
Bill would clump-clump, clump-clump after them
a way, to hear them scream. But if they hap-
pened to be wise, and didn’t run from him, but
stooped as if to pick up a stone, he would leap
the roadside wall with a great bound, and trot
away.

Old Bill spent a good bit of his time on the
former reservation, especially in winter, for then
Bill Snyder put out hay, when the snow was deep,
for him and for the dozen or more other moose
that now composed the herd, and there in deer
season, when the guns popped, he was safe from
annoyance. However, it took some vigilance
to keep the reservation free of poachers, and one
autumn Bill Snyder was asked by the owner to
secure a special deputy for the shooting season.

92 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Snyder bethought him of Tim Coakley, star first
baseman of the only professional team in the
county, who was just then loafing. Tim was six
foot one, tough as hickory, and reputed to be
afraid neither of man nor devil.

“ Sure,” said Tim, “ O7’ll come. The guy that
mistakes me for a deer’ll go to his own funeral.”

So, on the day before the season opened, Sny-
der led Tim up the mountain, and then took him
out into the deep cover to show him the likely
places to watch. But Snyder had a sneaking
idea that Old Bill and some of the other moose
might be around, so he left Tim in a little clear-
ing, and went on, alone, into the densest part of
the swamp to see if he could get a peep at them,
his pets and pride. He hadn’t gone very far
before he heard the voice of Tim calling frantic-
ally. Snyder turned and hurried back. As he
drew nearer, he heard not only his own name, but
various and sundry adjectives attached thereto
which are not proper for publication. The voice
seemed to be coming, also, from a greater height
above the ground than even the normal position
of Tim’s mouth.

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 93

Peering through the bushes, Snyder beheld the
giant first baseman of the Berkshire Tigers, the
dauntless hero who feared neither man nor devil,
astraddle the limb of a chestnut tree, which he
grasped with his arms as though it were his long-
lost sweetheart, while below him, horns almost
touching his dangling boots, stood Old Bill,
coughing and pawing the ground, and lowering
and then tossing up his fifty pounds or more of
pronged antlers.

Snyder emerged from the bushes, shouting
with laughter. Tim saw him and redoubled his
stream of adjectives.

“Hi, call off your blasted pet poodle,” he
shouted. “ You'll fine me two hundred and fifty
dollars if Oi shoot him, and he'll kill me if Oi
don’t, so’s it'll cost me three hundred dollars for
me funeral. Where do Oi get off, you blasted
old ——”

“Whoa, son!” Snyder laughed. “ You don’t
get off, apparently.”

“Say, this limb’s gettin’ sharp, Oi tell you.
Shoot the darn thing, quick, or Oi’ll fall off.”

“ Shoot a tame moose! ” cried Snyder.

94. ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

“Tame, your grandmother! Oh, yes, he’s real
tame, he is. He’s a dear little, gentle, tame dar-
lin’, Oi don’t think!”

Meanwhile Old Bill kept on pawing the ground
and coughing and tossing his great antlers. He
was thoroughly enjoying himself. So was Sny-
der. Tim was a suffering minority of one.

“ Well,” the warden remarked, after a moment
more, “ to stop your swearing, and save your soul
from perdition, Tim, here goes.”

He kicked up the mould, found a stone, and
tossed it at Old Bill, who suddenly sprang half
sideways six or eight f eet and vanished like smoke
into the dense brush.

Tim came down.

He rubbed his legs, he felt of himself as if to
make sure he was all there. Then a look of ex-
treme sheepishness spread over his face.

“ Say, Bill, for the love o’ Mike, don’t let this
get out!” he said.

“T won't tell,” Snyder answered, “but you
can’t trust Old Bill—he does love a joke.”

It was at the approach of the rutting season
the next year that Old Bill pulled off his most

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 95

spectacular stunt. No human could explain
just why he did it, and probably Bill couldn’t
himself. He had been getting more and more
restless for several days, wandering far afield
from the home browsing on the reservation, and
mulling over what he at last knew was the ap-
proach of the great crisis, when he would seriously
challenge the old bull, his father, for the su-
premacy of the herd. Twice, now, he had chal-
lenged, once as a mere boy of eighteen months,
once as a three-year-old, and both times he had
been defeated. But now it was different. He
knew his time had come. So he could not be
quiet. On the fateful morning, he was thirty
miles from the reservation, and with feet spread
wide apart and antlers threatening, stood a proud .
figure in the centre of the road down which Tom
Shook desired to drive with a load of milk, and
refused to budge. As Tom’s horse showed a
strong inclination to upset the milk and go home,
Tom decided the east road, which branched off
half a mile back, was, after all, the better way to
the village.

At noon Old Bill scared two children, fifteen

96 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

miles farther north, by trotting along the road
behind them.

At six o’clock, while it was still daylight, he
suddenly, and as unexpectedly as an earthquake
or the offer of a cocktail from William Jennings
Bryan, made his appearance on the streets of
Lenox. Lenox is not unused to Rolls-Royce
limousines on her elm-arched streets, nor has she
quite forgotten the aspect of fine horses, stepping
high with the flash of silver harness. But when
a big bull moose suddenly emerged from the
woods behind the French Renaissance “ cottage ”
of one of her wealthiest residents, and proceeded
up the macadam toward the post-office, Lenox
had considerable of a start. The village wireless
(an ancient and still unexplained mystery of the
science of transmission) crackled, and by the time
Bill reached the well-kept green in front of the
Episcopal church, there was a crowd already as-
sembled, most of them on the opposite side of the
fences, however.

Bill trotted up on the green, raised his head,
and surveyed the assemblage—which was grow-
ing momentarily—with some contempt, and just

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 97

abitofalarm. It was a trifle thick, even for him.
He tossed his antlers, and made a stamp or two
on the precious turf. The sexton rushed into the
church for the telephone,

Snyder was at his home, in the next town.
The sexton got him, his voice trembling with ex-
citement. ‘The moose was rampaging. The chil-
dren were in danger. Couldn’t he, the sexton,
shoot him? This was a bit too much, really—and
pawing up his lawn, too. Besides, he might dash
right into the crowd any minute and

“ Look here,” came the voice of Snyder, “ you
tell the crowd to go home, if they’re afraid. If
anything happens to that moose, I'll have you
arrested. Go out and chuck a stone at him.
Remember now—the fine’s two hundred and fifty
dollars!”

The sexton went back—as far as the church
door. Finally he edged down on the drive,
picked up a stone, and threw it.

“ Go ’way,” he said.

Old Bill made a break for the October Moun-
tain road. He had a brief glimpse of several
posteriors disappearing over fences on either side,

98 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and a horse climbing a tree. Presently he passed
a farmhouse on the road to the reservation. The
farmer called Snyder on the telephone.

“ There was a dog chasing him,” he reported.

“ Poor dog,” said Snyder.

But Bill wasn’t running from the dog. He
was running in answer to a challenge in his blood,
an instinct which told him that night he would
hear the cow moose call. Leaving the road, he
sprang up the wild, steep ravine of Roaring
Brook, leaving the baffled dog far behind, and
came crashing and swishing into the spruces and
hemlocks of the reservation swamp.

It was twilight now, with the hint of a moon
aglow in the east, and presently, from the other
side of the shadowy water of the little, hidden
pond, came the thrilling call of a cow. Old Bill
coughed, loudly, like a challenge, his head up, his
nostrils expanded. He heard an answer, off to
the left, and swished his antlers under the low-
hanging limbs as he made toward it. |

The big old bull was standing in an open glade,
awaiting him. ‘There were no preliminaries—
only a mutual charge, a crash of locking antlers,

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 99

the thud of hoofs, the strain of bone grating on
bone, the hiss of breath through straining nostrils.
Back and forth the battle went, even weight
against even weight, neck strength and endurance
counting. As long as the two pairs of antlers
were locked, the great animals swayed and
crashed against the bushes, the trees. Cedars six
inches in diameter were snapped off. The turf
was torn and churned into mire. Then the old
bull wrenched his horns free, drew back, and
charged once more. Bill was cleverer than of
old. He side stepped, like an agile boxer, and
reared on his hind legs. As the lowered head of
his opponent went past, down came his forefeet
like a pointed sledge-hammer on the other’s neck.
Blood spurted. The old moose wheeled with a
roar of rage and pain, and again Bill side
stepped, and this time gouged his side. Then,
once more, the great antlers locked,. the two
bodies, more than a ton of bone and muscle,
crashed against the trees, the panting breath, the
smothered roars, resounded through the still
forest.

At last the older neck gave way, the head went

100 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

sideways, then down, the great body, pried from
its balanced purchase in the miry loam, slipped,
toppled, and the vanquished leader of the herd
went down on his knees, with a bleeding head,
with a red wound slit across the neck, with a
gouged flank, beaten at last, uncrowned, laid low.

Bill wrenched his locked antlers free, butted
his opponent once more for full measure, stood
up and proclaimed his triumph, and then went
through the gathering night toward the call of the
cow.

But, as has been known to be the case with
humans, victory did not bring content to Old
Bill. Just at first it did, perhaps, as he piloted
. the herd, young bulls and all, around the winter
feeding with a new sense of dignity and im-
portance. But it wasn’t long before restlessness
came upon him, a strange restlessness that seemed
to come from some whisper of the north wind.
The north! What was to the north, anyway?
Bill, since that first escape from the reservation
and the terror of the smoking monster on the iron
road, had never crossed the tracks in all his wan-
derings. He had been south to Connecticut,

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 101

west to New York, east till he glimpsed the Con-
necticut River plains, but never north across
those shining rails where the monster thundered.
_But now, with two cows and a calf, he wandered
down the rocky slope to a wild ravine where it
was only a jump across the tracks to a rocky
slope on the other side, drove his charges, re-
luctant, across, and browsed north into a new
country. They pushed on, with good cover and
plentiful feeding for a day and a night, until, at
dawn, with the rising sun just flushing the snowy
summits and night still lying like pools of dark-
ness in the deep ravines, Old Bill stood upon a
bare, rocky, mountain shoulder and looked into
Vermont.

He saw a tumbled world of mountains, higher
than those behind him, forest clothed, and stretch-
ing, ever taller, into the far distance, blushed pink
at first by the rising sun, then misty blue and
beckoning. Were there other and bigger bulls
there to challenge? Was it the spell of the north
that was laid upon him, the colder north which is
the natural home of the moose, all the way to the
Arctic Circle? Was it instinct that made him

102 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

sniff the frozen wind, blowing down from those
far summits, or dreams that filled his dark, un-
blinking eyes? At any rate, he plunged down
the mountainside, nipping a few twigs of striped
maple for breakfast as he went, and followed the
banks of a brawling little river that was foaming
southward—up-stream.

That next summer, from a camp in the wilder-
ness of the lower Green Mountains, moose were
reported, the first reported in the State for many
years. There were scoffers who said it couldn’t
be so. But these moose were shy. Nobody was
chased up a tree, nobody was challenged on any
of the few rough roads which cross the range.
It was evident that Old Bill, penetrating deeper
into a wilderness where men were fewer, was him-
self lapsing into a condition of greater wildness.
That next autumn deer hunters up in the big
range to the east of Manchester, Vermont, the
beautiful valley village where the golfers revel,
reported “ a huge black deer, bigger than a cow.”
They fired at this strange “ deer,” but they didn’t
hit it. ‘That cow moose escaped, to call across the
brown mirror of some mountain tarn, pungent

THE ODYSSEY OF OLD BILL 103

with the odor of autumn leaves in the water, to
call for the chief of the herd, and to hear from the
opposite shore, or the rocky forest above her, the
answering coughs of Old Bill, and presently the
swish in the low-hanging branches of his great
pronged antlers as he came to his mate. Some-
where in those high, wild mountains, three thou-
sand, four thousand feet above the sea, Old Bill
goes browsing, up hill and down, thirty miles,
forty miles, on his long, powerful legs, between
sleep and sleep, no longer meeting men on his
journeys, nor wanting to, but avoiding them now,
the shyness, the alertness of the wilderness sink-
ing deeper and deeper into his consciousness, the
northward urge toward yet deeper forests, yet
wilder country, coming to him when the winds
are up and tearing southward with a race of cloud
and sting of sleet over the summit ledges. Will
it be the antlers of some rising young champion
‘in his own herd, or the broader horns of some
wilderness-bred bull of the great north ranges
that finally teaches him when his time of old age
iscome? The way is long, the dangers many, to
those free ranging herds above the St. Lawrence.
Old Bill may never get there. All one can say is
that his nostrils quiver to the keen north wind.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY

i aad was born with a price on her head.
Lucy doesn’t sound much like the name of
a fugitive from justice, of a vicious character
hunted for the legal reward. Nevertheless, Lucy
is what she came to be called by all the country-
side, no doubt just because Lucy is such a foolish
name for a wildcat. Lucy is a nice name for the
heroine of a poem by William Wordsworth, but
as the Christian appellation for twenty-five
pounds of gray-black and dirty white fur and
muscle and claws roaming the rocky, precipitous
slopes of one of the highest of the Berkshire Hills,
seeking what it may devour, the name has suf-
ficient incongruity to please the Yankee taste.
I hesitate a little to tell the entire story of
Lucy’s career, lest I be called a “ nature fakir.”

It is all true, but those who raise the cry of nature
104

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 106

faking will never believe anything true about
animals which goes contrary to what they them-
selves have seen, or the way in which the average
run of animals behave. Nevertheless, you cannot
always predict animal conduct from the average
run, any more than you can predict human con-
duct. There is more of the animal in humans
than we used to suppose (before 1914, for in-
stance), and there is more of the human in ani-
mals. Anyhow, I'll take a chance, and tell Lucy’s
story in defiance of the scoffers.

But first I wish I could take you into the coun-
try where Lucy was born and brought up. I
could, very easily, if you were here, and your
wind was good, for it isn’t more than a mile be-
hind my house—or, rather, above my house. You
may have been past the spot, indeed, purring
along in your motor, on your way to Stockbridge
and Lenox. But going past it and going to it
are quite different things. Leaping directly up
from the State highway is the steep wall of the
mountain, a long wall, or, rather, series of jutting
shoulders, stretching north and south for ten
miles or more, with the summit a mile behind

106 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

them, and beyond that more forests and scrub
land, and then a precipitous, wild drop into New
York State. This wall runs up for some distance
timbered heavily with birches and chestnuts and
other hard woods, and then enters a belt of fallen,
fern-covered boulders, with hemlocks wedged be-
tween, and, finally, the almost sheer precipices
which lead, in a series of steps, to the top of the
shoulder, where there is a forest of storm-dwarfed
pitch pines. In this forest herds of deer winter,
going up and down the mountain for water at the
springs below, and for feed when the snow is
lighter. On top of the ridge the snow is always
blown thin, and some food is available there in the
worst weather. Just under this ridge, at the
base of the precipices and among the fallen
boulders below them, are numerous little caves
or dens. Into these dens the fallen leaves drift.
They are more or less protected in winter, and
cool in summer. You might suppose it would be
a likely spot for wildcats.

It is.

For one thing, almost no people ever get there.
There is no trail except the dim paths used by

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 107

the deer, which are known only to a few hunters
and trappers. ‘The undergrowth is a dense mass
of laurel, through which progress is difficult and
even painful. Going my best, it takes me one
and a half hours to make the fifteen hundred foot
ascent to the top of the ridge. Now, the wildcat
is, after all, a cat, and you know that the most
domestic of pussies seldom cares for human
society as such. It hangs around you because
you feed it. (Of course, if you have a cat, you
won't admit this—your cat is an exception!)
It prefers to mind its own business, and often
resents interference. The wildcat has these
traits raised to the nth power. Furtive, sly,
aloof, it wants to be let alone, to avoid contact
with men, to go its own way. Though often
heard yowling in the woods at night—it has a
blood-curdling yell, a sort of meow—yang-yang-
yang—it is seldom seen, and when it is seen, it is
generally alone, sneaking along by itself, the
very epitome of wild self-sufficiency. Hence, if
a mother cat wished to retire from all danger of
contact with man and other disturbing things, she
could, in our country, hardly pick a better place

108 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

than the dens amid the boulders far up on the
steep mountain shoulder, with a half mile of
trackless laurel and dense forest below, and two
hundred feet of precipice above, and all around,
for concealment, the dense hemlocks, the ferns
which drape the rocks, the dead, fallen tree
trunks, the caked masses of last year’s leaves still
upheld on the fallen limbs which always litter a
virgin wood, making little thatched roofs under
which to creep.

This is the spot that Lucy’s mother chose late
one winter for her home, running far from the
male cat who was Lucy’s father, because the male
wildcat is anything but a gentleman and has a
fondness for killing his offspring after they are
born, if he can find them when their mother is out
foraging. If the mother is at home, he is wise
enough to leave them alone! Lwucy’s mother,
however, had:no intention of bringing her family
into the world where father would be likely to
find them. She ran away from him ten miles,
crossed a river on the ice, a swamp on the has-
socks, and went up the mountain till she came to
the fallen boulders. There, in a nice warm den,

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 109

lined with dead leaves, under an overhanging
rock and facing to the southward, she decided to
establish her home, and there Lucy and three
brothers and sisters were ultimately born.

There was no great family resemblance be-
tween them. Lucy was a decided brunette, very
dark, which is the accepted type of beauty among
wildeats, while her two sisters were gray and
dirty brown, and her brother was more or less
mottled, half-way between. Had you come upon
them playing in front of their “ door,” however,
on a warm spring day, while mother lay on her
side, paws lazily outstretched, purring content-
edly (but with one ear up and both eyes watch-
ful), you would have said it was a pretty picture
they made, and you might have called, “ Come,
kitty, kitty ”—and then beat it, as mother coiled
with a spitting snarl, and leaped off the rock!

But, like Wordsworth’s Lucy, few knew, and
few could know, how this Lucy grew, beside ways
even less trodden than those “ beside the springs
of Dove.” In fact, none knew. Only twice that
summer did any human being come up past the
den, and on both occasions Lucy’s mother heard

110 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

them coming, and had the kittens far out of sight.
A stray dog or two, to be sure, trailed her up the
mountain after she had been down the slope and
across the road into the swamp stalking pheas-
ants. But a lone dog, without a hunter behind
him, had no terrors for her. She did not court
trouble, to be sure, relying on speed to escape it.
But if she was forced to fight, she knew how, and
if the dog got away, he was a sadder and a wiser
pup. So Lucy grew, unmolested, with her
brother and sisters, and learned the needed les-
sons of life in the vocational school at first con-
ducted by her mother, and later by that still more
. ancient schoolmistress, Dame Nature.

The children were brought up, in fact, much
like domestic kittens, except they were taught to
avoid human beings, to keep out of sight of all
strange things, to hide from strange noises. But
even domestic kittens are thus brought up if their
mother has gone wild. They were taught to fight
in play, amid the dead leaves in front of the den,
and to bare their claws and strike quick and hard
when the mother cat pretended to resent their
attempts to play with her, and made lightning

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 111

dabs at them with her powerful paw. They were
taught to climb a tree, and to conceal themselves
amid the branches. They were taught, by watch-
ing their mother, how to lie out on a fallen log
across the deep brown pool in the brook at the
foot of the slope, motionless as a statue, and make
a sudden plunge with one paw, claws out and
curled upward, as a trout came past, catching it
‘under the belly and tossing it to the bank. They
learned, too, how to creep up on partridges sitting
on their nests, or sleeping; how to crouch behind
a bush along the rabbit paths and wait patiently
till a cottontail came by, or even, in favorable
spots, how to lie out along a limb over the path
and drop on the rabbit from above. They learned
how to run through the forest, too, as well as
how to wait, always zigzagging, nose near the
ground, ready to pounce on any deer-mouse that
might be there. At night, as their mother went
hunting through the woods, she would every now
and then raise her head and emit the startling,
raspy, snarling yell—meow—yang-yang-yang—
which often caused some sleepy animal or bird to
start in fright and betray its hiding place. Lucy

112 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and her brother and sisters practiced this yell,
rather feebly at first, but with growing confidence
and volume. AIl these things they learned first
from watching their mother, and then from prac-
tice, after their mother drove them with cuffs
from the maternal food supply and made them
hunt for themselves.

It was considerably after the self-sustaining
point had been reached that they saw their mother
do a strange thing. It was early morning, not
yet sun-up, and in the half light you couldn’t see
far through the night mists which still enveloped
the mountain at the altitude of the den. The
kittens were all asleep, and so was the mother cat,
having just come in weary and also hungry, after
a long trip to the plain for food, a trip which was
unrewarded by anything satisfying to a healthy
appetite. The previous winter had been a hard
one, with deep snow and extreme cold. As a
result, the partridges and pheasants were few, the
rabbits had been largely killed off by great horned
owls and goshawks which descended from the
north, and now the picking for wildcat was pretty
poor. Indeed, the mother cat that night had

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUOY 118

been so hungry that twice she had attempted to
raid a hen yard, being driven off by dogs both
times. Now she suddenly started up from her
first sleep, ears pricked up, white teeth just show-
ing, yellow-green eyes intense. Her action
roused the kittens, who also started up. On soft
feet the mother cat went to the entrance of the
den, the kittens following.

Something was coming down the precipice
above. It swished through the bushes like a
deer, and a second later they all caught the deer
smell, though, of course, by comparison ‘with a
dog or fox, their powers of smell were slight.
But it was evidently a small deer, from the sound
it made. Even at that, the kittens were surprised
to see their mother sneak one paw out, then an-
other paw out, till she glided almost like a snake
up over the top of the boulder above the den, and
from that to another, and so to another, till she
was crouched directly over the deer trail down
the mountain. She had never hunted a deer be-
fore, and the kittens knew it was because she
dreaded those terribly sharp hoofs, and the
sharper horns of the buck.

114 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Scarcely had, she reached her post over the
trail than a fawn appeared, a bit more than half
grown, trotting and leaping down the dim game
trail, evidently seeking his mother. As he drew
near the old cat, his nose told him there was
danger, and he suddenly reared, and then swerved
toward the thicker bushes. But with a yowl the
cat sprang far out from the rock, and landed
squarely on his shoulder. The deer gave a
frightened bellow and began to rear and plunge
as he ran, endeavoring to batter the cat off his
neck by diving sideways against trees. The cat,
however, with incredible speed and agility, shifted
from one side of his back to the other, keeping
her forepaws around his neck, claws sunk in
deep, and tearing with her powerful, razor-like
teeth. The kittens saw her disappear down the
mountain on her wild ride, and as fast as they
could, they scampered after.

It was down in the chestnuts that they found
her. The fawn had tripped and fallen, and that
gave her the chance to get in a death grab at a
vital artery. The little deer was breathing its
last. The mother cat snarled and cuffed her

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 115

hungry kittens away as they came eagerly up to
the meat, but presently she let them feed, too, and
all that day, their little stuffed bellies as round
as balloons, they slept in the sun at the mouth of
their den, their mother sleeping beside them.
Once or twice they woke up and purred. Life
is certainly worth while when you are filled up on
young, tender venison!

The kittens all grew rapidly, but Lucy fastest
of all. She was destined to be a big cat, with
dark fur, almost black, which thickened up as the
frosty. autumn nights came on, till she was worth
to the hunter not only five dollars for the bounty,
but another ten for her skin. Having no means
of knowing this, however, Lucy was not vain.
But she shared with her brother and sisters a
memory of venison that made her, and them, rash
with the rashness of youth. Their mother had
departed now, they did not know where. They
had attempted to follow, but she had turned, with
a spit and a bristle of fur, and driven them back.
The truth is, probably, she was weary of maternal
cares for a time, and wanted to be rid of them,
now they were large enough to shift for them-

116 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

selves. But they stayed on together in the old
den, knowing no other home, and hunted the
mountain, sometimes scattered, sometimes in a
pack, and often going hungry for all their efforts.
Hence it was that Lucy and her brother, coming
upon a fawn one day apart from its mother,
sprang at it without hesitating. The brother
missed it, but Lucy succeeded in landing on its
‘back. It dove madly into the scrub, with the
other cat at its heels, and almost before Lucy
knew what was happening she was knocked from
its shoulder by a terrific blow. Even as she
landed, she saw her brother rise in the air and go
spinning into the bushes as the mother doe caught
him with her hind heels. Two sore and sick cats
retired to the den and nursed their wounds for
several days, before they were fit for hunting
again. Experience is a hard teacher, but it had
taught them not to tackle a small deer unless sure
that it is quite alone.

It was in December, when all four of them
were hunting together, that they did come upon
a young doe, hardly more than a fawn, quite
alone. It was amid the pitch pines on the top of

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 117

the ridge above the den. All that day the cats
had heard distant gunshots, both from the
swamps on the plain below, and even from the
mountainside, and had noticed that the deer were
breaking up the slope in unusual numbers. But
they didn’t know it was the opening day of the
deer hunting season. They only knew the deer
were up on the mountain in great numbers by mid
afternoon. On discovering the little doe, they
tried their best to stalk it close enough to make
a sure spring, but the deer was too quick for
them, and bolted, over the ledge. The four cats
bounded in full pursuit.

Down went the deer, over the precipitous
rocks, twenty feet at a jump, the cats, with Lucy
in the lead, only a jump or two behind. Below
the ledges came the belt of tumbled, fallen
boulders and rock fragments, and here the doe
had a harder time, as she had to work between the
rocks, while the cats could leap from top to top.
Lucy almost had her once. In fact, her claws
did draw blood from the deer’s hind quarters as
she sprang from behind. But the deer just got
through, and broke into the dense laurel. Here

118 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

she could spring over, when the cats had to work
under, and she increased her lead. Once below
the laurel, into the more open woods, she rapidly
left the four pursuers behind.

Lucy was the last to give up the chase, but
finally she turned back, too, when the terrified
deer broke out of the woods into an open field
behind a house, and made her way back up the
mountain, busily looking: for mouse tracks in the
light snow as she went. If one couldn’t have a
deer, a mouse would do! Lucy was nothing if
not philosophical.

But, as it turned out, there was a greater
tragedy lurking in this exploit than the mere loss
of a venison supper. The craftiest hunter and
trapper in all that section of the country had been
hidden in a leaf blind beside a deer trail at the
base of the upper ledges, thinking that the deer
frightened by the hunters in the swamps below
would be coming up this way. Two or three had
passed him, but he was waiting for a fat buck, and
didn’t shoot. He had heard the racket, then the
little doe came plunging over the ledges, and had
seen her go by, just out of gunshot, with the four

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 119

cats in full pursuit. Then he had waited
patiently, and he had seen the four cats come
back, first one gray one, then a gray and a mottled
one, then Lucy herself, so dark and fine furred
that his finger itched on the trigger. None of
them, however, got near enough for a shot. They
were headed, of course, for their den, some dis-
tance off around a point. As sly as they, this
hunter watched them disappear, nor did he at-
tempt to follow. Instead, he went down the
mountain as darkness gathered, and got down his
rusty steel traps from their peg in the wood-
shed.

He didn’t tell anybody what he had seen, for
two reasons. The first reason was that he didn’t
want anybody else to get those cats; the second
reason was that he felt sure nobody would believe
him, it being an accepted fact that wildcats hunt
alone, not in packs, and never chase deer, anyhow.
But he had seen what he had seen, just the same.

He didn’t set his traps at once. Instead, he
waited till deer hunting week was over, and then
he went fishing through the ice. When he had
accumulated several pickerel, he journeyed up

120 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the mountain with his traps, picked up the cat
tracks in the snow, and close to their ranging
trails he set his fish-baited steel jaws. Then he
went down the mountain again, his pale blue eyes
seeing far through the winter woods and taking
in details that would quite escape your attention
or mine, or reading records on the snow—the
book he knew best.

Now, Lucy and her brother and sisters loved
fish above all other food, just as a domestic cat
does. Their noses might not be keen on a scent,
as a dog’s nose is, but they could certainly smell
fish a long way off. Waking from her doze that
afternoon, Lucy sniffed the frosty air and emitted
a sharp, excited meow. The other three cats
awoke, too, and they also sniffed and grew ex-
cited. Out of the den all four of them went, and
headed straight for the odor. Of course, if it
had been Big Reddy, the fox who lived down near
the plains below, who had smelled some unex-
pected delicacy in the neighborhood, he wouldn’t
have made directly for it at all. He would have
trotted in a big circle all around the smell, looking
for the joker. He would have come, at some

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUOY 121

point in the circle, upon the tracks of the man
who took the bait in, and that would instantly
have intensified his suspicion. He would prob-
ably have followed down these tracks, and at
some bush or other the trapper’s carelessness
would have allowed the bait to touch a twig and
the fox would have connected the bait smell with
the man track. That would have made him even
more suspicious, and if, ultimately, he found the
bait at the end of the man track, no matter how
hungry he might be, the chances are Big Reddy
would turn away. Hence the adjective “ foxy.”
But Lucy and her tribe had no such keenness of
nose, nor keenness of reasoning powers. Fish
meant food—that was the extent of their logic—
which is all right so far as it goes. With a snarl
and a cuff, Lucy drove away her brother and
pounced at one fish. The other sisters each
sprang for the fish they spotted.

An instant later there was a terrific yowling
and screaming and thrashing of bodies.

Lucy, because of her incredible speed of action,
had twitched up her paw as she felt it descend on
something cold and metallic, and the jaws of the

122 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

trap had got her by one toe only. With a snarl
and a lunge, she tore herself free, and diving into
the thick bushes, snarling with pain and anger,
began indignantly to lick the bleeding stub of
her amputated toe and claw. The brother, cuffed
away at first, now reaped the reward of meekness,
and ate the fish in safety. But the other two cats,
each caught fast in a trap, were howling and
plunging, trying to wrench themselves free by
main strength. The log drags, to which the traps
were fastened, were pulled about, till they caught
in the bushes and held fast. The snow was
churned up. The lonely forest resounded to
their cries. But all their efforts availed them
nothing. Their heartless brother sneaked around
and ate their fish, too.

The next morning Lucy, nursing her wounded
paw in the den, heard two gunshots not far away,
and pushed deeper into the shadows, snarling at
her brother. There were no sounds from the
trapped sisters after that. But presently there
was the smell of fish again. The brother, re-
membering only his feast of yesterday, sallied
forth. But Lucy was, like Peter’s wife’s mother,

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 123

sick of a fever, and lay still, licking her paw.
Presently she heard her brother screaming, but
still she did not budge. She slept fitfully that
day, his cries now and again awaking her, and at
nightfall felt a little better, and very hungry, for
it had been two days now since she had tasted
food. The fish smell was still in the air. She
went forth, her foot bleeding again as the crusty
snow cut it, and ate first the fish at her brother’s
trap. Then she sniffed. ‘There was more some-
where about. But Lucy was capable of learn-
ing by experience. She approached it warily.
The thing which had hurt her before had been on
the ground almost under the fish. The fish was
placed at the base of a rock. Lucy climbed up.
on the rock, lay flat on her belly, and cautiously
lowered her well paw down, down, till one claw
caught in the fish, and she could hook it up.
Seizing it in her mouth, she went back to the den
with it hastily, and ate it there at her leisure.
Then she slept.

She was waked by a single shot, and of course
became instantly alert. This time her senses told
her, presently, that danger was approaching, and

124 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

gliding out of the den in the dim morning light,
for the sun was not yet up, she sneaked like a
ghost over the snow, and between the rocks, up
the precipices above. After a time, crouched in
a thicket on the topmost ledge, she peered back
and saw one of the feared and hated race of men
standing alert near the mouth of the den, and
then coming on as if to follow up her trail. She
turned once more and headed through the brush
toward the summit of the mountain. She found
a warm spot on the south side of a rock, and slept
all day in the sun, letting her paw heal, and when
night came she hunted, but in vain. The next
day instinct led her back to the old den.

As she came once more to the top of the ridge,
the fish smell greeted her. This time the fish
was close to the den, and at the base of a straight
faced rock too high to reach down from above to
the fish. But Lucy had other resources. She
climbed a smallish hemlock, crept cautiously out
on a lower branch till it sagged far down with
her weight, and again sneaked up the fish on her
claw. She nearly fell into the trap, to be sure,
but managed to land on her feet at a safe dis-

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 125

tance. Then she took her meal back up the
ledge, having no desire to be wakened by a gun
barrel poked into the den.

Now, our trapper friend, having already three
cats to show by way of proof, had told his story
at last (and collected his bounty), and he didn’t
hesitate to add as new embellishment the tale of
the fourth cat, Lucy, who could steal bait out of
a trap, and was minus a toe on her off front paw,
thanks to her first lesson. Naturally, since traps
seemed of no avail, somebody suggested a hunt.
That was how it happened that as Lucy was re-
turning one morning from pheasant. hunting
down in the young pine thickets at the base of the
mountain, taking the stone wall for a path, as it
was easier going, she heard suddenly the deep,
purposeful baying of two hounds on her trail.

Well, if the dogs were after her, they would
have considerable of a jaunt! Lucy’s idea of
getting away from a dog was simply to run and
run till she had gone so far the dog gave up in
despair. So now she headed straight up the
mountain, on over the ledges, through the scrub
above, over the bare, wind-swept summit cone,

126 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

down the other side, across the sunny fields of the
table-land hamlet which lies up there behind the
dome of the big mountain, and, avoiding the few
scattered farms, into the dense woods on the far-
ther side. These, however, were no ordinary
dogs, she began to realize. ‘They weren’t mere
stray hunters; they were trained, hard-working
hounds. Ever they came baying steadily on her
trail, not getting dangerously close yet, but cer-
tainly not dropping behind. Lucy rested. She
was weary, and her paw hurt her, for it wasn’t
yet completely healed, nor the sickness all gone
from her. Her rest let the dogs up too close for
comfort. She plunged quickly down the cliffs
ahead of her, where they drop into New York
State, the dogs now in full cry behind, for one of
them had caught sight of her.

Lucy was going it blind now—she was in a
spot where she had never been before. Leaping
along in a deep gorge beside a brook, the dogs
almost at her heels, she suddenly found herself
at the jumping-off place. The brook simply slid
over a lip of rock and plunged straight down
sixty feet! There was no turning back, for the

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 127

only way back was up the gorge. Lucy didn’t
want to fight two dogs. She saw a tree, one of
three or four pine trees down here beside the
brook, growing close to the face of the cliff above

_her, and rising fifty feet without a limb. Just
as the first dog was almost on her, she sprang for
this tree, and went up the trunk just as you’ve
seen your cat go up a tree when the neighbor’s
dog came into the yard.

This was exactly what the hounds expected.
Having treed their quarry, they began to bark
excited signals to the hunters who were coming
on behind (a long way behind, by now), and to
jump around the base of the trunk.

But Lucy kept on up into the branches. Once
in their protection, she looked about her. Higher
up a branch leaned out and almost touched the
cliff face. Lucy went up to it, out along it, and
measured the distance to the little ledge she saw
on the cliff face. Then she sprang. ‘The dogs,
seventy-five feet below, didn’t see her spring, nor
hear her soft, padded paws land on the ledge.
From this ledge a slanting crevice of the rock,
or small chimney as a mountaineer would call it,

128 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

led up another thirty feet to the top of the preci-
Pice. Lucy got into this crevice, and with the
help of the frozen moss and mould lodged in it,
worked her way to the top. There she crouched
a moment, looking over the rim with her yellow-
green eyes at the dogs below, and then slipped
quietly and easily into the forest.

When the hunters came, they found the dogs
still baying the tree. But there was no wildcat
in the branches. After a while, they worked
around to the top of the cliff, and found out how
she escaped. But it was too late to put the dogs
on the trail again. They were a dozen miles
from home, with a mountain between.

After that, Lucy was a famous character.

Being a famous character has its penalties,
especially when you’ve one toe missing and no-
body can mistake your tracks. It was that miss-
ing toe which betrayed to Solon Littleton the fact
that it was Lucy who came into his chicken yard
and killed two of his pet Rhode Island Reds.
That was in February, after two weeks of tremen-
dous cold and heavy snow. Lucy was desper-
ately hungry. Solon had a dog, too, but the dog

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 129

was sleeping inside. As soon in the morning as
the theft was discovered, however, Solon put the
dog on the tracks, and told him to go to it.
Teddy was a big hound dog, that had probably
started out in life to be a fox hound, but had
changed its mind too late for a really successful
outcome, and tried to be a pointer—or a bulldog
(the matter was always in dispute between Solon
and his neighbors). ‘The hound started off on
the tracks, but Solon delayed following till his
wife had given him his coffee and doughnuts (the
latter broken by Solon meditatively, and the
pieces dipped into the former, before eating).
Meanwhile Lucy was not a great way off—
perhaps half a mile down in the swamp pines,
finishing up her own breakfast and raising a
mighty purr of thanksgiving therefor. The bay-
ing of one hound didn’t greatly disturb her, and
she let him get rather near before she started up.
But she had reckoned without due consideration
of the depth of the snow and the superior length
of this dog’s legs. She got across the road all
right, on her way to the mountain cliffs (her in-
stinctive refuge), but before she could make the

130 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

woods above the high pasture she realized that the
dog would be up to her. There was no available
tree—only a big, cleft boulder, overhung with a
wild grape-vine. It was a case of having to fight,
and she dove under the grape-vine, into the cleft
of the rock, where she turned at bay and waited
her pursuer.

The dog came crashing and baying in under
the vine, and instantly Lucy was on his back.
‘There was hardly room in that restricted cleft for
him to turn around, though Lucy could double
herself in it without trouble. She had him ai
this initial disadvantage, and she had, beside, the
great advantage of her own superior speed of
attack in combat. Her game was to keep on top
of him, clawing at his eyes and throat, and biting
at his head, while he tried frantically to get her
down, to throw her for a bite at her throat. He
couldn’t do it, and it was already a badly used up
dog that was fighting for his life now in behind
the grape-vine when Solon, guided by the yowls
and spits and bays of the combat, came plunging
up the pasture through the snow, calling frantic-
ally to the dog to come out.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 131

When he drew near, Solon hesitated about
drawing nearer. The sounds issuing from the
cleft were not reassuring, even to a man with a
gun, and Solon was not a hunter, anyhow. But
he did love his Rhode Island Reds, and he did
rather care for his dog, and he did relish five
dollars, which was the bounty on cats. So finally
he approached close to the opening, and peered
in, gun thrust forward, cocked. But he couldn’t
tell which was dog and which was wildcat—or
not for long enough to fire. Again he yelled at
his dog. The dog tried to back out, but the grape-
vine caught him. ‘The cat was following him up,
striking at his face, but protected from the gun
by his body. It was only at that instant that
Lucy really became aware of Solon, and sud-
denly she seemed to rise right through the grape-
vine, coming straight at Solon’s head. He
emitted a yell that would have done credit to
Lucy herself, and jumped to one side. At the
same instant the gun went off. The flame singed
Lucy’s coat, but did her no other harm. She
missed Solon by about the same margin as he
missed her, landed on the snow, whirled like a

132 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

flash of light, and was off up the hill. The poor
dog tried to follow—he was game, whatever his
breed—but it wasn’t in him any more. Pres-
ently he rejoined his master at the bottom of the
pasture, and the two of them went limply
home.

Solon, naturally, never told a soul but his wife
about this incident. Yet, as such things happen,
it mysteriously became known. Lucy’s fame
rose another notch—and Solon set up the hard
cider.

About that time Lucy moved. She wished to
bring up her kittens in a less dangerous spot,
where the sins of the parent wouldn’t be visited
upon them, and where, also, their father wouldn’t
be fussing around. So she trotted in the night
far across the river into the hills to the east, where
there was no big mountain such as she had left,
but miles of scrubby woods and rocks and small
cliffs full of dens, and only a few scattered farms
and small, upland hamlets, ruins of what a
hundred years ago had been prosperous vil-
lages.

Here Lucy spent a happy and contented sum-

ERARLES LIVINGSTON Ogee |

LUCY CUFFED THE KITTENS BACK OUT OF SIGHT AND SNEAKED OUT OF THE DEN

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 133

mer, and reared a fine family. Only once was
she disturbed. ‘That was when Bill Snyder, the
game warden, and his wife came up to camp on
Loon Pond, not far from her den. The game
warden was rather given to snooping around, and
one evening he and Mrs. Snyder walked up an
old logging road which led perilously close to
Lucy’s abode. Lucy cuffed the kittens back out
of sight, and sneaked out of the den. Whoever,
whatever, it was passing, she proposed to be ready
for it. Seeing Bill and Mrs. Snyder on the old
road, she crept softly along in the bushes just
behind them, making no sound, alert, watchful.
Once they paused, spoke, and Bill turned as if to
come toward her. At that she snarled, and Mrs.
Snyder, in the dusking woods, caught the twin
gleams of her yellow-green eyes.

Then Mrs. Snyder screamed. Both humans
began to walk toward the open, at a considerably
accelerated pace. Lucy sneaked along, just be-
hind, and in the bushes. Again, looking over her
shoulder, Mrs. Snyder caught the glint of Lucy’s
eyes. Lucy had to trot after that.

At the edge of the field she stopped and

134 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

watched to make sure that the humans were
really going away. Then she returned to her
kittens.

(Bill told somebody later that he wanted to
investigate, but his wife was afraid.)

The hunting was so good that summer that
Lucy had no occasion to risk a chicken raid, or to
try again the dubious experiment of tackling a
fawn. There were plenty of rabbits, grouse,
mice, and other small things, and after she left
her kittens and the winter colds came on, Lucy
was stout and sleek, with a fine, thick coat. But
with the accumulation of the snow, the burrowing
in of the woodchucks, and, more or less, of the
mice, the departure of many of the birds, and the
keen competition with the craftier foxes for the
game that remained, Lucy found the pickings
scanty again, and began to move about. She
grew bold once more, and twice raided chicken
yards, leaving her telltale track in the snow.
Traps began to ‘be set for her once again, and
hunts were organized; but she managed to escape
the traps, and she outran the dogs, and the end
of the winter found her ready to rear a second

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 135

family in a big, hollow fallen hemlock up a steep
ravine in the back hill country, not far from a
tumbledown farm or two.

No one suspected Lucy’s presence there, least
of all old man Parmalee, who left most of the
farming to his son, but still went out for the cows
every night, to the pasture which led up the slope
and met the ravine woods where Lucy had placed
her den. It was a chilly May evening, later than
his usual time, when old man Parmalee, waking
from a doze, realized that he hadn’t been for the
cows, doubtless because his son and daughter-in-
law hadn’t got back from the village to remind
him of his duties. He got up hastily, looked for
a raincoat, couldn’t find one, and seized a rag rug
from the floor, wrapping it around his aged
shoulders and hurrying forth.

To his surprise, the cows were not at the bars.
No telling what that old Jersey will do, he
thought, when you wait too long—probably led
the rest up the hill. Well, he’d get a scolding
sure if he didn’t go fetch ’em down. So he
plodded up the slope, the rain dripping from the
rug on his shoulders; and, finding hoof prints by

136 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the ravine, into which the water had not yet
settled, knew the cows had just gone up there.
He trudged on, into the dimness of the wet woods,
calling, “‘ Coo-boss, coo-boss,”’ over and over.

He had gone, it seemed to him, a long way, and
was nearing the old fallen hemlock which he re-
membered from other years, when he heard a
sudden snarl which froze his blood,—then he saw
the green flash of two eyes, and made out a dim
form stalking toward him. Old man Parmalee’s
legs grew miraculously twenty years younger.
He turned and fled, down the ravine, tripping on
roots, catching at trees with his hands to steady
himself, forgetting entirely his rug, which flew
off behind, forgetting the cows, forgetting every-
thing but home.

He panted down the pasture, not daring to
look behind, and almost fell into the dooryard,
where his son and daughter-in-law were just
getting out of the buggy.

“ What the

“Father, what’s the .

“ Wildcat—chased me—up the ravine—came
right at me ——” the old man panted.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 137

His son roared with unseemly mirth, but the
woman, with a look of alarm, felt of the old man’s
wet back, and led him into the house.

“You'll feel better soon,” she said.

Then she glanced at the floor.

“Why, where’s the red and blue rug? ”

“ Tarnation—I wore it—couldn’t find my old
coat—must ’a’ dropped it when the cat chased
me—Martha made that rug, too. Tarnation, my
old army pants was the blue in it.”

“'Where’s the cows?” said young Parmalee,
brusquely.

The old man gestured feebly. His legs had
grown old again now, and were trembling.

“Up the ravine,” he said. ‘“‘ You'll hev to go
get ’em. I won't. The cat’s by that old fell-
down hemlock. If you see my rug, bring it
back.”

“ Hang your old rug,” said his son, crossly,
stamping out.

Fifteen minutes later he also returned, pant-
ing.

“Dyer git my rug?” the old man asked.
“ Djer git all the cows—the old Jersey, too?”

188 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Young Parmalee gasped for breath. “I
never see such a big cat!” he finally ex-
claimed.

“ Believe me now, do yer?” the old man
cackled. “ But why didn’t yer pick up my rug?”
He spoke plaintively, but there was the hint of a
twinkle in his watery blue eyes.

At ten o’clock the cows came back to the bars
and woke the family up. It was after eleven
before they were milked, and young Parmalee
back in bed again. He retired with anything but
kindly feelings toward Lucy.

The cows were not turned out the next morn-
ing, but early the second morning Lucy, return-
ing to the den, heard suspicious sounds in the
pasture, drawing nearer. She roused the kittens,
drove them out of their warm, dead-leaf and
wood-mould bed in the log, and began leading
them rapidly up the rocks. But the dogs be-
hind moved more rapidly. They picked up the
fresh scent at the den, and suddenly their deep,
rather mournful, slow baying (not the quick, ex-
cited baying they use on a fox track) told her
they were on her heels. At the top of the hill

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 139

they were almost on her. She cuffed the three
kittens under a rock, and turned to fight. Alone,
she could have escaped, no doubt. At any rate,
she had more than once in the past. But now she
had her kittens to defend. There were two dogs,
one a bit ahead of the other. As he drew near,
she sprang, landing on his back, and had gouged
his eye and torn both ears before the other hound
closed in. Even the two of them, however, had
all they could manage, and a bit more. Lucy was
alive at both ends, and contrived to fight with her
powerful hind legs into the face of one dog, while
she rode the other. Clutch after frantic clutch
by the hounds were rewarded only with mouth-
fuls of fur, and a tearing scratch in the face.
The three of them rolled and fought and barked
and screamed and snarled and spit down the
rocks, till the heads and shoulders of two men ap-’
peared, coming from below, and a sudden shot
rang out, and Lucy rose convulsively and fell
limp between the dogs, which the men grabbed by
the collars and pulled away.

The owner of the dogs examined her, rolling
her over with his foot.

140 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

“ By gum, it’s Lucy!” he exclaimed. ‘“ Well,
she lived up to her reputation to the end.”

The battered dogs were sniffing up the trail
again now, and barking at the crevice where the
kittens had crept in. The men pulled them off,
some way to one side, and waited. Presently the
kittens came creeping out. They were pretty
little things, and meowed plaintively for their
mother.

“ There’s fifteen dollars more,” said the hunter
to young Parmalee. ‘ You take the light one,
I'll take the dark. We'll let the dogs run the
third.” |

They fired, and two kittens fell. The third,
with a frightened meow, scampered up the rocks
and made for a tree.

“ Go to it,” said the hunter to his dogs.

“Hold on!” exclaimed Parmalee. “Call ’em
back.”

The man called, getting them to return with
difficulty. “What’s the big idea? ” he demanded.
** Five bucks is five bucks, ain’t it?”

“T’m satisfied, that’s all,” Parmalee retorted.
“The old cat chased father and me the other

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LUCY 141

night, and fought two dogs this morning, all for
those kittens. Let one of ’em live, I say.” °

The other man shrugged his shoulders. ‘“‘ It’s
your land,” he said. ‘“ But they’re bad animals,
and five dollars is 5

“The skin’ll be worth more next winter, when
the cat’s growed,” Parmalee soothed him.
“ Better take your pups home now and patch
’em up.”

Parmalee picked up the two dead kittens,
stroking their warm fur with his hand. The
hunter slung Lucy over his shoulder.

“Twenty-eight pounds, if she’s an ounce,” he
said.

The dogs, with their bleeding muzzles, sniffed
at her limply dangling tail as they all descended
the pasture.

CHAPTER V

GENERAL JIM

IM cracked his shell in a nest up in the tip of
an old pine tree in the big swamp, and his
‘first glimpse of the world was a vision of tree
tops and blue sky. A baby bird, when you come
to think of it, has considerable the better of a
woodchuck, let us say, in the matter of environ-
mental influences. That may be why birds are
more attractive. But Jim, and his brother Jim
and his sister Jim (why are crows always named
Jim?) did not enjoy their Peter Pan-nish abode
very long. The reason was that young Tom
Harris knew a man who said he’d like a pet crow,
and Tom assumed that, of course, he’d like three
pet crows three times as much, so when Tom saw
the nest in the swamp and heard the three babies
crying up aloft for their dinner, as only baby
crows can cry, he scurried home for a bag and a

long string, returned clad in overalls (Tom was
142

GENERAL JIM 143

mindful of an unreasonable maternal objection to
pitch on the pants), and climbed the tree. This
was a matter of no small labor, and after he had
secured the three baby birds it was no less a job
to lower the bag without injury, through the
branches to the ground. He got them safely
down, however, and carried them in triumph to
the man who, in a careless moment, had expressed
a desire for a pet crow.

He was a big man, with a big laugh, a big gar-
den, a big dog, a big small son, and a big heart.
The only thing little about him was his house,
and that was a delightful old farmhouse between
country road and garden, with the woods beyond.
He had quite forgotten that he wanted a crow,
but when he saw the contents of Tom’s bag, he
remembered that he wanted three. So that was
how Jim and Jim and Jim found themselves,
after their distressing adventure, in a new home
at the bottom of a barrel, with a netting over the
top, so neither cat nor dog could molest them.
Tom and the big man’s big small son were out in
the garden digging up worms and grubs to stop
their clamor.

144 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Nothing, however, can stop the clamor of a
hungry little crow. You dangle a nice fat grub
in front of him, and he opens a yawning cavity
of mouth and says, in a raucous, strident, im-
patient tone,“ Caw!” ‘Then you drop the grub in
his mouth, and he keeps right on cawing, but swal- -
lowing at the same time, so that it sounds some-
thing like this—‘‘ Caw-w-obble, obble, obble.”
As soon as the grub is down, his mouth opens
again and he crossly insists on more.

But the big man was wise. He knew that if
you give a baby crow all it wants to eat, it will
gorge itself into an untimely grave. So Jim and
Jim and Jim were taught to leave the table hun-
gry, as it were, and they throve on this involun-
tary self-denial. Soon a perch had to be put in
half-way up the barrel, and before very long they
were all three up on the rim, and then down on
the ground, and the big man’s son expected to
see them fly away.

But they didn’t fly away, not even after they
had taught themselves to take the air. The big
man’s wife sometimes wished, perhaps, that they
would, but they didn’t. Sometimes they sailed

GENERAL JIM 145

out over the fields and woods, but they always
came back, especially when wild crows drew near
them. Instead of going to their kind, they
seemed to be in fear of them. But on the place
they were in no fear of anything, least of all of
Don, the big collie dog. Jim, our hero, was
Don’s chief tormentor. His favorite sport was
to wait until Don was fast asleep, and then he
would pick up a shining, smooth pebble (it wasn’t
always smooth, either!) in his beak, walk care-
fully up to the dog’s head, lift the flap of his ear,
and drop the pebble inside. Don would at once
wake up with an impatient grunt, shake the
pebble out, and go lie down somewhere else. As
soon as he was asleep again, Jim would repeat
the operation, until finally the poor dog would
be driven to take refuge in the house.
Jim had other forms of sport, however. He
discovered, for instance, that by flying down sud-
denly, with loud caws, upon the back of one of
the sheep in the pasture, and fixing his claws in
the sheep’s wool, he could send the startled anima]
cavorting over the landscape. In this way Jim
enjoyed many a free ride, and appeared to take

146 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

much the same pleasure in it that a cowboy takes
in riding a bucking broncho. Still another trick
was to wake up the family at five a.m. This he
did by flying to the big man’s chamber window
ledge (the window was always open) and cawing
at the top of his lungs, till somebody tossed him
out a scrap of food. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant
trick, and Jim never knew how close he came
sometimes to having his neck wrung!

In the matter of food, he and his brother and
sister were peculiarly fortunate. Not only did
they get table scraps, bits of meat (which they
dearly loved), and all the crumbs from Don’s
dish, but the big man had a garden in which he
hoed, and when they saw him enter this garden
they flew with joyful noise, if not with song, after
him, and followed his hoe or cultivator up the
rows, pouncing greedily on every white grub his
implement turned up. He used to call them his
best helpers at such times, as indeed they were.
They certainly ought to have become fat and
healthy crows. Nevertheless, it is to be feared:
that they were somewhat afflicted with what the
soldiers so euphoniously call cooties. One day

GENERAL JIM 147

the big man saw Jim, and later Jim and Jim
also, squatting contentedly down in a big ant hill,
not taking a dust bath, like a hen, but just squat-
ting. He couldn’t conceive why they should
choose such a place to squat in, until he chanced
to read that the poilus in France spread their
shirts on ant hills when no decootieizing machine
was handy. That raised his already high esti-
mate of Jim’s intelligence.

But whether from parasites or some deeper
cause, Jim’s brother and sister never could seem
to retain their flight feathers, and while they
could skim about a few feet above the ground,
only Jim became and remained a full fledged
aeronaut. But it did not appear greatly to in-
terfere with their happiness, and every night they
hopped up the rungs of a ladder which ended un-
der the overhang of the house eaves, and took
their places to roost beside Jim, who flew there.
This practice continued for some time. One day,
however, as the two crippled birds were half
hopping, half skimming, around the yard, Jim,
from a tree near by, emitted a loud, startling caw.
As if they understood him perfectly (as they

148 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

doubtlessly did), Jim and Jim scurried for cover
under the grape-vines. At the same instant, out
of the shadow of the woods swept a marsh hawk,
hovered a second, and dove for the hurrying pair.

But he didn’t get to them. Quick as he, Jim
dove, too. He dove straight at the hawk, from
above, and landed a vicious peck on his head.
The hawk banked quickly, and swung around and
up to meet his attacker, but Jim kept above him,
and landed another jab. The hawk saw that his
prey were under cover now, and lost. Pretend-
ing, with much dignity, to ignore Jim’s existence,
he flew rapidly away, the smaller bird, with loud
caws, following him for three hundred yards or
more. Then Jim resumed his vigil in the tree top.
It was some hours later that he cawed again, and
once more the shadow swooped, and once more
Jim dove to the rescue.

That night, for the first time, Jim did not sleep
on the top rung of the ladder, under the eaves,
with his brother and sister. He perched on the
ridgepole of the house, where he could command
the whole horizon!

The big man pointed this out to his son.

GENERAL JIM 149

“Tf every man,” he said, “ was as brave and
watchful to defend his weaker brothers, this
would be a better world.”

“ Jim’s a good old Scout,” said the big man’s
son.

Now you can call Jim’s action instinct, or what
you like. All I know is that Jim never roosted
again on the ladder, but always on the ridgepole. .
It looks to me like a remarkably quick learning
of a lesson, coupled with a natural disposition to
protect his kind. I should say it showed Jim to
be both intelligent and social.

When autumn came, and Jim was a fine, strong
bird, with glossy black feathers that reflected the
sun when he banked for a turn, the big man and
his family decided to close the little farmhouse
and go to the far-away city for the winter. They
couldn’t take Jim with them, nor his poor brother
and sister, either.

“ Tt will be all right to leave Jim,” the big man
said. “He can look after himself. But Jim
and Jim can’t. It would be cruel to abandon
them.”

So he caught the two crows with the imperfect

150 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

flight feathers, and Jim never saw them again.
He flew around the garden cawing for them, but
they did not appear. The next day, when he
woke up and flew to the bedroom window, he
found the window closed. He pecked at the
glass, and made a loud noise, but nothing hap-
pened. Don was gone, too. No scraps were
put out for him at breakfast time. Wondering
and disconsolate, he flew around the deserted gar-
den, and fed himself that day by watching the
corn shocks standing in the field, and pouncing on
the mice which ran in and out under them. That
night he was bitterly cold upon the ridgepole, and
without Jim and Jim to protect he saw no reason
why he should remain on it. So he sought the
ladder under the eaves—but that was gone! He
flew over to a pine tree, and got in among the
branches. There was no wind there, nor could
any hawk see him from above while he slept.
Toward morning he heard a noise overhead, a
noise of many wings in steady beat, and now and
then a caw. A great flock of crows were going
south. Something stirred in him, some instinct
to rise high into the air and join them. But he

GENERAL JIM 151

did not go. This was home to him here, and, be-
sides, he did not know what would happen to him
among all those strangers. So he remained in
his pine tree, while the flock streamed south.

Jim waited and waited about the deserted
house, but still there was no scrap of breakfast by
the door, no sign of the people and the dog he
knew, no brother and sister for company. At
last a snow came, and he was positively hungry.
The mice burrowed under the snow, and it was
hard to detect them. The stray kernels of corn
around the fields and the barn were all covered.
So were the oats. Jim made a higher flight than
was his wont, and gazed over the surrounding
country for signs of help. Far off, over a snowy
meadow, he saw the black forms of three crows,
and forgetting his fear in his hunger, he flew di-
rectly toward them.

- They were circling and settling over the snowy
fields when he drew near, and all three began to
caw when they saw Jim coming. Their voices
did not seem unfriendly. Jim recognized one of
them as a crow which had lived that summer close
to his yard. In fact, they seemed to be trying

152 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

to tell him of food in the field. He came closer,
with increased confidence, till he could see that
they were getting food from the black, exposed
earth on the sides of a swift brook which cut
through the grass, a dark, winding thread on the
snow-white sheet of the meadow. Jim circled
close now, three or four times, cawing a tenta-
tive answer to the greetings of the three strangers.
Then he flew into a tree and watched the pro-
ceedings a few moments more, before actually
venturing to join the tiny flock. At last he made
up his mind, swung out on the air with a loud
caw, and dropped to the side of the brook, ex-
tracting a mussel from the ooze, for that was what
the others were doing.

After he had only partially satisfied his hun-
ger, the other three crows flew away, flinging
back a half invitation to join them as they went.
Jim was tempted, but he couldn’t quite make up
his mind to go. Instead, he fished some more,
and then he went back to his familiar pine tree
for the night. For several days thereafter Jim
Joined these three crows every day, traveling with
them about the country looking for food, and

GENERAL JIM 153

learning from them many ways of getting it.
They taught him, for instance, to fly low over a
field where the snow was light, looking for signs
of oat stalks, and when they were seen, to scratch
close to them for dropped grain. They taught
him the food value of many seeds, and how to
peck around the cracks and bark scales of old
trees (especially apple trees) and rotten stumps
for grubs and larve. Jim, whose food had al-
ways come easy, was green at first, but he was a
ready pupil, and could soon shift with the best,
and seldom went hungry.

At last, however, there came a great storm,
with a terrible wind and bitter cold. Poor Jim
almost froze to death, huddled in the’ deepest,
most protected part of his pine, because he could
not venture out for food in such a blizzard, nor
find any if he did venture out, and without a lot
of food a bird, which is an intensely hot-blooded
creature, soon perishes. His little engine has to
be stoked regularly and energetically to keep up
steam. It was not till late the following day that
Jim could get out any distance in his search, and
by then his vitality was so low that he could just

154 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

make headway against the wind. He rose high,
and looked about, over a world in which half the
landmarks were obliterated. Some way off, be-
tween the almost buried lines of stone walls which
bounded the road, he saw a wood sled jogging
along, falling into a walk now and then as the
horses tugged it over a packed drift. On this
sled were a man and several bags. Jim almost
blew down toward it, like a bit of black paper on
the gale, and his keen eyes now detected some-
thing dropping behind. Down lower he dropped,
and with a caw of joy fell upon the grains of
“ mixed feed ” which were oozing out from a bag
on the back of the sledge, unknown to the driver.
Every time the sledge had tipped backward as the
horses pulled it up on to a packed drift, a little
stream of cracked corn and other delicacies had
poured out and still lay on the hard snow. Jim
fell upon the first he spotted, and ate ravenously.

He began to warm up. His blood flowed
again. His wings felt stronger. As soon as his
hunger was satisfied, he rose into the air, and be-
gan to circle, cawing loudly against the chill,
lemon-gold sunset. He was calling to his three

GENERAL JIM 155

friends. He knew they must be hungry, too.
Here was food enough for a hundred crows. He
must find them, and let them know! At last he
was rewarded by an answering caw, and one of
the three appeared above the pines on the slope
of the mountain. Jim swung rapidly toward
him, down wind, and soon he was leading all three
toward the precious trail of grain on the road.
While the three ate, Jim, too, consumed a little
more, walking back along the trail of feed, which
evidently extended clear to the village.

But his work was not yet done. Flying to a
roadside tree, the oldest crow peremptorily sum-
moned the rest. This storm had created a dan-
gerous crisis for all the crows who had elected to
winter in those parts, instead of going south.
Tribal safety demanded that as many as possible
be notified of the salvation offered by the grain.
Jim was to go north, he himself would go south,
another east, another west. Each was to bring
back all the crows he could muster as soon as it
was daylight. So Jim’s social consciousness was
thus enlarged from the neighborhood to the tribe. ©
No sleep in his warm tree for him that night!

156 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

He flew by the stars, over strange fields, cawing
his tidings as he went, and making long détours
to each side to cover all the area possible, and
when the east reddened, he headed back, again
swinging to left and right, cawing loudly, till he
had gathered in more than a hundred and fifty
crows behind him, coming by ones and twos and
threes from many places. They reached the
snowy road where the grain lay to find other
crows there by the scores, then by the hundred,
till the road for three miles, or all the way from
the farmer’s door back to the outskirts of the
village, was a wide ribbon of white with a jet
black band running down the centre, a band com-
posed of famished and feeding crows. By ten
o'clock there was no grain left. But by ten
o'clock the sun was up, the storm wind had
abated, the snow began to melt a bit on south-
ward facing rocks, and the crows were saved.

After that, Jim did not go back to his pine to
sleep alone. He was completely adopted into
the band of three crows whose acquaintance he
had first made, and became one of them. His
period of loneliness was over.

GENERAL JIM 157

The coming of his first spring was a great event
in Jim’s life. First of all, of course, it meant
more food for less trouble. But it meant, too,
the return of other birds—friendly crows, hostile
hawks, and the hosts of song birds which were
neither friend nor foe, but which would presently
lay eggs and hatch broods that could be robbed
for juicy meat. Night after night, from his roost
in the tall pine up on the mountainside, Jim
would wake and hear overhead the noises of
northward moving birds—the honk of geese far
aloft, the wing rustle, sometimes, of crows flying
low, the division leaders cawing commands, the
cheeps and twitters of the lesser folk of the air.
Going across the meadows long before the leaves
were out, he heard one morning the merry, sweet
note of the redwings. Later he saw the bobo-
links over the fields, and heard them gurgling
their lovely song while on the wing. Farmers
appeared with plows and from his aery pathways
he could look all around and pick out the squares
of brown loam, where the plow had been, each
square a potential feeding ground, full of white
grubs turned up by the plowshare.

158 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

The hawks came early. One morning in mid
March Jim looked aloft, at a shrill cry which
floated down, and saw sailing there on almost
motionless wings a great red-tailed hawk. He
didn’t mind this fellow much, though, knowing it
was unlikely to molest him. But the sharp
shinned hawk which arrived that day and pro-
ceeded at once to course low over the mountain
woods, swooping down to investigate the nest two
of Jim’s friends had used the season before, and
which they intended rebuilding for the coming
summer, was a different customer. ‘The old crow
cawed a summons, and the four of them went for
this hawk on the rush. He didn’t care to fight
four of them, and they drove him away, chasing
him for a full mile, while farmers in the fields
looked up to see what the excitement was about.

But the most wonderful part of that first
spring for Jim was the arrival in the neighbor-
hood of several strange crows, one of them a fe-
male of his own age, in whom he took a sudden
profound interest, and before whom he began to
show off at every possible occasion. For her he
preened his glossy feathers till they shone, he

GENERAL JIM 159

did stunts in the air, he tried his best to sing (and
perhaps she thought it was lovely, though no-
body on the ground did!) ; he sat on a tree limb
beside her, too, or as near as she would let him,
and courted her ardently. Jimwasinlove! He
was gloriously and persistently in love. And his
persistence won. The object of his adoration at
last consented to be his bride, and look over trees
with him, with a view to building.

They chose a fork high up in a tall pine on the
mountain, building the rough nest of sticks and
leaves, and feeding at about that time on corn.
Jim and his bride and Jim’s three friends, and
perhaps half a dozen other crows, all of. whom
were nesting that season up in the pines on the
mountain, usually hunted corn together, in the
early morning hours, when nobody but a farmer
or a Broadway rounder who hasn’t gone to bed, is
up. The corn was best to eat, as well as easiest
to find, just after it had sprouted. The tiny
green shoots above the brown earth exactly lo-
cated the grain, and made it easy to pull up with-
out any digging. Then, too, the shoot having
burst the shell, and the earth having softened it,

160 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the whole grain was far tenderer and easier to eat.
But one had to use care. In the first place,
farmers didn’t like to have their corn pulled up,
and had an annoying trick of sneaking up with a
gun and shooting you. In the second place, they
had an almost equally annoying trick of cover-
ing the corn with a vile smelling and tasting black
substance (called tar, or creosote), which quite
spoiled the food, sometimes, in an entire field.
One couldn’t tell at all from the sprout whether
the corn was tarred or not. One had to go to all
the trouble of pulling it up first.

When Jim and his friends went corn hunting,
and found a promising field, one of the number
was always stationed in a tree where he could
command a clear view of the approaches, to give
warning of any danger. Then the others went
to work, ready instantly to rise and fly away if
the watcher uttered his warning caw. (If you
listen to crows carefully enough, you yourself can
learn their language sufficiently, at least, to dif-
ferentiate between a caw of warning, say, a caw
which means attack, and a playful caw. There
are men who know many more crow words than

GENERAL JIM 161

these few simple ones, and can even imitate some
of them.) Jim himself was rather reckless at
first, paying little attention to the bits of white
cloth or shiny tin pans or stuffed dummies set up
over cornfields. But one day what he thought
was a dummy, it stood so still, opened fire on him
with a gun, actually shooting off two of his tail
feathers, and after that he grew as cautious as the
wisest. But he never got over his temper when
he pulled up tarred corn, and always, when that
happened, he pulled up at least a dozen shoots
more, just for spite. At least, that is what the
farmers thought, though it may have been that
he also had a hope he might finally get a kernel
which wasn’t tarred.

Mr. and Mrs. Jim were extremely proud of
their family of four, when it finally appeared,
though it wasn’t much to look at (except to the
eye of faith) for several days—merely yawning
cavities of mouths opening into fuzzy, ugly, black
bodies, without form and, if one could judge by
their actions at the approach of food, most cer-
tainly void. It was a still prouder moment for
Mr. and Mrs. Jim when they at last got the

162 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

babies, grown nearly to parental proportions, out
of the nest, out of the pine tree, and down the
slope into the open, where the entire family
emerged one summer morning at five o’clock, the
parents in the lead, the babies half walking, half
flying on behind and making such a cawing and
squawking as would have done credit to fifty im-
patient automobiles trying to toot a Georgia
cracker out of the middle of the road. It was no
small job to feed this growing family, and Jim
and his wife had to start in early. At that, they
had the better of the farmer in whose garden they
sought for grubs, for he had to buy shoes for his
children, and you know what that means these
days!

The babies grew with extraordinary rapidity,
however, and before long could forage for them-
selves. ‘There were many other children in the
eolony up in the pines, and many were the early
morning games of tag and prisoner’s base the
flock played in the pasture at the foot of the
woods, the old folks joining in. At least, that
is what they looked like, though the crows no
doubt had other names for them. Games they

GENERAL JIM 163

were, at any rate. Food was plentiful; now that
the corn season was over nobody shot at them;
and the whole flock throve and were happy.

But one night a great and terrible enemy came.
He certainly had no business there on the Berk-
shire mountainside in summer, though in winter
he was not uncommon. But in summer he should
have been far to the north. Perhaps the hunting
in the north had grown poor, and he had moved
south early. At any rate, here he was—a great
horned owl, more than two feet tall, with talons
of terrible power and a carnivorous appetite that
would not balk even at a skunk. Jim and the
others in the flock were wakened toward morn-
ing by a loud cry for help cut off into silence in
the middle, and then by the ominous flutter of
great wings down in the trees. Jim himself
fairly leaped up into the air, over the woods, and
peered down into their shadowy depths, trying to
make out the direction in which the marauder
was flying. He got a glimpse or two, and his
ears told him still more, and a moment later he
and the other crows were in pursuit, now over,
now in the trees. 'The owl made for the deepest

164 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and largest forest on the mountain, a stand of
virgin hemlocks in a steep, wild ravine, and until
daylight came the crows were almost helpless,
though they kept up a loud rumpus overhead,
and dashed down as near as they dared. Jim,
however, and two or three more of the leaders,
wasted no time here. Like the messengers in the
poem, they rode forth, to east and west and south
and north, to summon their array. The dawn
was just reddening the east, and the stars grow-
ing faint, as Jim sped northward, flying hard and
low, not seventy-five feet over the tree tops, and
cawing as he went. Two miles beyond he woke
a little flock of crows in some pines in a swamp,
and glancing ‘back saw them headed for the moun-
tain. He did not pause, however. On and on
he sped, swinging now five miles to the east, then
five miles to the west, then back into his course,
and always seeing out of the corner of his eye
some band of crows leaving for the spot whence

he had come. The sun was full up before he
turned at last, feeling that he had roused minute

men enough, and himself returned to the moun-
tain, now but a blue-green dome on the southern

GENERAL JIM 165

horizon. Meanwhile, a farmer’s boy, getting up
very early to milk the cows, had seen a strange
sight. He had heard an excited cawing over-
head, and looking up had seen one crow flying
north. Before long (he was milking the cows
in a corner of the night pasture), he saw half a
dozen crows headed south, flying hard and low.
Then more came over, and more, and more. In
groups of two, or ten, or even twenty, they came,
always flying hard and low, headed south, and to
his ears, very faintly, for the mountain was three
miles away, came from somewhere up its sides
now a ceaseless noise as of a thousand hoarse
throats shouting.

The minute men were arriving. The battle
was on!

When Jim got back to the scene of action he
could see from afar sudden explosions of crows
up from the tree tops, as if black fragments of a
great blast were being ejected into the air. This
guided him directly to the spot, even if there had
been no uproar. From one to two thousand
crows were in the hemlocks, and flattened against
a trunk, protected from above by an overhanging

166 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

limb, or now and again trying to beat its way to
another tree, but still holding the dead crow it
had captured in its talons, the great owl, half
blinded now by the daylight and the incessant
swarm of live crows that attacked it, was
plainly visible—and plainly uncomfortable.
Neither one crow nor all the crows together
dared risk open combat. But they all beat in
waves around it, made dashes for its head, its
back, drove it again and again to cover, and
again and again worked it out of cover by at-
tacks from above till it had to fly, giving them
fresh opportunity to strike at its head from the
air. All the morning the battle raged, the moun-
tain echoed to the hoarse roar of the myriad caw-
ings, till at last the battered owl] managed to find
an old tree that was hollow, and get inside, where
he could easily defend the opening. Still hun-
dreds of crows remained on the scene, and it was
not till darkness again fell that he could make his
escape. The next morning the farmer’s boy
heard only the usual friendly and cheerful and
familiar caws of the crows that lived about his
farm, and the distant forest was quiet. The owl

THE GREAT OWL WAS PLAINLY VISIBLE -AND FLAINLY UNCOMFORTABLE

GENERAL JIM 167

had gone. With it had gone the hosts of the
minute men, dispersed ‘back to their homes. Jim
led his family down to the fields in security once
more, but he puffed his feathers a bit, and made
his morning caws a bit more energetic and strid-
ent than usual. He felt he’d done a pretty good
job, and acted as a real leader should. He was
rather inclined to think he ought to be listened to
respectfully by the other crows after this!

When autumn came a slight difference of opin-
ion developed in the domestic circle. Mrs. Jim,
who had spent the first (and only) winter of her
life south, was all for migrating. Jim, who knew
no other home than this Berkshire mountainside
and the valley below, and who loved it, was strong
for staying right there, in spite of his memories of
the great blizzard. But you know how such dis-
putes are usually settled. They went south.
They rose into the air one chill November day,
followed by several of the other crows of their
neighborhood, and joined a flight going by over-
head.

That evening Jim saw the ocean for the first
time—at least, he saw Long Island Sound, and

168 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

across Long Island was the open sea itself. They
got good food for a week or more on the grain
fields of Long Island, and then cut across the
open sea itself on a short flight to New Jersey,
and worked on down, getting tasty sea food along
the bay shores, till they scattered over the fertile
fields of Virginia, roaming a little restlessly and
chiefly intent on food. It was early in March
that Jim felt the call of the north again too strong
to resist, and gathering a small band, set out for
the return journey, keeping step as he moved
with the ploughed fields. The band, picking up
other flocks on Long Island, crossed the Sound
one fine day late in March, warmed by the south
wind and finding the air “bumpy,” as the aviators
say, so that they rose high over the water to get
into easier going, and headed toward the hills.
But up in the hills they found the fields were
not yet plowed at all, and they met, too, a coun-
ter, chill wind from the north. Jim was disput-
ing the leadership with two or three old timers,
but there was no dispute now about what to do.
They all descended into a thick woods, to have
shelter from the coming storm they sensed, and

GENERAL JIM 169

to find food around the rotted logs and stumps,
and under the forest mould.

The storm came that night. It was the most
unseasonable storm the oldest crow, or the oldest
man, could remember. The north wind rose to
ninety miles an hour. The snow and sleet cut
like a knife. The cold was almost as intense as
in winter. Great trees crashed down in the for-
ests. ‘The frozen sleet and snow covered all food
as in a case of steel. All the next day the storm
raged, and no birds could ride it even to search
for food. On the second morning, the wind
abated, the snow ceased, and Jim and his com-
rades, venturing out. hunted for food along the
edges of streams, and anywhere else they could
think of. They saw scores of song sparrows and
robins dead on the ground, and they themselves
were weak, nor could they find much to eat, so
coated was everything with sleet and snow.

Then Jim thought of a certain rocky pasture
slope and quarry side, in his old home land, which
lay entirely on a southern hillside, protected by
pine woods from the north wind. Even in mid-
winter the snow lay light here, and there were

170 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

hundreds of low bushes which bore a nourishing
seed that clung till the following season before
dropping. He had often fed there. He rose
now, spiraling high, till he got his bearings, and
then called to the flock. The food call was
enough; nobody could dispute a leadership which
took them to food in a crisis. The flock rose,
rather feebly, and followed, gathering in others
as they went. For three long hours they flew,
their numbers constantly augmented, till it was a
black band of a thousand birds which dropped
down behind Jim into the pasture, and blackened
the thin coating of snow on the ground, as they
fed their fill.

That night they all roosted in the pines, and
for another day they fed on this slope, while the
snow melted a little. The second night they fol-
lowed Jim over to the mountain where his nest

_had been, and roosted in the forest there. The
following day, having stripped the pasture, they
fished the banks of Jim’s brook, explored the
trees and stumps in the wood, investigated at the
bottoms of ‘all the old apple trees in the valley
orchards, and cleaned up the food supply. To-

GENERAL JIM 171

ward six o’clock Jim rose high once more, over
the pines on the mountain, calling—the call now
of the acknowledged leader. Not far to the
northeast—perhaps twenty miles—was a forest
he had once visited, with just such a pasture as
this one here lying under its protection. By the
time they had cleaned that the snow would surely
be melted again, for already the wind was veering
into the south and in the west the clouds were
breaking.

Jim took his bearings, cawed once more a few
sharp, short commands, and flying low, at an alti-
tude of about. three hundred feet, with steady

- wing beat, he headed in an airline for his destina-
tion. Mrs. Jim flew just behind him, almost at
his side. By twos and threes and tens and scores,
spread out in irregular formation, but making as
a whole a perfectly straight though somewhat
broken black ribbon across the sky, the great flock
of crows rose from their perches in the forest, from
the stream banks, the pastures, and followed him.
The same farmer’s boy was out in the fields as Jim
went overhead. He saw the long line coming on
behind, and he saw that Jim had disappeared into

172 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the northeastern twilight while the crows were
still coming from the southwest. Being of an
inquiring mind, he pulled his dollar watch out of
his pocket, and timed the procession. The last
two stragglers passed over his head a full fifteen
minutes after the leader had vanished.

“Gosh!” he said aloud, “I’m glad all them
crows ain’t goin’ to stay here! Wouldn’t have no
corn at all!”

Then he watched the tail of the procession
vanish into the gray northeast, and his eyes grew
big. He wondered how it felt to be up there in
the free air, winging at such speed far over the
earth. He thought the crows were like a vast
fleet of aeroplanes, going forth to bomb some dis-
tant city, and the first crow, the leader, who had
gone cawing over him, fifteen minutes before, was
the general in command, giving his orders and
flying in advance, as a general should.

“ Gosh!” he reflected, “ it must be great to be
a general!”

That was just what Jim thought, too, as his
wings beat steadily and his eyes reached out into
the gathering twilight, looking for the haven
where his thousand followers could feed.

CHAPTER VI
THE MATING OF BROWNIE

T wasn’t far from the home where Brownie

was born that land is sometimes worth $5,000
an acre, and men and women of the world of
“fashion ” build Italian villas and French Re-
naissance chateaux amid the Yankee maples and
pines and chestnuts of the Berkshire Hills. Yet
Brownie’s home was quite as comfortable as any
of these, though architecturally it might be de-
scribed, perhaps, as pre-neolithic, with pro-
nounced aquatic influences. It was designed and
built by Brownie’s father and mother. The
front door was under water, which effectively
discouraged tramps, beggars, soap and sewing-
machine peddlers, book agents and even loan
drive canvassers and strange dogs. The front
hall, as a consequence, was a trifle damp, but once

up-stairs into the parlor, sleeping-room, dining-
173

174 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

room and nursery combined, the house was found
to be snug and cosy, with sanded floors (as well
as sanded walls and ceiling). In short, it was a
roomy and well made otter den, in a bank of a
clear, rather deep brook which flowed through
sandy flats, overhung with alders and willows,
with wild cucumber and clematis, on its way to
the near-by Housatonic.

Nobody knew the den was there—nobody, that
is, on the ground above, though the muskrats
which passed up and down the brook were aware
of it, and hurried by, and the fishes, perhaps,
knew it, though they are silly things sometimes
and don’t always pay attention to such matters.
Brownie’s father and mother were comparative
strangers in these parts themselves, having spent ,
the previous winter under the ice in Goose Pond,
twenty miles away, and only came here with the
breaking up of the ice, to rear their family on a
waterway which gave them ready and safe access
both to the river and to a large, well-stocked pond
which the brook drained. In the fields and woods
above, hunters pursued foxes, boys chased wood-
chucks, the deer, the grouse, the pheasants, the

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 175

rabbits, lived in danger. Traps were even set
along this very brook for muskrat. But few
were the hunters who suspected that otters were
about, and fewer still the hunters or trappers who
knew how to capture them. Brownie and his
brother and sister arrived in a home that was hid-
den beneath the ground, with two strong, ener-
getic parents to look after them, beside a brook
that led to fishing grounds so well stocked that
the lengthening shadow of the high cost of living
cast no gloom across the domestic hearth. There
was no reason at all why they should not have
been chubby, contented, good-natured youngsters.
As a matter of fact, they were.

It wasn’t long before their parents decided the
,time had come to teach them to swim. If there
is one thing an otter can do better than anything
else (or anyone else, for that matter), it is to
swim. He can swim down a pickerel, for ex-
ample, which would undoubtedly land him the
captaincy of the swimming team if he went to
college. If he was a lady otter, he might get a
better job in the movies than Annette Keller-
mann, for he swims as gracefully as she, which

176 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

leaves little more to be said. Yet, in spite of this
fact, a baby otter, unlike a duckling, is mortally
afraid of his first plunge. When the hour struck
for their lesson, Brownie and his brother and sis-
ter had to be urged firmly, if not gently, down-
stairs into the moist front hall, whence they were
propelled out into the brook. The first thing
they did on reaching the brook was to make a mad
scramble for their parents’ shoulders, and finding
their parents brutally unresponsive, they splashed
to shore as best they could, climbed up the bank,
and squatted there, very wet and astonished and
miserable.

This would never do. Pa and Ma Otter came
up after them, grabbed one apiece and mutually
cuffed the third, till all three babies once more
went splashing into the dread element below."
This seems like a rough way to be taught to swim,
and is not practiced at our best summer resorts.
But it worked. By the time the cubs were the
size, say, of rabbits, they were fully qualified for
the metropolitan championship, and they were
more at home in the water than out of it. They
swam and played till they were tired, and then

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 177

there was always mother’s back, or father’s back,
to climb upon for a rest, while the amiable parent
did the swimming.

No doubt when you were a boy you “ went in ”
at the old swimming hole, and you like to think
about it now, recalling those happy days and be-
lieving that nobody ever had such a good time.
But Brownie and his brother and sister had just
as good a time, if not a better one. They had
just as good a time in the water and on the bank.
They could go in before breakfast, if they liked.
They could stay in as long as they pleased. They
didn’t have any shirts to take off, nor stockings to
pull on over wet, sandy feet (usually causing a
rent or a dropped stitch and later parental
wrath). ‘They could dive without getting water
in their noses, and stay under indefinitely without
getting ringing in the ears and suffocation. They
could see under water without making their eyes
smart, too, and if they got hungry they could
chase and catch a fish.

A modified form of water polo was one of their
favorite pastimes, which frequently was con-
verted into football on top of the bank. They,

178 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

played this with a stick, and would have reminded
you strongly of frisky dogs, if you had been lucky
enough to have seen them. Brownie not only
loved to dive up under a floating stick, seize it in
his powerful little teeth, and swim with it to his
brother or sister or mother, for them to grab the
other end, but he would play with the stick when
he was all alone, letting the current carry it away
from him and darting on it again, swimming on
his back and tossing it up in his paws, shaking
and worrying it in his mouth, and so on. Up on
the bank, the cubs played still more like little
dogs—dogs with long bodies and almost invisible
short legs, and pointed tails very big at the base.
They tugged and wrestled with a stick, bracing
and pulling and falling over.

But they had other pastimes, too. 'Toboggan-
ing and diving combined was one of them. An
otter is exceedingly well built for tobogganing.
He has a long neck which he can raise up for the
curl of the toboggan. He has a long, smooth-
furred body (no fur is better than an otter’s, ex-.
cept a seal’s—and the seal is his cousin) , with legs
so short that he can get them easily out of the

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 179

way. Finally, he has a heavy flat tail, large at
the base, to act as a rudder. Altogether, he
doesn’t need a toboggan made of ash boards; his
own tummy does very nicely. So Brownie and
his playmates found. Hunting out a spot where
the stream had cut into the deep, alluvial loam of
the meadows, making a high, steep bank, they
simply went head foremost over the top, giving
themselves a helping shove with their hind feet,
and slid, splash! into the water. Then out they
scrambled, and did it all over again. After an
hour of this sport, they would wear a regular
little toboggan slide into the bank, about sixteen
or eighteen inches wide, and smooth as glass
where their wet bodies had converted the bottom
into mud. Nor were Pa and Ma Otter in the
least averse to shooting this chute, either. In
fact, they often joined in the sport with all the
zest of the village deacon on a spree at Coney
Island, their dignity quite forgotten.

But their caution was not forgotten. Let
someone be heard approaching through the fields,
or a dog barking near by, and Pa Otter would go
down the slide with a bark of warning, followed

180 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

by Ma and the children, and if any dog did get to
the spot, if only a second later, he looked down
upon a calm and silent swimming pool, with only
a ripple or two to break the surface.

“ Get under water, and be quick about it! ”—
that was a lesson Brownie soon learned, at any
sign of danger. Once under water, he feared
nothing.

There were, to be sure, some things in the water
he didn’t particularly like, chief among them the
big German carp which inhabited the polluted
waters of the Housatonic River. It is to be
feared that neither Brownie nor his parents read
the New York Tribune, so they didn’t hate the
German carp because they were told to. Their
objection was based strictly on dietary grounds.
The carp were tough and strong. Brownie much
preferred just what you would prefer—trout,
pickerel, bass, perch, eels. Now and then, to get
into streams where these real fish were to be
found, Brownie and his family had to swim up or
down the Housatonic, and here they encountered
the carp, as well as the sewage from certain of the
Berkshire towns which so proudly boast their

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 181

cleanliness and beauty. How Brownie hated
that filthy water! The carp alone lived and
throve in it, and he would pick out and chase
down a big one just out of spite, to vent his ill
feelings toward pollution in general. But, un-
less he was very hungry, he would not eat so much
as a mouthful of his kill.

It was rather up in the pond above the den that
Brownie best enjoyed fishing. Here were lily
pads and pickerel weed and arrowhead growing
out from the shore, and here the long, lean pick-
erel hovered and darted like wraiths under the
water—like wraiths to you or me in a canoe
above, looking down into a dim half-world as
through brown glass, but real enough to Brownie
as he, too, swam below the surface. He would
swim down the darting fish, heading it off from
deep water again and again, driving it steadily in
shore, till presently there was no way for the pick-
erel to turn without giving Brownie a chance to
closeinon him. Then, with the fish in his mouth,
the otter would raise his keen, bright, intelligent
eyes and his flat muzzle and his comical whiskers,
slowly above the water and the weeds, to look

182 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

about. Slowly his long, glossy brown neck would
follow, as he raised his head still higher. Satis-
fied that no danger was near, he would sink back,
swim on the surface, or even wade, perhaps, to
shore, and sitting on the bank, sink his sharp
teeth into the firm, tender meat of his prey.
After all, you and I cannot call him cruel, not, at
least, with good grace. We, too, eat pickerel,
and we catch them not in a fair chase, speed pitted
against speed, but by deceit and a barbed hook.
Besides, we could live on vegetables and bread
and butter if we had to, but Brownie couldn’t.
It was fish or starve, for him. 'We—that is, Man
—talk a great deal about the cruelty of Nature,
and how one animal preys on another, as if they
lived in a different world from ourselves, calmly
ignoring the fact that we too are a part of Na-
ture, an animal part, and perhaps the most cruel
of all.

There came presently a great day in the life of
Brownie and his brother and sister. Pa and Ma
Otter announced a trip to distant parts! The
children, when you come to think of it, had seen
very little of the world, especially the world above

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 183

the river banks. They had been up and down
the river a few miles, and up and down tributary
brooks, into small lakes and ponds, but except
when they played on the top of the banks and saw
from that height distant hills and woods and blue
things called mountains, they knew the world
chiefly as two banks rising over their heads on
either side of the water, banks clothed with mild
water pepper plants, trailing balsam apples,
bright jewel weed, blue vervain like little cande-
labra, drooping willows, brilliant cardinal flowers.
It was a pretty world, to be sure—no gardens are
fairer than those of the river bank. Yet the chil-
dren hankered, as young folks will, for adventure,
for new sights and sounds, and great was their
excitement when the expedition started. Its real
object, one suspects, was a better food supply, for
five otters can pretty well fish a stream in a sum-
mer, but that didn’t lessen the fun any for
Brownie and his brother and sister.

Pa Otter led the way, and they swam up their
brook two miles into the lake, and then a mile to
the upper end of the lake, and then two miles
more up a smaller brook, which emptied into it,

184 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

until at length the brook grew so shallow and
came tumbling down such a steep place, over
rocks and over great hemlock roots, that they
could swim no more, but had to wade and climb.
This was all new to Brownie and the other chil-
dren, who had never been beyond the lake. The
cold, clear, sweet mountain water was new to
them, and the great, cool, deep forest overhead,
through which Pa Otter was leading the way so
cautiously, ever alert and watchful now, for the
deep pools were few and far between in which
they could find sure refuge from danger. At last
the pools grew so shallow that it seemed as if the
brook were in danger of disappearing, and Pa
ordered a halt till night, before they hazarded the
land crossing. The family scattered to hunt
trout in the shadows under the hemlock roots,
where the cold water lay still and brown.
Brownie found splashing around in one of these
pools after a trout rare sport, though the fish was
hardly a mouthful when you got him.

At twilight the march was resumed. The
brook did, presently, disappear altogether, seem-
ing to shrink into mossy springs in the mountain-

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 185

side, and for the first time in his life Brownie
found himself traveling over unknown dry land,
with no water at all near by into which to plunge
for safety. Overhead was the great, dim mys-
tery of the forest. All around, in the trees, in
the laurels, on the forest floor, whispered the Un-
known. Brownie was afraid. He pulled him-
self up and forward on his short legs as fast as he
could, keeping close to his mother. But Pa Otter
seemed to know what he was about, following a
trail so dim that to you or me, probably, even in
full daylight, it would have been invisible. This .
trail wound up the mountainside avoiding all
stumps and rocks by going under or around them,
taking always the easiest way, for an otter does
not relish the labor of pulling his long, heavy
body over any more obstructions than he has to.
Once over the divide, the trail went rapidly down,
and at every possible point Pa and Ma and all the
children tobogganed on their bellies.

Pa stopped presently with a warning signal.
He scented danger. Quickly Ma drove the chil-
dren ahead of her, so that she brought up the end
of the procession and they proceeded again with

186 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

redoubled caution. Yet the scent of danger, if
no sound of it, went with then—the pungent
scent of fox. Big Reddy, wandering that night
over the slopes, was trotting on padded paws on
their trail, now behind, now beside them, wonder-
ing how he could cut out one of the young otters
without risking a tussle with the parents, whose
teeth he greatly respected. At last, he thought
he saw his chance, and made a spring for
Brownie’s sister. But it was no rabbit he was at-
tacking, even in size, The young otter, with sur-
prising agility for an animal apparently so ill
adapted for land operations, reared and met his
spring with bared, angry teeth, so that he did not
catch her back after all. Like light, Pa and Ma
Otter closed in on him, and Big Reddy, who was
looking for a supper, not a fight, disappeared into
the blackness of the forest.

_ Itall happened so quickly that Brownie hardly
knew what had occurred. He only knew he was
trembling, and that his sister was bleeding about
the face—he smelled the warm blood—and that
he wanted to get to water and plunge in where it
was safe. Pa Otter hurried faster now, and the

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 187

children were almost ready to drop with weariness
when at last came the sound of water falling, the
sound and the sweet, clean smell of it! Five
minutes later they all fell into the pool below the
big spring which gushed from the base of a ledge,
and began a rapid descent, through more cold
pools and over slippery rocks, while the water
deepened, and through the dim forest overhead
the sky grew rosy.

That day they came into a shadowed pond in
the woods, with a bottom of black mud, the accu-
mulation of ages of leaf mould, and here they
found horned pout in profusion, and, better yet,
eels! There were so many horned pout that they
never bothered to eat a whole one, merely taking
a bite from the tenderest, meatiest part. That
night, weary and well fed, Pa led the way to a
steep, overhanging bank, where there was room
for all the family in the mould and sand just
above the water and under a sort of thatch of
matted roots and sod. He knew this place of
old, and here they curled up in safety, and slept.
Brownie was glad to sleep, you can be sure. His
legs ached, and he had the heaviness of food upon

188 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

him. He didn’t even stop to think about foxes.
Besides, he knew now his father and mother
could take care of any fox. He just went to
sleep.

The family went a long way on this expedition,
and Brownie saw much of the world. But three
things stood out, above all, in his memory of it.
First, there was the big lake they came to, with a
great wire screen across the inlet, so they had to
climb out and walk around. In this lake were
great, swift fish, like none Brownie had ever
chased before, big, fighting fish that were not to
be captured without a long, arduous pursuit and
sometimes almost a fight at the end, but which
were so delicious that they were worth all the
trouble. In a word, salmon! The State had
carefully imported them, and put them in this
lake, for the benefit of fishermen. Well, Brownie
was a fisherman, and he was duly grateful, though
he had paid none of the taxes—which is rather
human, after all.

The second thing which stood out in his mem-
ory was a vast river, flowing so wide and deep
that it seemed like a moving lake, with strange

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 189

things on the banks, known to us as factories and
cities. Past these, the family hurried fast, swim-
ming in mid-stream. Then, at last, the water
changed. It wasn’t pollution, it wasn’t foul—it
was salt! Brownie felt a strange sensation come
over him at the first sting of that salt. He
wanted to swim on and on, and meet it, get deeper
into it. He knew not why or what, but some-
thing seemed to call him out, out, toward the salt.
His father, however, ordered a return. He didn’t
particularly care for the fish they now caught.
But the third thing was the most wonderful of
all. He saw other otters! All his childhood, he
had seen only his father and mother and brother
and sister, but on this trip he learned that there
were otters who did not belong to his family, and
in one little, forest-fringed pond was a family
just the size of his, with two girl otters in it, who
were most attractive and not at all unfriendly
when Brownie met them as he was chasing a
perch. In fact, he gave one of them part of the
fish (I am afraid after taking a bite himself out
of the tender part behind the head), and later
they played on the bank with a stick for about an

199 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

hour. Somehow, this was one of the happiest
hours of the whole trip, and Brownie thought
often about it as Pa Otter slowly, by easy stages,
led the way back up the streams and finally over
the divide and into the home country once more.

Winter was coming on now, and the parents
decided to sperid the cold season up in the pond
at the brook head above the den. Long before
Christmas the pond was frozen over, and
Brownie, while he was under the ice, as he was
much of the time, moved in a strange, dim world,
’ especially after the snow came and covered the ice
so thickly that little light could penetrate. Down
there, it was like the long winter night of the Es-
quimaux. The water, of course, was perfectly
still but the mud on the bottom stirred now and
then sluggishly as a turtle moved, or a muskrat
went past. The fish were none too numerous,
and Brownie and his family had sometimes to
chase the muskrats for food, though they were a
last resort. However, there were certain airholes
in the ice, and both at the outlet and up the inlet
the water remained open, so they could escape
from the pond when the weather was good, and

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 191

clad in their thick furs make overland journeys to
other ponds and streams. Out on the snow their
long bodies made a distinct trail, for their short
legs sunk in so deep that their bellies dragged.
Breaking trail was hard work, but those who fol-
lowed the leader had less trouble, and coming
home the trail had usually frozen and was easy to
walk in. Wherever it led down hill, all Brownie
had to do was to slide—real tobogganing, this
time, on an icy chute!

That winter the first tragedy occurred to the
family. Brownie’s brother, swimming around
alone under the ice, saw distant light, as if a new
airhole had been made, and went toward it. As
he drew near, he saw a small fish shining in the
water in the descending shaft of light. He
darted on it, and took it in at one mouthful. But,
even as his jaws closed, he felt a sharp pain, and
a second later, in spite of his most powerful ef-
forts at resistance, he was pulled right up through
the hole. Brownie and Pa Otter arrived just in
time to see him mysteriously disappearing.
Swimming around the hole in grief and perplex-
ity, they heard sounds of human speech above, a

192 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

dull blow, and then another small fish appeared,
lowered through the hole on an almost invisible
line. Brownie, who was hungry, made toward it,
but his father, quick as a flash, dove in between
and butted him away. He had seen the line, and
suspected mischief. Very warily, he nosed the
fish by the tail, smelled that it was fresh though
dead, and nibbled it carefully. It was suddenly
yanked up out of reach!

Brownie looked on in surprise.

Again it came down, and Brownie and his
father each nibbled, at either end, keeping their
mouths away from the line and the hook which
they now detected. Each managed to get a mor-
sel before it was again yanked up. This time the
voices above the ice were loud and angry. Pa
Otter turned tail and swam away, his son follow-
ing. That was Brownie’s first experience with
the wiles of man, though the fisher was probably
more surprised than the otter was when he pulled
Brownie’s poor brother up on his line. If it had
been Brownie’s last experience, this would be a
different story.

The ice had gone from the lake when Brownie

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 193

found himself thinking harder than ever of the
otters he had met on the long trip the season be-
fore. He was full grown now, a fine, sleek fel-
low, and he had a sudden great desire to see those
otters again, to play with them, to be with them,
or with one of them, at any rate. He confided
his plans to nobody, not even his mother, which
proves that he was a regular young fellow, now.
But early one morning he started out, all alone,
over the long trail.

Though he had made the trip but once before,
and partly in the dark, he had no doubts about the
way, finding the track as a woodsman or an In-
dian follows his dim blazes in the forest. No fox
molested him now, for he was too large for a fox
to risk a contest. But, as he was descending on
the farther side of the divide, he heard a hound
baying on his track, and though he hurried as fast
as his short legs would carry him, the dog was up
before he could reach water. Brownie instinc-
tively backed up against a flat-sided boulder, and
let the dog come on. As the dog closed in, quite
unconscious of what he was tackling, Brownie
reared his powerful neck with incredible speed,

194 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and closed his teeth. The dog tore and struggled
to escape and get a hold on him, but he only
reared higher and threw his whole weight for-
ward, twisting his neck at the same time to bring
the hound down under him: He had a hold on
the dog’s throat, and when the hunter arrived
some moments later, he found only his dead
hound on the torn moss and trampled ferns, and
an otter’s tracks leading away. He ran as fast
as he could follow them, but they ended in the
brook. Brownie was on his safe way now to the
pond below.

He slept that night where the family had slept
before, he tasted delicious salmon again in the
lake farther on, and presently he reached the
wooded pond where his friends had lived. This,
he hoped, was his jJourney’s end, and he at once
began circling the shores, rearing his head over
the water to look at the banks, diving under to
search amid the weeds. But no friends did he
see. He came at last upon the under water en-
trance to a den, and entered it boldly. But no-
body was there. For two days he swam about
that pond, and up and down the outlet, looking

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 195

for otter signs, or for some otter trail leading
away overland and freshly used. He had about
decided to move on, down-stream, perhaps to-
ward the great river and the queer salt water,
when quite suddenly, in mid-stream, at the outlet
mouth, he met one of his friends—the prettier
one, too!—coming up-stream.

The two circled each other rather shyly. Then
Brownie climbed the weedy bank, and began
searching for a stick, while his friend stood in the
shoals, her head raised, watching him. Finally
he found one, came back with it, entered the
water, and invited her to play. She took a tenta-
tive bite, then a harder one, and yanked. The
pull of her strength against his excited him. He
began to frisk and splash, and show off his powers
as a swimmer. All the time she watched him,
and sometimes: followed him about. Finally a
fine ‘fish went past, and Brownie dove for it,
bringing it up in triumph in his mouth, and shak-
ing it before her. It may well be that at this sign
of his ability to provide that she smiled. At any
rate, they swam off into deep water, and not long
after they might have been seen by the muskrats

196 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and the fish making a den entrance into the soft
bank.

They were certainly two fine children that
Brownie and his mate drove into the water and
taught to swim. It was a real pleasure to catch
fish for them, to ride them around the pend on
one’s shoulders, to pull on a stick with, to cuff and
push down the bank. Brownie spent a happy
summer in that quiet, wood-shadowed pond, but
he didn’t forget the fun he had as a boy on the
first long trip abroad, and he took his family more
than once adventuring, especially up into the lake
where the salmon were. It was in this lake that
he and his mate decided to winter. But before
winter really set in Brownie had a desire to go
once more over the divide, and see his old home
pond. If he wanted to show off his progeny to
their grandparents, who can blame him? I don’t
say he did—but, anyhow, he led the way over the
long trail. A light November snow had fallen
the night before they crossed, and the family left
a trail a born and bred New Yorker could have
followed through the woods. They couldn’t help
it, of course, and, indeed, they had no conscious-

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 197

ness of danger in so doing. The enemies
Brownie knew were dogs and such on land, and
fish-hooks under the ice in winter, and he no
longer feared either. Yet that trail was to prove
fatal, for it was seen by the man whose hound
Brownie had killed, and seen at almost the exact
spot where the fight had occurred. Thus the
man knew this was a regular otter crossing. He
went home and got a trap.

It was several days later that Brownie and his
family returned over the trail. The snow had
partly melted now, but there was still enough in
the woods so they could toboggan, and they were
having a great good time descending the slope.
Brownie had, for once, gone off the trail a few
feet to investigate something which interested
him—it was a ruffed grouse nestled in a bed of
dead leaves, and he wasn’t quick enough to catch
it, only to send it whirring off through the trees
with a startling sound which caused the two
young otters to jump. Mother Otter had slid
on ahead, being intent on getting back to water,
and suddenly she gave a cry of pain and Brownie,
springing to her, found her fast in the grip of a

198 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

strange iron thing, which was chained fast to a
log drag and resisted ‘all her frantic tugs and
lurches. Helpless and terrified, he and the chil-
dren stayed by her, watching her agonized and
pathetic efforts to free herself, till at length they
heard a dog bay, and, as the dog drew near, the
crack of undergrowth from a man’s steps.
Brownie could have handled the dog, he knew,
but a man was a different proposition. To save
the children, he had to lead them rapidly down
the trail to the brook. Behind him, far off, just
as the three plunged to safety, he heard a faint
ery from his mate—and then the yelp of a dog—
and silence.

It was very lonely under the ice that winter for
Brownie, in spite of the two young ones. They
were getting full grown now, every hour, and
needed no care. Toward spring they began to
wander off, as young folks will, and leave him
quite alone. He, too, went off by himself, though
never back over the long trail. That way he
never wanted to take again. Finally, even the
taste of salmon paled. He grew more lonely and
more restless. Both children had disappeared.

THE MATING OF BROWNIE 199

He felt sure they had gone looking for mates. A
mate! That was what he wanted. It is written
that it is not good for man to dwell alone. The
same, no doubt, is true of otters. Poor Brownie
had tasted the cup of wedded happiness, and
therefore his loneliness was doubly acute. He
climbed one morning out of the lake at the outlet,
slunk overland around the wire screen, took to the
stream again, and swam rapidly downward to-
ward the pond in the woods. He remembered
that his dead mate had had a sister. If she were
wedded now, no doubt there would be a daughter.
Perhaps this daughter would look like her aunt.
So lonely widowers have reflected since time was!

CHAPTER VII

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK

[‘ must be admitted that, from one point of
view, he who is to be our hero, and who came
to'be known by the name of OI Buck, as you shall
learn, began life rather badly. But so did Jo-
seph; only Joseph was thrown into a pit, while
our hero, while yet a little fawn with speckled
flanks, fellinto one. However, the means of get-
ting there matters to the chap at the bottom
rather less than the means of getting out. In
Joseph’s case, the agency that got him in was a
band of particularly unfraternal brothers. In
our hero’s case—and we might as well begin call-
ing him OI Buck at once, especially as the name
is so ludicrously inappropriate to the little fawn
he was at the time,—the agency was a Hill Billy.
A Hill Billy is, normally, a citizen of the com-
monwealth who lives on a rundown-farm or cabin

up in the mountain country where the towns were
200

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 201

prosperous a hundred years ago, but later slid
down to the valleys when the railroads came, leav-
ing mostly the shiftless, the infirm, the feeble-
minded, to repopulate the hills. So far as the
hills have been repopulated—which isn’t very far
—it has been by the shiftless, the weak-willed, the
feeble-minded. The result to-day is the Hill
Billy.

Now, some Hill Billies catch woodchucks along
in August, when they are well-grown and fat, and
salt down the meat in barrels, for winter con-
sumption. Why not? The meat tastes “as
good as chicken,” they say. But that is neither
here nor there. What matters just now is that
other Hill Billies are partial to venison, and there
is only one game warden to a great many square
miles of wild country. It’s risky, of course, but
life at best is a risky proposition. So all the salt
put out in the upland pastures isn’t for the rang-
ing cattle, and Wilbur Bailey, being shy on am-
munition and still shyer on cash, as well as on
brains, as you may infer, refrained from shaving
for the sixth consecutive morning and went out to
a certain dim deer run he knew of, on his ancestral

202 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

acres, and there digged a pit (where nature had
aided him by an old erosion gully), across which
he placed boughs and bait in the shape of a lump
or two of salt, a few oats and several juicy leaves
of Swiss chard from his wife’s weedy vegetable
garden. Wilbur Bailey didn’t care for vege-
tables himself, certainly not enough to weed ’em.
He preferred meat.

But Wilbur’s toil (considerable enough to have
cultivated a large corn field) availed him less than
he hoped (as well as more than he expected),
from two causes. One cause was biological—an
adult deer’s ability to jump out of a hole. The
second cause was international. It would be too
long a story to tell how the Polacks first came into
the hills, buying abandoned farms, or even how
the Hill Billies, Yankees all, scorned them, and
how feuds arose over tumble-down fences and
consequent incursions of Polish kine. Suffice it
to report that young Ignace Raufkowsky, a son
of Wilbur’s next neighbor down the road, and
whose father was even then “ at law” with Wil-
bur over a fence, had learned a thing or two dur-
ing his “ Americanization ” process, besides how

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 203

to spell “ cat” and sing the Star-Spangled Ban-
ner. He saw Wilbur go into the woods with a *
shovel, and he went, too—at a discreet distance.
After Wilbur had departed from his baited pit,
a black-eyed, sharp face might have been seen
rising over a fern-draped boulder. The Rauf-
kowskys had no telephone, but the Wojtyniaks
had, two miles down the hill. Ignace took off
his shoes to save leather, and walked down the
hill. At the Wojtyniaks’ he called up Bill Sny-
der, the game warden. Score one for the Rauf-
kowskys, in the fence case!

It was hardly more than daybreak the next
morning when Wilbur set forth once again into
the woods, armed this trip with a long knife and
a piece of rope. As he drew near his pit, he
quickened his pace into a run, for he heard dis-
tinctly the sound of thrashing amid boughs, and
also something very like a cry of distress. He
sprang out of the bushes over the brow of the
gully where his pit was dug, and as he sprang the
bushes parted on the other side, and he looked
squarely into the steel-gray eyes of Bill Snyder.
Young Ignace, having the future in mind, when

204 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

Bill Snyder would be far away, was not visible
just then.

“ Hello, Wilbur, what you doing here?” asked
Bill.

“ T heard a noise, and I was comin’ to see what
it was,” said Wilbur, sneaking a glance down into
his pit, where a little mottled fawn was whimper-
ing.

“Well, you come with me, and I'll tell you all
about it.” Bill spoke quietly, with an engaging
smile.

* Aw, no, Bill, honest to God, I didn’t know
nothin’ about

He turned his head quickly, as if to estimate
the chances to make a break.

But the game warden was beside him, with two
long strides. The edge of a hard hand hit his
wrist, and the knife fell from his pained fingers.

“Now I'll take the rope,” said Bill, quietly, as
he picked up the knife. “I advise you to stand
right there.” And he let his hand wander a sec-
ond toward his hip.

Wilbur stood right there, while Snyder got into
the pit and tussled with the terrified little fawn

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 205

till he had his legs tied together. Then he slung
him head down on a pole, and making Wilbur
take an end, they carried him to a wood road,
where a Ford was standing. They put him in
the rear on a blanket, and Snyder ordered his
prisoner up on the front seat. Presently Ol
Buck was inside Snyder’s chicken fence, being
coaxed by Mrs. Snyder to feed out of a baby’s
bottle, and Wilbur was on his way to face the dis-
trict judge. His fate no longer concerns us.
Suffice to say the punishment was terrible—he
had to work all winter to pay off his fine.

Meanwhile Ol Buck easily mastered the bottle
art, and throve lustily. He frisked his absurd bit
of white tail all about the yard after a few days,
butted anybody who came near him (except Mrs.
Snyder and Bill, his bottle bearers), and was
admired of all the neighborhood, and later of all
the county, for Bill took him to the county fair in
a little wooden pen, where he was almost as much
a centre of attraction as the horse races.

But as time went on and OI’ Buck grew in
stature, passing from the bottle stage to the let-
tuce and chard and hemlock bough and sumach

206 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

blossom stage, a chicken run was too small a spot
in which to confine him. Snyder tried the ex-
periment once or twice of letting him loose in the
yard, but on the first occasion he jumped the
fence and was chased back in terror by a dog, and
on the second occasion he went into a neighbor’s
yard, demolished the lettuce in an open cold
frame, and then knocked down the neighbor’s lit-
tle boy with the part of his head where his horns
were going to be. After that, Snyder took him
to the superintendent of one of the big summer
states, where there was a big chicken run of al-
most an acre, and left him there for the winter.

In spite of this rearing in captivity, which is
bad as a rule for all deer and moose, because by
nature they range for their food and thus keep in
condition, Ol’ Buck seemed to thrive, and when
early spring came he had every appearance of
health. He was full of ginger, too, and though
well enough disposed toward the man who fed
him, he not infrequently threatened to try his
budding antlers on anybody else who got him into
a corner.

Once a woman came to see him.

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 207

“* Oh, the darling!” she cried. “ Deer are such
pretty, timid, gentle-eyed creatures, aren’t they?
Come here, you pretty little thing.” And she
drew near him, holding out her hand to stroke his
head.

She said later, when she got her wind back, that
she believed her corset steels were all that saved
her.

Bill Snyder came frequently to see him, and on
his last trip, the first of March, declared that in a
week or two they’d set him free. But they never
did.

OP Buck discovered one night that he had!
grown stronger and bigger. He went over the
chicken wire, catching on the top, to be sure, and
half breaking it down, and the following morning
the man who fed him followed the tracks through
the snow as far as the woods. That was the last
he ever saw of OI Buck.

So far as I know, that was the last anybody
saw of OI Buck, for two years and a half. No-
body with a gun saw him, at any rate, for he es-
caped either death or wounds. Yet he might
have been seen, too, for he roamed the country.

208 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

for many miles, and having less fear of man than
his fellows in whose company he often traveled,
and knowing, also, how good certain domestic
products are to eat, such as apples, beet tops, the
tips of young string bean vines, and succulent
Swiss chard, he not infrequently came out of the
woods into fields and orchards, just as the dawn
was reddening, or even trod softly into the very
gardens and nibbled what he liked best. It was
he, I always thought, who came into my garden
one morning, after a rain, so that the ground was
soft and he left deep prints with his sharp hoofs,
and ate the tops off an entire row of beets. He
touched nothing else, stepping daintily through
the strawberry bed without treading on a single
vine. It took the beets the rest of the season to
make new tops, and we never did get any roots
from them. But I treasure no grudge. I don’t
particularly like beets.

However, the next authentic record we have of
OY Buck was, as I say, two years and a half after
his escape, and the circumstances were dramatic.
Drama, you may recall, has been defined by Bru-
netiére as a “ clash of wills,” a contest of contend-

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 209

ing desires, and it was a clash of wills, as well as
a clash of horns and heads, which the cottagers on
Hubbard’s Pond beheld across the water one
September twilight.

Do you know September twilight over a still,
fresh-water pond in the woods? If you do, you
have felt its mystery and charm. You have felt
how night oozes from the shadows of the trees
over the water close in shore, and from the trees
themselves, and yet how the centre of the lake
holds day still imprisoned in its placid mirror.
At such an hour, on such a pond, almost anything
might come from the mystery of the forest on the
farther shore. What actually came on this occa-
sion were two stags in mortal combat, followed
by a doe, the cause of their bitter contention, who
was curiously unaffected by the sight of the
struggle, but began peacefully to browse on the
bushes along the strip of beach, quite as if battles
for her favors were too common to notice. The
stags, however, were so intent on their battle that
they could hardly have observed her attitude of
uncomplimentary indifference. It is a curious
_ thing that when men fall to fighting over a

210 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

woman they become so absorbed that they forget
the woman, which perhaps explains why she re-
gards the whole matter with indifference. “If
it wasn’t I, it would be something else they’d fight
over,” she seems to say. “‘ Meanwhile, this is a
charming piece of music ”—or “ a delicious sprig
of hemlock,” if she chances to be a doe.

But meanwhile it was serious business for the
two bucks who were fighting so close to her. A
slip, a wandering glance, a throat exposed, might
mean death. Gentle creatures, deer? Then you
never saw two bucks in action! OV Buck and his
antagonist charged each other once along the
strip of beach, and as their heads met, their horns
locked, the watchers at the log cottage across the
pond distinctly heard the crash of the impact.
They saw one deer reel, and plunge out into the
water, pulling his horns away from the grapple.
He backed in up to his knees, and the other deer
rushed him again. This time they met with a
louder crash, and swayed their interlocked heads,
pushing and thrusting, their muscles rigid, their
eyes red, their breath hissing. Once more the
elder deer worked free, and backed off. He was

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 211

evidently getting the worst of it, for it was Ol’
Buck who, for a third time, rushed him, though
he rallied and charged to meet the attack. The
water splashed high as their hoofs clove it, and as
they once more broke free, anyone close enough
might have seen the red upon it. ‘They were now
out almost to their haunches, and could get less
momentum on their next charge. ‘Their horns
did not lock, but as Ol’ Buck’s head crashed into
and past the head of his opponent, he lunged sav-
agely with all the power of his sleek, powerful
neck, and a red gash opened along the neck of the
other, clear to the shoulder. The blood ran into
the water, and with a bellow of pain the defeated
buck dashed out of the lake, across the beach, and
disappeared into the woods.

‘Then the conqueror raised his head and
snorted, splashing triumphantly to shore and
turning toward the doe.

But she kept right on nibbling deliberately at
hemlock roots.

The watchers across the lake reported that Ol’
Buck appeared somewhat surprised by this indif-
ference. It was certainly no way to treat a tri-

212 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

umphant hero, who has just done bloody battle
for your sake. Ol Buck strode rather impa-
tiently up to the doe, but she frisked her sharp
heels and her white tail disappeared, ghost-like,
into the gloom of the forest. Ol Buck followed
her, at a bound, and that was the last the watchers
saw.

It was as well, perhaps, if they were believers
in the traditional gentleness and timidity of the
deer. For what followed was not pretty, any
way you look at it. It was, however, natural,
and it showed, at least, that OI’ Buck was a fellow
of spirit and that, deep rooted within him, was
the triumphant instinct to keep his race alive.
You wonder, perhaps, why the deer remain so
numerous in our woods, in spite of the hunters,
when fiercer, stronger animals have vanished, and
even animals no less protected by law in certain
seasons than the deer, are fast disappearing also.
In part, at least, it is because, like Ol’ Buck, the
male deer are fierce to fight for their mating
privileges, and strong and ruthless to insist on
them.

At any rate, OP Buck caught up with the doe

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 213

in a small open glade, and once more approached
her for a sign that she abided by the results of
the battle. Once more she turned from him, in-
different—not coquettishly, he could have en-
dured that—but with complete indifference. OF
Buck didn’t argue. He used his head, but in an
extremely primitive way; he drew off, charged,
hit the doe amidships, and knocked her off her
feet, so that she rolled and slid up against the
bushes. She got up stiffly, and tried to move
away once more, but OI’ Buck was too quick for
her. Again he struck her, head on, and knocked
her down. Even this second emphatic token of
affection, however, did not cause her to recipro-
cate. She got up as best she could, and a third
time tried to get away. Once again Ol’ Buck
smote her, and once again she fell sprawling and
breathless on the ground. This time she rose
with still greater difficulty. The spirit as well
as the breath was knocked out of her. Limp and
lame, she raised large hazel eyes of acquiescence
toward the still inflamed eyes of her lord and
master, and signified that she was conquered.
So man, also, wooed and won, it is said, in the

214 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

neolithic age. But nowadays it is not usually
advisable to try such methods. Women have
many weapons, from hatpins to sarcasm, and
they have decreed more gentle and tactful ap-
proaches. Which only means that a deer is a
wild animal, after all, and a strong, virile, pugna-
cious one, not the symbol of timidity and shyness
he is generally pictured.

With this conquest over the older leader, OY
Buck supplanted him as the guiding spirit of the
herd which began gradually to assemble as winter
drew nearer, and to work over the plain, through
the swamps, toward the steep wall of the big
mountain. Often the herd scattered, the fawns
keeping with the does, and always they wan-
dered far each day in search of food, not because
food was hard to find, but because it was better
to nibble a little here and there, with a mile
canter between bites; if one ate a full meal in one
place, he paid for it with a stomachache, or at the
least a lessening of muscular vigor and wind. In
spite of his early bringing up, in confinement,
OY Buck knew that as well as anybody. His
nose, too, was as keen as any nose in the herd.

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 215

When he stole into an orchard at the dusk of
evening, or at the dusk of dawn, to nibble apples
under the trees, he would take a bite and. then
raise his head, nuzzling the air, as it were, for
scent of danger, before he stooped for the next
bite. His large, soft ears, too, pricked up con-
stantly, like a fine young dog’s, and the sleek
yellow coat that wrapped his haunches was like
a wet silk shirt wrapped to the shoulders of an
athlete, showing the powerful muscles ready for
instant action. I came upon him once, greatly
to his surprise, at the lower end of my orchard,
directly under the mountain. It was almost
Thanksgiving, and very cold, with a high wind
blowing. I came up against this wind, and he
neither heard nor smelled me, so that I stalked
him close, screened by some bushes, and saw him
bite off the top half of a frozen apple without dis-
lodging the lower half from its contact with the
ground, as I discovered on later examination.
What other animal feeds so daintily? I had a
flash in my pocket, which I suddenly turned
full on him. He blinked great, startled eyes
into the radiance for a second, then the muscles

216 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

played beneath the silken shirt, and I saw merely
a white strip of tail going over the fence, from a
standing start. It was a clean, beautiful jump
of six feet. I have heard sporting editors liken
hurdlers to deer—but they never saw Ol’ Buck
take a fence!

The week of legal deer hunting opened at six
o’clock on December first. It is only three miles
from the village, across the swamp to the first
leap of the mountain, yet before the sun was up
that day fifty men with guns had either passed
along this road, or were stationed at various
points in the swamp woods beside it. What show
had OY Buck and his little herd against such
odds? ‘There were more than five hunters, more
than ten barrels, to each deer! Well, they had
one considerable advantage over the hunters—
they had better ears and infinitely better noses.
A hunter, if he wants a good nose, has to employ
a dog, and dogs are not permitted in deer hunt-
ing in our State. As a matter of fact, when the
first hunters came along the road, long before
six o’clock, and struck into the swamp woods by
a logging road, Ol’ Buck and his little herd were

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 217

scattered over an area of two or three acres, not
three hundred yards away, just beginning to
browse for breakfast on the ground hemlock
which grew thickly at that spot. Ol Buck him-
self and two of the does on the windward side got
the scent, and were off with long, easy bounds
through the dim woods, where the ground was
not yet frozen and they made astonishingly little
noise. Not a soul saw them go, and in ten min-
utes they had crossed the road at the base of the
mountain, and had begun to climb.

But there is one real woodsman in our town,
who knows in advance what the animals are going
to do. An hour earlier than any other hunter,
he was out, and up the mountain, where he sta-
tioned himself down wind, not too close to a cer-
tain trail so dim that only another woodsman
like himself could have detected it even by day-
light. It was the trail made by the deer the
winter before, now practically closed in again.
He knew that at the first sign of danger the deer
would be coming up this way. Presently he
heard the swish and soft crashing of bushes below
him, and his finger crept around the trigger of his

218 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

shotgun. It was OI’ Buck, leading his band up
the mountain.

But mountain air currents are tricky things
sometimes. Just at this moment a strong gust
came swirling down over the summit, from the
wrong direction, and OI’ Buck got the scent—the
man scent, and the odd, strong odor of gun oil.
He pulled up sharp, and swerved hard to the left,
bounding along without climbing for two hun-
dred yards or more, and then resuming his ascent
through unbroken laurel—what in the southern
mountains would be called a laurel hell. He
knew well enough that once in this tangle he and
his herd could outrun anything.

The man swore bitterly at the wind, and sat
back to wait for another opportunity. He didn’t
propose to waste energy by following up this
herd through the laurel and over the upper
ledges.

OY Buck and his herd saw the red sun ball
heave up over the eastern hills, from a ledge 1,500
feet above the swamp where they had started to
breakfast. This ledge stretched for ten miles
along the eastern flank of the great mountain,

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 219

wind swept and covered only with storm-dwarfed
pitch pines, with some moss, thin, hardy grasses,
and a profusion of low shrubs in the rock crannies.
It was their winter feeding ground, for here the
wind kept the snow blown off, and between the
ledge and the peak of the mountain was an ex-
tensive forest full of evergreens for additional
food, and shelter. They felt safe up here, too,
since in winter it was a spot almost inaccessible,
at any rate a spot where nobody ever came to
disturb them.

Still, twice that morning OI’ Buck had fled
from the man smell in the woods, and now he
heard unpleasant explosions here and there in
the distance. He kept pricking his ears nerv-
ously, and raising his muzzle to sniff the wind.
The herd wandered, browsing, along the ledges
till the sun was high overhead, and the noon
sleepiness came upon them. The fawns and
some of the does lay down, picking out spots
where the dead grass made a bed in the warm sun-
light, but Ol Buck, a young yearling buck, and a
doe, retraced their steps cautiously. They went
for some little distance without detecting any

220 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

signs of danger, and then, suddenly, both their
ears and noses got unmistakable warning. ‘They
were being followed! With a great bound, OI
Buck led the way back to the herd. The spots
where the deer had lain down to rest were still
almost warm, the grass still crushed in the shape
of their bodies, when two hunters reached the
place. But no deer was visible! Only, by care-
ful searching again, could the men follow the
tracks into the tangle of scrub oak and laurel and
blueberries and azalea, through which the deer
had headed for the forests on the mountain sum-
mit. And the summit was State reservation, and
Bill Snyder was the game warden!

Still, this was wild country. Bill Snyder
couldn’t be everywhere. It wasn’t far to bring a
deer out of the reservation, and then report the
kill. “Who'd know the difference? Their blood
was up now, the trail was fresh—and they
plunged in after the herd. Up here near the
summit there was suddenly a little coating of
snow, the precipitation of some cloud, perhaps,
and the trail became easy to follow. When they
reached the double tracks (for Ol’ Buck, of

SUDDENLY BOTH THEIR EARS AND NOSES GOT UNMISTAKABLE WARNING

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 221

course, had once more gone back to sniff before
letting the herd settle down to rest), they stalked
off to leeward, and crept in as silently as they
could toward an open space where they thought
the deer would be napping. But even as the
trees thinned, and they got a view into the open-
ing, they saw the white tails vanishing into the
opposite foliage. Raising their guns, they fired,
and then sprang forward to pick up the trail.
They cried aloud with joy—there was blood on
the snow! Forgetful now of weariness, of tear-
ing laurel, of slippery rocks, they almost ran
along the trail. But the blood signs grew no
thicker, the wounded deer did not seem to have
dropped out of the herd. Up to the peak of the
mountain, then over a seventy degree cliff wall,
the tracks led them, and plunged into the wilder-
ness on the farther side. Once out of the summit
snow, too, the tracks grew hard to follow, and as
dusk came on two weary and empty-handed men
were plugging back along the rutty, frozen road
to the village, their guns heavy in their hands.
A poor day’s work, they said.

And Ol!’ Buck agreed with them, with bitter-

222 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

ness and anger! One of his does had a buck shot
in her hind shoulder. It had not cut a cord, to
be sure, but it pained her, and made her lame and
sick, and the blood had run down her leg and
frozen in clots, and now she lay in the warm, thick
shelter of a stand of young hemlocks, her eyes
big with pain, and big with terror, too, of the un-
known affliction, while the others lay or stood
browsing near by, and Ol’ Buck stared at her
wonderingly, trying, perhaps, to clear up in his
mind the mystery of association between the
man smell, the explosion sound, and this wound
in his doe’s shoulder. At any rate, the fact
of association was clear. Look out for the
man smell! It means danger, pain, death per-
haps!

All that week on the mountain OI!’ Buck never
relaxed his nervous vigilance, and never allowed
the herd to go out of the deepest woods, or down
the lower slopes at all, for the guns were sound-
ing there, and up here, for some unknown reason,
except for the one time when his doe was hit, no
guns had been fired. Animals, of course, cannot
reason. Wise men have often told us so. But,

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 223

reason or no reason, Ol’ Buck could put two
and two together. Humans carried guns; guns
caused wounds and terror; the guns were going
off down below; they weren’t going off up here;
why not stay up here? Q.E.D. Naturally,
this isn’t reasoning, because only a deer does it,
not a noble, two-legged animal called Man, who
shoots deer. But it has served many a deer in
protecting his life and the life of his fawns,
so it does well enough. And it explains,
perhaps, why this story can keep on, instead
of ending right here with the slaughter of the »
hero.

His experience that week in protecting his
herd, with a wounded doe limping in his com-
pany, intensified Ol Buck’s instinctive dread of
man. Though the guns presently ceased, and
the winter snows came, and nobody molested
them up there on the wild, wind-swept ledges,
and they grew bold again and foraged down to
the plain for frozen apples in the orchards, OY
Buck was more alert than ever to scent danger on
the wind, and to spring away from it into the
protection of the wildest forest. When spring

224 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

came and he left the herd, to suffer alone, or, at
best, with a few of his equally afflicted male com-
panions, the ignominy of a de-antlered brow, and
later when his new horns began to grow and he
rubbed his itching sprouts against the smooth
birches or hornbeams in the forest, wandering
back into the swamps and by the refreshing pond
shores, he still remembered the danger that lurks
in the man smell, and he became the wariest of
woodland creatures, taking his sleep in thickets
moated with swamp or precipice.

That next September a young buck had the
temerity to challenge him, but he was still far
from being an old buck himself, and his antag-
onist suffered the same fate as befell his opponent
the year before. The little herd was still intact,
too, for though many of the fawns had now grown
up and scattered, there were new ones to take
their places. Race suicide is unknown among
healthy deer. It is murder, not suicide, which
reduces their number.

Once again, too, Ol’ Buck eluded the hunters
on the first day of December, and reached the
mountain reservation with his herd untouched.

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 225

Then a strange thing happened, something quite
new to his experience, at any rate. A great
snow-storm came, without much wind even up on
the exposed ledges, and the snow piled up and
up, and up, till all the grass and moss and even
the bushes were covered, and even the most ener-
getic stamping and pushing along paths by the
whole herd could not avail to keep the food sup-
ply uncovered. Of course, the ground hemlock
was covered, too, and though there were the top
shoots of saplings sticking up in the woods, and
hemlock branches to eat, the food question be-
came rather serious. Nor did this snow melt.
Instead, more came, and more, till at last there
were six or seven feet of it up on the moun-
tain.

Or Buck led the way down, always seeking for
some variety in diet, and for enough succulence
in the food to supply the warmth their bodies
needed. In this search, he came early one morn-
ing on a lumber slash. He heard horses champ-
ing in a stable somewhere, and caught warning
odors—but he was hungry, and the cutting had
brought down within reach branches of trees

226 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

which were good, especially the delicate buds of
the hard woods, and boughs of hemlock and
cedar. He fell upon them, and then, before day
should break, he gathered others of the herd to
feed. They were still feeding when they caught
the sound and smell of the dread humans, and
rushed away into the forest, floundering almost
to their bellies in the deep snow, so that an ener-
getic man on snowshoes could almost have run
the fawns down. Such bitter going as this was
too exhausting for long trips. In spite of the
presence of the hated man, OY Buck yarded his
herd not far from the lumber camp, and every.
night, before the dawn broke, or after the men
were early asleep in the evening, he led them to
the slash, where they fed. After a day or two,
also, they discovered that when the horses were
fed at noon, a lot of the oats spilled out upon the
snow, and not all of them were picked up by the
chickadees. Into these stray oats all the deer
nuzzled, cleaning up each space.

But if they discovered the oats and the sweet
terminal buds on the fallen tops, the lumbermen
also discovered their tracks. And one of these

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 227

lumbermen was a Canuck by the name of Johnny.
Johnny’s command of English was largely con-
fined to a whole-hearted but quite innocent pro-
fanity, and his arms were admittedly stronger
than his head. But he had a warm corner in his
heart for animals. He looked at the tracks for
three days, saying nothing, and then he remarked,
“TI tink me dose deer mebbe havin’ pretty hard
tam.”

The boss only grunted, but as Johnny was his
best man with a team, he made no remonstrance
when he saw him load an extra forkful of hay on
the outgoing sledge.

The next morning Johnny saw that the deer
had walked around the hay, without eating it.
He went back at noon and brought up some salt
and sprinkled it over the hay.

“ Hi, Johnny, that’s a salt lick—you’ll have the
game warden after you—twenty-five dollars
fine!’ somebody called.

“T vink no,” said Johnny, with his childlike
smile, continuing to sprinkle.

But the salt worked little better. Ol Buck
sniffed it, and took a lick or two, but it was

228 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

midwinter, and the salt hunger was not in
him.

Again Johnny was disappointed, but he
smiled cheerily.

“T vink I fool ’em yet!” he said, and dumped
a measure of oats into the hay.

The next morning the hay was half gone, and
the remainder trampled into the snow. ‘The oats
had quite disappeared.

“T tink dose deer, dey like oats,” Johnny
mused. Whereupon he proceeded to establish
half a dozen feeding stations at convenient points
close to the logging roads, and to disappear from
the camp before the others were up in the morn-
ing, wriggling out of his bunk and into his boots
with a soft smile on his face. .

Soon after even the least interested of his mates
began to notice that the deer were becoming
tamer. Their white tails would often flash into
the woods in front of the oncoming team, and at
last one of them saw the leader of the herd him-
self, feeding up in the slash, and only running
away when the horses shook their bells as they
approached.

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 229

“You see heem, you see Ol’ Buck?” Johnny
asked. “I tink I mak’ OP Buck what you call
tame yet!”

The man laughed. ‘“ Swell chance!” he said.
“ Maybe you'll tame a fawn, though.”

“Umph!” said Johnny, and kept on at his
morning expeditions.

It was a Saturday that Johnny announced he °
was ready to give an exhibition. The big boss
had come to the camp to pay off, and jokingly
asked the “ Frenchie ” where his pet deer were.

“T get dose deer,” Johnny replied, flashing
white teeth under his little moustache. “I get
OY Buck.”

He filled a pan with oats and vanished into the
forest. The sound of a gentle tapping on the
pan floated back.

Presently Johnny himself came back. Like
the Pied Piper he moved, out of the shadow into
the edge of the clearing, and behind him, the for-
ward animals nosing eagerly toward the pan,
which he kept tantalizingly just ahead of them,
came the entire herd, with two spring fawns al-
most under Johnny’s heels and—yes, it was

230 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

true!—the proud horns of OI Buck himself
looming up in the midst!

Then Johnny stopped, actually pushing the
fawns from the pan, while he appeased the rest
with a few handfuls of oats cast on the snow, and
held the pan toward OI Buck’s nose. Slowly, a
little reluctantly, it almost seemed a little proudly,
with his ears still up and his eyes alert, Ol Buck
drew close, and put his nose into the food.
Johnny raised one hand and touched his neck.
Quick as a flash, he reared up and sprang back a
full pace, but Johnny persisted, holding out the
pan again. Again Ol’ Buck nuzzled into it, and
this time he let Johnny’s hand rest a second on
his strong, beautiful neck, before he reared back
his head again and withdrew a dozen feet. ‘Then
Johnny turned to the fawns, setting down his
pan for the does to feed in, and putting an arm
around the neck of each little deer, while his face,
between theirs, laughed with inexpressible delight
toward the astonished group of men below him.

Somebody shouted, and OI’ Buck, with a single
spring, was faced in the opposite direction and
headed for the woods. The does followed, but

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 231

the two little fawns, held fast by Johnny, only
tugged their heads for a moment, and then seemed
almost content to remain. He fed them the last
of the oats before they, too, seampered away, like
animated sawhorses.

“I tink dose two fawn, dey need camp,”
Johnny said, returning all smiles. “ Little legs,
dey all shiver dis way—so cold! ”—and he illus-
trated with his own stout legs.

So Johnny built a little lean-to of ‘hemlock
boughs, not far into the woods, and bedded it with
hay and baited it with oats and some carrots, and
then coaxed the two small fawns into it. Once
they were established there, he went out of a
morning and sat ‘between them, on the hay, while
they fed out of the pan on his lap. While he was
so engaged, about the third morning, he was
startled by a sound, and looking up, saw OI’ Buck
himself at the entrance.

“Ho!” said Johnny softly, “bon jour, OY
Buck! So he come beg, eh? He come vera tame
now, eh? He like Johnny leetle bit now, eh? He
like nice breakfas’?”

Johnny held out the pan, and Ol’ Buck poked

232 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

his proud, sensitive nose into it, and daintily filled
his mouth while the mittened hand of Johnny
touched gently, with admiration and a little awe,
his branching horns. OJ Buck shook his head
angrily. He resented this familiarity. Johnny
respected his feelings—and respected his horns—
and withdrew his hand. But Ol’ Buck did not
go away. He took another mouthful of oats.
After all, this was Johnny. Johnny was a man,
but a different kind of man. He did not shoot—
he fed. Men could be kind and friendly, as well
as cruel and hostile. Ol Buck was confronted
with the same paradox which has confused the
philosophers and theologians, through all the
centuries—and, like them, he was making the
best of it, while the kindness held out!

Would it always hold out? He did not know.
Perhaps he did not wonder. He at least was sure
of Johnny now—and the oats. He, the wildest,
most wary of his clan, was eating from a dish held
in the lap of ahuman! Ol Buck was tamed.

But when the snow melted and the natural food
supply was again uncovered, and the sap stirred
in the maple shoots, Ol’ Buck was off through his

THE TAMING OF OL’ BUCK 233

ranges, and Johnny knew him no more. What
fate is in store for him? Will his taming make
him less suspicious of other men, so that he will
fall a victim to their guns? Or will his in-
stinctive wariness again assert itself, to protect
him and his herd? Who can answer? I can
only say that so far nobody has reported his kill-
ing; he is still ranging our woods and swamps,
and watching from the lofty mountain ledges the
heave of the red sun ball above the eastern world
rim.

CHAPTER VIII
RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR

ED SLAYER lived in an old stone wall

which ran up the hill toward the woods,
dividing two peaceful pastures where in summer
the cattle grazed, and in winter the field-mice
made tunnels under the snow and matted grasses,
radiating out in all directions to reach the richest
stores of seeds and roots. From any of the in-
numerable holes, like little cave mouths, in his
wall, Red Slayer could look out upon the world
and see the pleasant countryside—the pasture
slopes, the green woods above climbing up to the
mountain shoulder, the road below where the
wagons rattled past or the motors whizzed, the
farm -fields and orchards and barns and houses
beyond, and the broad meadow where the brook
ran half hidden in sedge and his cousins, the mink,

lived well. Many tourists, going by, looked on
234

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 235

this scene and sighed that they could not always
live amid a country so peaceful and calm and
lovely. A poet has written about it. More than
one artist has painted it. Yet there is no use in
blinking the fact that it had no effect whatever
on Red Slayer. Perhaps there is less in the
theory of environment than we suppose. Not all
the warlike peoples have sprung from wild and
rugged lands. Certainly, among weasels, the
landscape hath no charms to soothe the savage
breast. Red Slayer was a regular weasel, all
weasel from the tip of his sharp, keen-scented
nose to the tip of his furry tail (a distance of
some sixteen inches), and he regarded the land-
scape solely as a place in which to slay. He was
a cruel beast, there can be no doubt about it, a
cunning, alert, preternaturally active, sleek,
pretty villain; and, as the saying goes, he got
what was coming to him, which is not always the
case with villains, except, of course, in the movies.
But Red Slayer could never be put into a movie.
The camera shutter is a quick thing, but not quick
enough to capture Red Slayer!

I said that Red Slayer lived in the half tumbled

236 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

down stone wall, but that is not strictly true.
Actually he lived in a hole between two roots of
an old stump directly against the wall, and the
wall was his commonest path to and from his
dwelling. This hole had originally belonged to
a chipmunk, but Red Slayer, chancing along that
way on one of his wanderings (he was a great
wanderer when he went hunting, often traveling
many miles), had coveted it. He also coveted
the chipmunk. ‘There were two ways of getting
the chipmunk; one was to go down into the hole
and kill him, if he was there, the other was to wait
close by, in the wall, and pounce on him when he
came in or out. Red Slayer tried the hole, tenta-
tively. It went straight down for more than a
foot, and then evidently swerved at a sharp angle,
to the level. It was a pretty tight fit even for his
long, slender body, and promised to offer little
room to work in. Not that a chipmunk has to be
respected as a fighter at all, but a nipped nose
isn’t pleasant. So Red Slayer backed out of the
hole, withdrew into the wall till his reddish-brown
body was entirely invisible, and his sharp, sloe-
black eyes were invisible, too, and proceeded to

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 237

wait, with the patience characteristic, in some de-
gree, of all wild animals, but of very few humans.

Presently, if you could have seen Red Slayer’s
slender body, you would have seen it arch up,
you would have seen his neck stretch out and up-
ward, his sharp nose quiver almost imperceptibly.
He smelled his game approaching! He had a
nose more than the equal of any dog’s, and sharp
as were his eyes, it was his nose he chiefly relied
upon when hunting. The unsuspecting chip-
munk came along the top of the wall, drawing
near his burrow. When he was above it he
sprang down on the top of the stump. Then he
jumped again, planning to land at the mouth of
the hole. But he never did. Red Slayer came
out of the wall like an arrow from a bow and
caught him in mid-air, setting vicious teeth, with
unerring aim, into his neck, and bearing him to
the ground three feet away, such was the force of
his spring. When they landed, Red Slayer, of
course, was on top, and the poor chipmunk was too
far gone to put up any real fight. One more well
directed bite of those severing, tearing teeth, and
his neck veins were opened. Red Slayer drank

238 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

some of the blood which flowed. He was not
very hungry, as a matter of fact, but he bit open
the chipmunk’s skull and ate the brains. That
quite satisfied him, and he turned to an investiga-
tion of the burrow.

The hole went down, he found, largely through
soft earth and roots rotted to a brown pulp, so
that he had no difficulty in squeezing and pound-
ing the sides apart with his shoulders, making the
tunnel large enough for his own comfort. At
eighteen inches below the surface, it ceased
descending, and ran along on the level, reaching
in a few feet a sort of chamber. The shaft con-
tinued, apparently indefinitely, but beyond this
point it entered gravel, and Red Slayer was
averse to the effort required to enlarge the bore.
It made a perfectly good home as it was. More-
over, as winter was coming on, the chipmunk had
brought in some nice, dry, dead leaves for a bed.
There was also the smell of hazelnuts in the
tube—but that didn’t interest Red Slayer in the
least. Nothing interested him in the line of food
except meat. He curled up in the leaves and
took a long nap, with no more qualms of con-

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 239

science than a Prussian officer sleeping in a Bel-
gian chateau.

That was how Red Slayer achieved his snug,
warm home beside the gray stone wall between
the peaceful pastures and below the whispering
forest. The house suited him, the neighborhood
suited him. He settled down to become our most
undesirable citizen.

Shortly after a change began, not in his char-
acter, but in his appearance. From a pretty
reddish-brown above, with a whitish shirt front
and belly, and a black tail tip, he changed to a
curious mottled effect, especially odd on his tail,
which was black for one third, brown for one
third, and white for one third—a kind of pousse-
café effect. This lasted while the ground was
freezing and the early snows of November flying,
until gradually the white triumphed, and Red
Slayer emerged from his hole one morning of
white glitter and dazzle, as white as the snow it-
self, all except that last third of his tail, which
remained a glossy black. His eyes, too, of course
remained sloe-black. He was a lovely creature
then, a bit of animated ermine, sleek and slim and

240 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

clean, and when he bounded over the snow about
all you could see of him was his black tail tip, so
white he was. A wood-chopper was going up
through the pasture, and chanced to spy him, but
evidently not until after Red Slayer had scented
the man and seen him, too; for he was standing
with all four feet on the snow, his neck upraised,
his bead-like eyes fixed with suspicion yet alert
curiosity upon the big creature with the ax. The
man made a step toward him, and Red Slayer dis-
appeared. The man was perplexed. It seemed
utterly incredible that anything sixteen inches
long could disappear from sight on a field of bare,
clean snow. He peered about, and suddenly saw
the black tip of Red Slayer’s tail behind a tuft of
dried grass which stuck up above the snow ten
feet from the spot where he had first seen him.
The man took another step. By keeping his eyes
fixed on that black tail tip, he saw the weasel
make two springs of ten feet each, his hind feet
coming down almost in the tracks of his front
feet, and vanish into the wall. The man let his
eyes rove along the wall. In no more time than
it took him to move them, Red Slayer’s head, up-

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 241

raised neck, and shoulders, emerged from a hole
a dozen feet from the one where he had entered,
and the sloe-black, intelligent eyes met the man’s
in a bold, inquisitive stare. The man made an-
other dash forward—and Red Slayer was gone.
He did not see him again.

I tell this incident not because it had any effect
whatever on Red Slayer, but because it shows, in
large measure, why it had no effect upon him,
why he was so confident of himself, so devoid of
fear, so ready to tackle a bird or animal twice,
three, even four times his size or weight. He
had more than the quickness of a cat, coupled
with better than the nose of a dog. Short as his
legs were in proportion to his body, he had a leap-
ing agility and a bodily litheness which enabled
him either to attack or to escape at a tremendous
advantage over his foes. When an animal can
leap eight times its own length, and keep it up as
a regular gait till it gets to safety, it is not in
imminent danger of captivity, provided it has a
nose, or eyes, or ears, sharpened to give it warn-
ing of danger. And when it can thus leap, itself
almost invisible as it comes over the snow, aiming

242 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the terrible bite of its jaws to land with the ac-
curacy of a rifle shot, the thing aimed at is not at
all likely to come off on top. Red Slayer’s con-
fidence in himself was not misplaced.

Yet he had certain fears—not grave fears, but
rather wholesome respects for antagonists. He
respected Big Reddy and the other foxes, because
their noses were as good as his, and if they caught
him out on the open, some distance from a wall or
broken ground or thick bushes, they could make
it hot for him. He respected, in winter, the great
horned owls who lived up in the mountain woods
where he often went to hunt deer-mice. The
owls, with their uncanny eyes, and their advan-
tage of being in the air where the scent escaped
him, had to be watched for carefully, of course.
So did the hawks in the warmer seasons. He re-
spected, also, his cousins, the mink, who lived by
the meadow brook—respected and a little envied
them. He not infrequently wandered down
through the meadows on his hunting expeditions,
both in winter and summer. In winter there
were many field-mice to be had there, and in sum-
mer luscious young meadow larks on their nests

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 243

in the grass, and sparrows, too, and grasshoppers
and such small fry. As he wandered along the
brookside, he not infrequently came upon signs of
his cousins, and once he found the body of a Pekin
duck, half in the water, half out, its neck viciously
bitten. That was the work of a mink, he knew.
It was a fat duck, freshly killed that night, and
Red Slayer cautiously investigated the carcass.
He was tasting a morsel of the flesh when a warn-
ing odor smote his nostrils, and rearing his head,
he looked across the three feet of running brown
water directly into the snapping black eyes of one
of his cousins, who was also rearing a sleek brown
neck, out of the grass on the farther bank.
Cousin mink opened his mouth slightly, show-
ing white teeth, and made a remark. It was not
the sort of a remark regarded as good form be-
‘tween cousins of gentle breeding; certainly it dis-
closed no sense of the good fellowship of con-
sanguinity. Red Slayer knew that his unamiable
cousin had some inches the better of him in the
primitive style of argument for which he was evi-
dently preparing, and deemed discretion much
the better part of valor. He fled. But he

244 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

couldn’t help envying the mink that fat white
Pekin duck, which had so thoughtfully strayed
down from the farmyard up by the road. It was
not exactly fear, and not exactly respect, which
kept Red Slayer out of the barnyard itself. It
was rather the sense of mystery, of the unknown.
Close around the dwellings of man were strange
smells and alarming noises, there were cats and
dogs and unexplored recesses into which one
might run for safety, only to find himself trapped.
It was Red Slayer’s common sense instinct to
avoid the houses and barns of man.

Nor had he, so far in his life, needed to visit
them. There was plenty of hunting without.
He liked to hunt at night, for then the deer-mice
were up and about in the woods, often dancing in
some tiny glade, where he could pounce upon
them; the partridges were sleeping in a nest of
leaves on the ground; the rabbits would be com-
ing by on their little packed highways on the
snow, beside which he could crouch and wait.
But he often hunted by day, too. It was a
matter of mood, and the state of his stomach. He
was tricky in his hunting, too, with several dodges

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 245

which he worked. One of his devices was to
follow the line of a fence which ran along the
road, passing one post on the north, the next on
the south, the next on the north, and so on with
the regularity of a shuttle in a loom. Along this
fence were many weed and grass stalks sticking
up above the snow, for the mowers never get quite
up to a fence line, and the mice came here to feed
on the seeds. By passing the successive posts on
alternate sides, Red Slayer was first screened
from the view of one side, then of the other, and
seldom enough did he go the quarter mile length
of that fence without making a sudden spring and
landing his teeth into the throat of a mouse. If
he was merely hunting for the fun of it, he left
the mouse where it lay, scarcely drinking its
blood. If he were a bit hungry, he ate the brains.
If he were still more hungry, he peeled back the
skin and ate the flesh. But sometimes he carried
the mouse away, caching it in his wall, against a
lean spell. When the snow was very deep and
the hunting poor, he thus stocked his larder when
game came his way.

This particular winter, after he had come to

246 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

live in the chipmunk’s hole, the snows were fre-
quent and the world was buried deeper and
deeper under them, and it was bitter cold. More
and more Red Slayer found himself hunting be-
cause he was hungry, and not just for the fun of
killmg, and he began to take longer chances.
More than once he hunted where he knew Big
Reddy, the fox, was hunting, too, in the hope of
getting a rabbit. It was his good fortune one
day, traveling over the snow with his black tail
about all of him which you would have noticed, to
come upon fresh rabbit tracks leading into a
dense thicket of shrubs and very small trees. He
sneaked in under the bushes silently and swiftly,
his nose telling him the game was near. There
were, in fact, no less than four rabbits in that
thicket, each one crouched under a mat of over-
hanging shrubbery, taking a midday snooze.
These rabbits, too, had been hungry, and only
the night before had come upon a stand of seed-
ling maples, with juicy terminal buds in easy
reach. They had fed well, and now were taking
their ease. Red Slayer slunk up close to the
nearest one, which stirred uneasily, some sixth

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 247

sense telling him danger was near. Even as Red
Slayer sprang, the rabbit leapt, also. But he
was too late. The weasel’s teeth were fastened
in his neck. Red Slayer had just missed his aim
at a vital artery, however, because of the rabbit’s
spring, and the two went down on the snow, leap-
ing and thrashing about, the rabbit kicking at his
own neck frantically with his powerful hind feet,
and Red Slayer engaged in the twofold occupa-
tion of hanging on and avoiding the blows of
those feet. The snow grew red. The weasel
needed all his snake-like litheness to maintain him-
self, and work his hold over to the vital artery.
But he succeeded, and the rabbit ceased from
struggling with a last convulsive kick. Then
Red Slayer feasted.

But, meantime, the other three rabbits, terri-
fied by Red Slayer’s coming, a creature hardly a
quarter their size, had leapt frantically out of the
tangle of bushes, knowing that they were safer in
the open than in a region where the weasel could
slip through with a speed as great as their own.
Had it been a dog or a fox pursuing them, they
would have dashed into the bushes instead. A

248 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

man, crossing the fields, saw them emerge above
him into the pasture and hop rapidly away, and
wondered why. No dog emerged in pursuit.
There was no hawk or owl overhead. Yet it was
plain they were flying from some mortal peril.
But his curiosity was not strong enough to lead
him back into the bushes, and that is why Red
Slayer was not hungry that night, but full to re-
pletion as he snoozed in his snug, stolen chamber.

But food grew scarce again, and sometimes
Red Slayer wandered for many days and nights,
miles and miles from home, without satisfying
his desires. He traveled through the woods
smelling for deer-mice and red squirrels (who
often saw him and scolded him angrily from their
safe perches in the trees), and sneaking around
rocks, from the north side, to pounce by chance
on some partridge that might be huddled under
the warm southern face. In the woods, at night,
or in the dusk of late afternoon, he heard the
mournful hoot of the big horned owl, and kept his
path so far as he could under the protection of
laurel leaves or ferns or rocks, with his eyes ever
watchful for the deadly, flitting shadow above,

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 249

and for the nearest hole into which to dive. He
traveled over the meadows, too, and along the
fences, and went into old stone walls looking for
squirrels and chipmunks, and even into wood-
chuck holes looking for sleeping chucks. It was
a tough hide around the neck a chuck had, to be
sure, but there was a softer place under the
throat, and one couldn’t be too particular when
hungry. Still, this was a last resort.

Then Red Slayer’s mind reverted to the Pekin
ducks in the barnyard. Driven by hunger to
overcome his aversion to the unknown, he crossed
the road one moonlight night, nothing but his
pale shadow and his black tail tip showing over
the snow, and sniffed around the barnyard. His
nose took him to the hen-house, and he found
easily a crack through which he could enter.
Once he was inside, the hens began to stir on their
perches uneasily. Red Slayer went quickly up
the roost pole, and fastened himself on the neck
of the nearest fowl, killing it and feasting on the
blood. Now the whole roost was in commotion.
The hens were fluttering and flapping about, and
making a tremendous noise. The taste of blood

250 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

filled Red Slayer with joy. The noise and terror
of the hens delighted him. He sprang upon a
second fowl] and killed it. Then he sprang upon
a third. He was hungry no longer, but filled
with the lust to kill. He had just fastened on
the throat of a fourth bird when the hen-house
door opened, a blinding light flashed in, and a
man and boy entered. Red Slayer let go of his
prey and cast about for a means of escape. He
sprang into a dark corner, but the wall was solid
there, and the blinding light followed hin. Now
the boy sprang at him with a club, while the hens
were dashing madly around. The door was open,
but it was behind the man. Yet it was his only
hope, for under that had been the crack where he
entered. Red Slayer made a spring for it. The
club descended, just grazing his tail. Between
the man’s legs he dove, out into the night, and
away, pursued by the sounds of cackling hens,
angry voices, the baying of a dog, the excited
stamping of the horses in the stable. Up and up
toward his wall he went. Yet even as he bounded,
his nose caught on the still, frosty air the scent of
a mouse, and he dropped to his stalking pace im-

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 251

mediately, once more the hunter, not the hunted,
and with a clump of dead goldenrod for cover
stalked his game, and brought the prey back to
his cache in the wall. His heart was beating nor-
mally when he reached his hole. Warm and
satisfied, he slunk into the burrow, and went to
sleep.

It was two days later that the Terror came.

The sky had been gray and overcast all day,
and when Red Slayer started out from his wall
across the open snow, toward evening, he cast no
shadow. Neither was it easy to make out ob-
jects against the dull and neutral sky. But he
wasn’t looking upward with any care, to be sure,
for out here on the open he had no fear of the
great horned owls, who lived in the forest above
and were not at all likely to come out over the
pasture, not while there was daylight, at any rate.
There were no hawks, now, in the dead of winter.
With so much open space about him, in fact, he
had no fears at all, and went leaping along over
the crust joerc ree thinking only of his pos-
sible kill.

Then, with startling suddenness, he was aware

252 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

of a rushing in the air above him. His head shot
up, his eyes turned skywards, with the lightning
rapidity for which he was noted, and he had an
instant’s vision of something grayish white and
huge, with red eyes, shooting down upon him like
a meteor. Have you ever seen a watch spring
suddenly leap from the open case and fly out
across the room? Much like that, Red Slayer
seemed to uncoil and leap away. He turned in
the air, or at the instant of landing, you could not
have said which, and fled back toward his wall.
But as his feet left the ground on that first spring,
he felt the rush of the great bird just behind him,
the blow of cloven air at his back, the snatch of a
talon grazing his tail. As he leaped madly for
his wall, varying his direction with each jump, he
heard the beat of the wings behind him, too, for
the bird had wheeled and come on to strike again.
He dared not look back, but once more he felt the
monster strike, and once more the talons grazed
the black tip of his tail. With terror at last in
his heart, he dove into the protection of his wall,
and from a safe hole he looked up and watched
the strange bird circle and swoop three or four

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 263

times directly overhead, angry at the loss of his
quarry.
It was a big bird, more than twenty inches
long, a grayish white below, slate colored above,
almost a gun-metal color as he banked against the
dull sky. He had powerful yellow talons, and
a wicked gray beak and fierce, piercing eyes with
red irises. He flew, Red Slayer could see, with
tremendous power, and, as the weasel well knew
now, he dropped to strike with terrific speed. It
was a bird he had never seen before, and one he
never wanted to see again. He did not know
what it was, for no goshawks had come down here
from the north before in his lifetime, but the fact
that it was here was self-evident, and for the first
time in his life terror entered into Red Slayer’s
heart. Nothing on earth had saved him then but
the black tip to his tail. Seemingly making his
otherwise white body conspicuous on the snow, it
had in reality caught the eye of the hawk so
strongly that he couldn’t help striking at it, and
as a result the main portion of Red Slayer, so to
speak, was past the danger point. But this pro-
tection would not always work. Hereafter there

254 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

was a menace in the air above which he could
never ignore, never forget. He could never cross
the open fields in safety, he could never let him-
self get far from cover.

When next he ventured out he went down
to the road by the wall, and up the road un-
der cover of the fence and roadside brambles,
and finally reached a hen yard just in time to
see the Terror suddenly drop from over the
screen of a tree, pick up a big rooster which
must have weighed much more than he did, and
bear it instantly aloft, while the startling flash
and roar of the farmer’s gun, from a corner of
the barn, did not come till he was well in the air
again, and affected his flight not at all. The
sight so soon again of his new enemy, the ’roused
barnyard, the stinging smell of powder, the pres-
ence of men, all conspired to send Red Slayer
slinking off, without any attempt to get a meal of
chicken or duck or young turkey. Instead, he
went a long way into the woods, searching for
mice or rabbits, and spent the next day far from
his burrow, and resumed the search after a rest
in a hollow stump. He had picked up a fresh

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 255

rabbit track, and followed it greedily but craftily,
coming at last within striking distance of his
prey, a big European hare, crouched beneath a
snow-laden young hemlock. 'This hare was too
speedy for him to overhaul in a chase, of course,
and he was debating whether it was not also too
large for him to attempt to kill by stalking and
leaping. He had never been hungry enough to
attempt such a feat before. But even as he de-
bated, the hare moved out from under the tree
with a couple of odd, crouching hops, and nosed a
shrub inquisitively to see if it was edible. Red
Slayer slunk a trifle nearer, and then, with the
same abrupt and terrifying suddenness as before,
the gray death dropped over the screen of a tree
like a falling cannon ball, and hit the great rabbit
like a bomb. *

There was instantly a tremendous scuffle,
which Red Slayer watched, fascinated, from the
shelter of his bush. The hare was so heavy the
hawk could not lift him clear of the ground as
long as he was putting up resistance, and he was
strong enough, too, to roll and kick with his big
hind legs, striking the wings of the bird. He

256 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

strained with his neck to get his mouth, with its
razor teeth, into some part of his antagonist, and
between his kicking and biting the feathers flew
from the bird even while the blood flowed from
the hare. Now and again the hawk would get
him clear of the ground, only to be forced down
again a few feet away, where again the snow was
trampled, the long, powerful hind legs kicked,
bird and beast rolled and bounced and battered
each other. But the hawk was ever striking with
his cruel beak, hanging on relentlessly with his
talons, and at last the hare lay still on the red
snow. The hawk stood upon him and tore his
flesh, before he flapped his feathers straight again
and rose with the carcass.

But meanwhile Red Slayer had slipped away
unobserved. He had seen all he wanted to. The
Terror was growing in his heart.

For the most part, of course, it was bigger
game than weasels the goshawk was after, but he
scorned nothing in the way of meat, just as Red
Slayer himself would devour a grasshopper on
his way to kill a chicken. And some instinct told
Red Slayer this was so. He redoubled his cau-

RED SLAYER AND THE TERROR 257

tion. He never entered or left his burrow across
the open snow, but always by way of the stone
wall and the fence below or the woods above.
Yet the Terror was unpredictable, and unsmell-
able.

The end came when Red Slayer was engaged
in the (for him) harmless occupation of skinning
a mouse not eight feet from his wall, at a point
where a single spring would carry him into an
impregnable cave. ‘There were no trees near.
The sky above was free of birds. Not a wing
marred the rosy flecks of dawn clouds. Red
Slayer had just lifted his head to see.

But what he did not reckon on was the fact
that the stone wall cut off a certain part of the
celestial are from his lowly view-point. The
Terror, flying low toward the wall, simply flowed
up over it, and struck. This time the body of
Red Slayer was between his own black tail tip
and the dark body of the mouse. The mouse
held the bird’s eye as well as the tail. He
sprang—but it was too late. The talons sank
into his beautiful white fur, into his slim, sleek
body. The Red Slayer was slain.

258 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

The goshawk swung upward with the limp
white form in his talons, the black tail tip
dangling and swaying in the wind of the flight.
On strong, steady wing beats, he mounted higher
and higher, and his steel gray body, outlined a
moment against the rosy flecks of dawn sky and
the sweet, pale blue, grew indistinct against the
dark wall of the mountain forest as he headed for
some secret perch in a gnarled tree up the crags.

CHAPTER IX
RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP

‘HE story of Rastus really begins with the
arrival of Wolf under the mountain. If
you ask me what kind of a dog Wolf was, I can-
not tell you. His master said he was a short-
haired collie (which sounds like a contradiction in
terms), but there was more than one bar sinister
on his family coat of arms, and one of them meant
a hound’s nose and another tremendous endur-
ance. We'll let the sagacity come from the
collie strain, if you like, though all my own collies
have been more ornamental than sagacious. At
any rate, the advent of Wolf was distinctly an
event, and a disturbing event, in the life of Rastus
and all his fellow ’coons on the mountain.
Before Wolf’s arrival, the only dogs in the im-
mediate neighborhood were two magnificent and
costly Saint Bernards. These two amiable crea-

tures roamed the mountainside at will, to be sure,
259

260 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

but I’ve never heard of a Saint Bernard being
employed as a ’coon dog; certainly Benedick and
Beatrice would never have been selected for that
arduous and highly specialized profession. Alla
coon had to do to escape either or both of them
was to amble up the nearest tree—anything would
do, from a two-hundred-year-old oak to a ten-
year sapling, just so it did not bend with the
weight—and stay there till the dog went away,
or else move into another tree, drop to the ground,
and amble off to safety. The result was that
Rastus and his fellows were almost entirely with-
out fear of dogs, and rambled by night where
they chose, seeking meat even in the garbage cans
and washing it in the brook which ran down
through the hemlocks beside the big house, or now
and then raiding the chicken yard or the corn-
field, for though they were not vegetarians, they
were not averse to green food at times, especially
corn. Indeed, they ate nearly anything.
Rastus originally was one of a large family of
five. He came of a hardy race, too, for his
father, who weighed twenty pounds, had gnawed
his own tail completely off the winter before

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 261

Rastus was born, because it had become em-
bedded in an ice cake during the winter hiberna-
tion. After thus heroically freeing himself (it
must be admitted, perhaps, that the heroism was
not quite so great as it seems, for a ’coon can take
more punishment with apparently less pain than
almost any other animal), he came out from his
den into a sloshy March world, and foraged for
food, being lean and cold and brittle of fur. He
was caught in the act, and put in a washtub, with
a barrel inverted into the tub and a piece of two
by four braced between the barrel and the ceiling
of the cellar, to keep him locked in. When morn-
ing came, the two by four had fallen, the barrel
was heaved off the tub, and the father of Rastus
had vanished through a cellar window. That
very night he was again captured, at a neighbor-
ing house, and put in a chicken coop and fed
bananas. In the morning he was gone, having
gnawed his way out, preferring freedom to trop-
ical fruit. These two Houdini-like performances
gave him a certain distinction, and certainly
argued great strength in a body weighing only
twenty pounds when fattened for the autumn,

262 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

and much less than that after a winter’s hiberna-
tion sleep. However, the man who first caught
him should have known he was strong, for this
man, dragging him out of a hole he was trying to
dig into a frozen drain, got him with both hands
back of the head and tried to hold him down in
vain. So long as the ’coon had his four feet on
the ground, he could literally carry the man
along on his back.

After his second escape, father ’coon got back
to the mountain cliffs and wilderness, and was
later privileged to see his five offspring, among
whom was Rastus. The family grew in a wild,
up-ended land of forest and precipice and rocky
caverns, leading down to lumber slash and then
to farms and the big house, beyond which, on the
plain, were more forests and swamps, and two or
three ponds. It was a splendid land for ’coons.
The trees were big and plenty, the caverns in the
precipitous rocks were even better and safer than
the trees for dens, there were plenty: of small
game and birds, in the brooks were trout, in the
swamp ponds crawfish, in the fields corn. And,
as I have said, the neighborhood dogs were a

FATHER ’COON GOT BACK TO THE MOUNTAIN CLIFFS AND WAS LATER PRIVILEGE
TO SEE HIS FIVE OFFSPRING, AMONG WHOM WAS RASTUS

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 263

joke. It was small wonder Rastus grew up to a
full twenty pounds of sharp face, the bead-like
eyes ringed with black, and black and dirty gray
furred body, without much fear of man or beast,
and without any great resort to the instinctive
strategy of his race. ‘There had been nobody, in
fact, even to name him Rastus.

Then Wolf came. Wolf had a master who
came with him, but the master did not figure
much until autumn, while Wolf started in im-
mediately, the May violets being still in bloom in
the woods. Wolf was a born ’coon dog. Down
south they have ’coon dogs, I’m told, but I never
thought much of any I ever saw. At least,
they’d be of little use on our mountain. They
are hound dogs, and they bay on the scent. Ifa
dog bayed on the scent of one of our ’coons, the
’coon would be off so far in advance that he would
get safely to his den in the rocks, where nobody
could get at him, and the dog would never tree
him at all. Wolf had a hound’s nostrils, but no
bay. He followed a hot trail like a silent race
horse, and he never barked till he was certain he
had his ’coon up that particular tree beneath

264 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

which he sat on his haunches. It was a pretty
sight to watch him work when the scent took
him to a tree trunk. His nose went up the bark
as high as he could raise it, but no sound came
from his mouth, except, possibly, a faint whining
complaint, as if he were muttering out the puzzle.
Instead, he would drop back and circle the tree,
perhaps fifty or a hundred feet away. If he
didn’t pick up the scent again in that circumfer-
ence, he would enlarge it to a diameter of a hun-
dred or even two hundred yards, and again com-
plete the circle. Only after a second failure on
this larger arc would he return, satisfied, to the
tree, sit on his haunches, raise his eyes to the
branches, and wake the echoes.

‘This was a totally different proposition from
the hunting of Benedick and Beatrice, and after
Wolf had roamed the mountain for a week or
two, putting up ’coons at first not a hundred feet
from his dooryard and catching three or four as
they foolishly attempted to spring out over him
to the ground and escape, Rastus and his fellows
began keenly to realize the difference. The word
was passed around, as such things are in the wil-

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 265

derness, and all the ’coons, especially the older
ones, began to exercise that instinctive strategy
which is their heritage. By July, Wolf’s bark at
night, which at first had often resounded close to
the house, was now heard faint and far away, up
the rugged mountainside, and most often among
the limestone cliffs where tiny cave mouths led
in to inaccessible and impregnable recesses no dog
could enter. There was frequently a note of
plaintive anger in his bark now, so you could al-
most tell whether he had the ’coon up a tree or
had trailed it to a den mouth.

Rastus had two or three experiences with Wolf
during the summer, but he managed to come off
free in each case, learning something from each
one, too, if it was only caution. And in each
case it was his curiosity which got him into trou-
ble. But you can’t cure a ’coon of curiosity,
except with an ax. Did you ever have a pet
’coon? If you have, you know something about
the curiosity of the breed, and something, too,
about their humorous tricks. A wild ’coon, of
course, has the same curiosity and the same
humorous tricks—only there is none to see them.

266 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

A ’coon, being nocturnal in his habits, works
largely by scent and touch. His small eyes may
be keen enough, but he seems to prefer to take
the testimony of his nose first, and then even
more of his forepaws, which, in spite of their
sharp claws, appear to have a great delicacy of
perception. They can look, and feel, almost like
hands at times. The ’coon’s most amusing trick,
or mannerism, is his fashion of investigating the
contents of a basket, say, by taking everything
out of it with his hands, while keeping his head
turned the other way, or looking upward toward
the sky—anywhere except where his hands are
exploring. This gives to his action a quaintly
surreptitious air, as if he were determined not to
let even himself know what he was up to. If he
is investigating something that may contain food,
his hands appear to reject what, to him, is un-
edible, by tossing it aside, and when a nut or bit
of meat is clutched, a look of crafty joy suddenly
radiates the sharp little face. Taking the bit of
meat, if possible, to water, he holds it between
his two front paws and sloshes it back and forth,
back and forth, till it is washed white and pulpy,

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 267

before he eats it. You may wash it almost to
a pulp for him, but he will grab it from your hand
and rewash it himself before eating.

The wild ’coon, of course, has all these traits.
I have lain by the shore of Lake Drummond, in
' the heart of the Dismal Swamp, when there was
a heavy blanket of night fog four feet thick hang-
ing over the water, and heard the ’coons washing
their meat, or fishing, close by me, but quite in-
visible under the fog veil. In the morning I
would find in the mud the print of their feet by
the shore, the hind paw marks uncannily like the
print of some shriveled baby’s foot. If you could
have watched Rastus at night, you would have
seen him, when ranging the woods, get up on
every fallen log and run along it, poking his paw
down into crannies of the bark, feeling for grubs.
When something glittering caught his eye—a bit
of quartz, a piece of tinfoil dropped by some
hunter from a cigarette package, you would have
seen him approach it, look up into the trees, pick
it up on his forepaws and thus investigate it.
You would have seen him climb up trees, too, and
poke his hand into holes where chickadees or

268 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

. woodpeckers might be nesting, or climb out along
limbs for the nest of thrushes or warblers. You
might at times, also, have seen him over by the
shore of one of the ponds, sitting perfectly still
on a stone or a log overhanging the margin, his
eyes fixed on vacancy, one paw dangling in the
water. But if you had been able to watch long
enough, presently you would have seen that paw
yank up with a lightning quick stroke, and a
crawfish fly to land.

It was one evening in late summer that Rastus
saw firelight glowing on top of Black Rock, a ~
rough precipice jutting out like a bowsprit from
a shoulder of the mountain, with a flat top on
which picnic parties were sometimes held, when
you could find enough men and especially women
who were not afraid of the rattlesnakes which
lived on the faces of the naked cliff itself.
Rastus, led by his curiosity, moved over toward
this firelight, while it glowed redder and flickered
lower with the coming of night, and as he drew
near his nose caught the smell of meat—of bacon,
no less! The picnic party had departed; Rastus
had heard them go laughing down the trail which

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 269

skirted the rocks. He moved in to the fire
cautiously, however, for fire was something new
to his experience, found a big bacon rind, and
scurried away with it into the deeper thicket. He
was on his way toward a trickle from a mountain
spring, to wash this food, when he heard Wolf
and his master coming back up the trail. The
full moon was now rising over the eastern world
rim and flooding the open spaces with its pale
radiance. Wolf’s master had returned for a for-
gotten basket of knives and forks, but glad, too,
of the excuse to see the moonrise from this com-
manding promontory. Wolf, however, was blind
to «esthetic effects. His nose began to wiggle,
his nostrils to quaver, as he reached the fire ring,
and with a joyous little moan he was off on
Rastus’s hot trail.

When Rastus heard him coming he was in a
serub oak thicket—not a tree big enough to give
him any security from Wolf! He didn’t have
time, he knew, to get to the tiny brook, which
otherwise he could have used to hide his track.
Running water tells no tales. Accordingly he
almost doubled on his tracks and actually passed

270 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

by Wolf not fifty feet to the leeward. Wolf’s
master had seated himself on top of the rocky
bowsprit, to enjoy the moonrise and to see what
would happen on Wolf’s hunt. As Rastus ap-
proached, however, he heard nothing, which was
not strange, for Rastus was making no sound.
The way a ’coon can slip over the ground, even
over dead, crackly leaves, with no sound whatever
except a kind of whispered rustle as if from his
own fur, is almost uncanny. The man did not
see Rastus till the ’coon stood on the edge of the
rock, in the full moonlight, not twenty feet away.
He kept perfectly still, and Rastus evidently did
not see him at all. Rastus was looking down, as
if measuring the distance or inspecting the
ground below. He slunk along ten feet further,
where the jump suited him better, and plumped
off. The man heard the thud as he landed on a
ledge forty feet below. Then he heard no more
down there, but a second after the pant and soft
whine of Wolf, coming hot footed back on the
trail.

When the dog found it to end abruptly at the
edge of the precipice, and could not pick it up

i

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 271

again on either side, he actually emitted a sharp
yip, ytp of exasperation, and then, without pay-
ing the slightest attention to his master, pro-
ceeded painfully to find a way down through the
scrub at one side of the precipice. A few mo-
ments later his. master heard, very faintly, his
whine as he picked up the scent again. Then
the man waited for the bark that indicated a
treed ’coon.

But the bark never came. Instead, to the
man’s amazement, a few minutes later he heard
a faint sount to one side and a bit below him, and
a thud of a pebble bouncing on the rocks. ‘Then
the sharp nose of Rastus emerged over the rim,
and the gray, sleek body of Rastus behind it, and
drawing himself up on level ground, the ’coon
glided noiselessly and without haste across the
open space of moonlight and disappeared on his
first trail into the woods; and, if you ask me, I
think he picked up that bacon rind on his way
back and took it to the brook, walking a long way
in the water and emerging without further fear
of pursuit.

‘A moment after he had passed the man, Wolf

272 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

arrived at the base of the cliff. Looking over,
his master could see, in the bright moonlight, just
how Rastus had gone up a tall tree which had
thrown a limb against the rocks, and by using this
limb easily reached a sloping gully that made a
road to the top. Wolf, however, was completely
baffled. 'There was only the one trail to the tree.
He ascertained that. Then he came back and
studied the trunk in silence a moment. Finally
he sat down and barked. He'd treed his ’coon,
he told the world. And Rastus was a mile away,
eating bacon rind!

Wolf’s master whistled the dog off, and went
down the mountain reflecting on the marvelous
instincts of the wilderness folk, which teach them
such lessons in the strategy of retreat. When he
got home, he looked up his guns and lantern.

“Wolf and I are going to get that Rastus this
autumn,” he told his wife.

“That who?” said she, surprised out of her
grammar.

He laughed. “Such a big clever ’coon has to
be named Rastus,” he answered, and told her the

story.

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 273

Meanwhile Rastus had been having other
troubles not connected with dogs and men. He
was the father of a large and growing family of
five, which had to be looked after by himself and
their mother pretty much all summer, for they
were not born till late in May, and at first they
were as helpless as kittens, and later, as they
grew up and could get around a bit, they had to
be taught how to climb trees and to be watched
when the parents went abroad, for they insisted
on following when they got a chance, and cried
like babies if they couldn’t keep up. When the
corn was in the milk, Rastus would take the
whole family down to a cornfield and they would
reach up and strip the ears, eating their fill—
which was considerable, and spoiling even more
than they ate. Then they all had to be led safely
back again to the snug, safe den up in the rocks
before daybreak. It was fortunate, perhaps, for
all the family that Wolf’s master did not get his
hunting idea until after the children were grown
enough to shift for themselves, and they could
scatter if necessary at the signs of danger.

Rastus and his mate were out one night, under

274 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the harvest moon, headed across the hundred-acre
hole in the forest where the lumber had been cut
and only a scattered tree left here and there as a
seed bearer, when Wolf and his master, also out
for an evening stroll up the lumber road (the man
had no gun), cut across their trail.. Free of the
children, the two ’coons were bound for the pond
over in the swamp, to fish, but willing to pick up
anything in the way of food, animal or vegetable,
on the way across the farms. It was certainly
hard to be interrupted violently by the panting
of Wolf on their trail. They made for the near-
est sizable tree as their only immediate salva-
tion—a white oak, and went up it, till they were
amid the spring of the branches, where they
crouched down practically hidden from the view
of any one below. Wolf completed his two
circles of the tree, and then squatted beneath and
bayed his decision that the ’coons were up there—
the ’coons, he knew, though his master supposed
there was only one.

“Want me to go up and shake him down,
Wolf?” his master asked.

The dog barked still louder.

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 275

The man embraced the trunk, and began to
shin. He made much harder work of it than the
*coons had done, but he got to a limb at last,
pulled his leg over, stood up, and peered into the
branches. Ten feet above his head, he saw, to his
surprise, not one, but two dim forms curled into
crotches on opposite sides of the trunk, and two
pairs of eyes watching him intently. He began
to climb again.

As he neared the ’coons, Rastus began to move
slowly out along one limb, his mate slowly out
along another. When the man reached the limb
Rastus was on, and got his weight fixed against
it ready to shake, Rastus was far out amid the tip
branches. Before the man could shake, however,
completely to his surprise Rastus jumped. He
landed with a crash of broken sticks square in the
middle of a pile of rotted down slash, and of
course Wolf sprang toward the sound. But even
as he landed and Wolf sprang, his mate plopped
off the end of her limb at the opposite side of the
tree, and while Wolf was yet just short of the
slash pile where Rastus was hidden in the hole his
fall had broken through, Wolf heard the thud of

276 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

the second ’coon. He whirled around and dashed
toward this second sound, bewildered by surprise.
Then Rastus, from his slash heap, suddenly
uttered a strange cry, something like the hoot of
a big owl. Wolf turned again and sprang to-
ward it. No sooner were his feet on the slash
pile when the same cry came from the other side
of the tree! Again he turned, and made a dash.
The man in the tree, who had scrambled hastily
down to the lowest branch, to observe the fun,
now saw the second ’coon making off, a dim,
ghostlike, blackish-gray ball, into the under-
brush. Wolf got to the spot where she had
vanished when Rastus cried again—cried as he,
too, was slipping away. Wolf, thoroughly be-
wildered now, caught like a runner between third
base and home plate, turned yet again, and
actually danced a circle in his own length under
the tree as the cry was repeated behind him. His
master slid down the trunk and put him on
Rastus’s trail—but there was a small brook not
two hundred yards away, and the trail ended at
the border. Wolf returned to the hearth rug
that night with a drooping tail.

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 277

After that, Wolf’s master, who was the best
kind of a hunter because he had a great deal more
curiosity to find out how animals behave and how
they defend themselves than he had lust to kill
them, determined to keep on giving the ’coons a
fair chance and see what they could make of it,
while Wolf did the killing, if any was done. Be-
cause he knew that Rastus and others fished along
the shore of the swamp pond he put a canoe on
the water, and with a powerful flashlight in his
pocket and Wolf in the bow, he would go out at
night and paddle as quietly as an Indian (for he
knew how to feather under the surface) along the
shore, till he felt, if it was too dark to see, the
dog’s nostrils quiver, and the tip of the canoe as
Wolf, in excitement, leaned to one side. Then
he would drive the bow sharp in shore and sud-
denly turn on his flash, as the dog sprang for the
beach. Sometimes the flashlight would catch the
’coon actually sitting by the water and staring
with eyes that shone red into the beam of light—
to vanish as its body vanished when Wolf sprang.
Wolf ran down two or three young ’coons and
one older one before they could tree; but two

278 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

other old ’coons reached their trees and then
jumped out into the water, easily outswimming
the dog and escaping.

That taught Wolf something. He was learn-
ing about ’coons every night now! Accordingly,
when it was the red eyes of Rastus at last which
stared into the flash, and Rastus who went up the
swamp maple overhanging the pond, Wolf was
out up to his spine in the water, ready for the
fall. Rastus, with his night-piercing eyes, saw
this, and didn’t jump. The man had to climb the
tree for him. He crawled out on a limb over the
water, but a good shake and a sudden snap sent
the ’coon down. He was fat now, weighing a
full twenty pounds, and he couldn’t hold on
against that snap. Into the water he fell with a
splash, and Wolf with one bark of joy was at
him. But that was the last bark he emitted.
His master, hearing no sound but a splashing and
churning of water, turned the flash downward
and saw only white foam churning thirty feet out
from shore, and what looked like Wolf’s back.
He slid down the trunk, suddenly fearful for his
dog, and waded out. The water was up to his

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP. 279

neck and his feet were sunk deep in mud and
threatening to sink farther when he at last
reached his dog’s tail and pulled. The dog came
toward him, and getting an arm around under his
neck, he lifted Wolf’s head out of the water and
struck sharply under the jaw. The dog’s mouth
opened, the ’coon, which was in it, but at the same
time also curled completely around the muzzle,
with teeth and claws working, dropped and shot
away through the water. It was a bleeding and
half drowned dog that was got to land. Twenty
pounds of ’coon around your muzzle, every pound
fighting, when you yourself cannot touch bottom
with a single one of your four feet, to get a brace
and lift your head up, can drag your head under
water and hold it under! Even that wouldn’t be
so bad, if the ’coon couldn’t stay under any longer
than you can. But he can stay under indefi-
nitely—or so Wolf must have thought. It was
a wet and dejected pair, master and dog, who
paddled back across the pond. Rastus, however,
battered enough to be half dead if he hadn’t been
a ’coon, had been saved from a broken spine or
crushed ribs by Wolf’s inability to make a clean

280 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

strike in the water, and by now had landed and
was on his way up the mountain toward his den,
to sleep himself back to normal in his nest of dead
leaves.

Wolf’s master’s mistress said, when her drip-
ping husband arrived home and emptied the mud
out of his boots, that she should think he’d had
about enough of ’coon hunting, and he replied
that he guessed he had. But a few nights later,
when it was frosty cold and clear, with a golden
October moon shining on the last shreds of golden
foliage in the maples, and Wolf had healed up a
bit (though one ear would never be the same
again!), and his master’s boots had quite dried,
and the mud was scraped off and they were
freshly oiled, the man was seen by his wife to be
filling his tobacco pouch and testing the oil in his
lantern and the battery in his flashlight.

“Again?” she said.

“ Just for a bit of a ramble over the mountain,”
he answered. “ It’s such a beautiful night.”

“ Beautiful fiddlesticks!”’ said she, showing
that women are incapable of understanding the
lure of a ’coon hunt.

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 281

It was well on toward midnight when Wolf
picked up a trail, which as luck would have it was
that of Rastus, and started hot foot through the
woods, then down the mountain, across the
meadow, toward a tiny pond not more than thirty
feet across—really a big spring hole—in a
swampy corner of a hayfield. Rastus hoped to
make this little pond, which had a sedgy brook
for an outlet, before Wolf caught up to him, but
he couldn’t do it. It took every notch of speed
he had to make the white ash a hundred feet short
of the pond, and scramble up into the safety of
its branches. There was no tree adjacent to af-
ford him an arboreal highway. He would have
to stay in that tree if Wolf was alone, or jump
for it if the man creature, who climbed trees and
shook limbs, came along behind. Wolf was
sitting on his haunches on the dead leaves below,
waking the echoes of the still autumn night, when
Rastus saw the bobbing light of a lantern ap-
proaching over the field. Presently, as he curled
his body along the upper side of a limb and peered
over at the ground, his eyes looked into the dazzle
of a flashlight beam, and he heard the man’s ex-

282) ‘ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

clamation when his eyes, in turn, caught the twin
red glints from the tree.

“You’ve got open ground for fifty feet,” the
man said to Wolf. “If you can’t get him
when I shake him down, you’re a poor pickle
hound.”

Then came the sound of a lantern being set
upon the ground, and the crunch of leather and
khaki on bark, as the man began to shin. As the
man drew near, Rastus crept farther and farther
out on his limb. Had he planned what he was
going to do? Did he know the country below so
well that he could plan? Were his night-trained
eyes so superior to the man’s and the dog’s that he
saw things they could not? Who can say? I
only am sure that he had been often in this neigh-
borhood, and I surmise that, like other wild ani-
mals, an instinct told him always to know every
foot of his country. At any rate, this was what
happened. The man shook and snapped the
limb, Rastus fell off—and fell directly into the
only patch of shrubs and briar anywhere close to
the tree. Wolf sprang like a shot at the sound
of the fall, landed with the characteristic collie

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 283

bound, forepaws downward to pin the game right
in the little patch of briars—and found nothing
whatever there! With a yelp, he dashed over
them, and rushed with nose to the ground, in an
expanding fanlike radius. Then he came back
to the briar patch, smelled, scratched, barked,
looked worried, and dashed forth again. By this
time the man was down from the tree. He poked
thoroughly into the briar patch, and then took
Wolf to a rail fence not far away and held him
up to run his nose along that, on a chance that
somehow the ’coon had reached it and run along
it to conceal his scent. The rail was “ cold.”
Back Wolf tore to the briar patch, his instinct
telling him Rastus must be there. Suddenly he
whined, and tore along a new scent—from the
briar patch to—to the little pond! The pond
had an outlet brook. Rastus had escaped! Not
a hundred yards down that brook, the thick
woods began, and the ’coon could have gone up
directly from the water into any one of scores
of trees, and traveled thenceforth far above the
ground.

The man went back, leaving poor Wolf to

284 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

circle the pond over and over, like a whining
merry-go-round, picked up his lantern, and pro-
ceeded to a thorough investigation of that clump
of briars. Quite concealed within it was a small,
flat rock, and under this rock a natural cave,
into which a woodchuck had burrowed. Going
through the tangle, you could step on the rock,
but you could not step into the hole, for it was
covered by the overhang of the stone. Rastus
had simply taken refuge in that hole, and perhaps
the woodchuck scent had confused the dog. Why
had the ’coon not stayed there? Was the wood-
chuck still actively awake, so late in the autumn,
and had he objected to the intruder? Or did the
hole become so small that Rastus couldn’t get in
as far as he wished for safety? That was un-
likely, surely. Or had he actually watched for
the opportunity to make a break for the pond?
The man pondered these questions, and wished
he had, for once, the nose of a dog so he could
arrive at some conclusions. He whistled Wolf
up, and showed him the hole. Wolf took a few
digs at it, but refused to become really excited.
He knew his particular quarry had gone toward

RASTUS EARNS HIS SLEEP 285

the pond. So master and dog, at two in the
morning, returned slowly and empty handed
across the fields, hoar frosted and cold to the feet,
under the chill October moon.

That was their last encounter with Rastus.
When winter came on, Rastus at first decided to
den up in his rock cave, but a warm, melty day
precipitated the same sort of trickle through a
crack that had made an ice cake over his father’s
tail, necessitating an heroic operation, so Rastus,
being wiser, forsook the den, taking his mate
with him, and two of the children also, who had
stuck around with the old folks. They climbed
out on the damp snow, foraged a bit for food, and
came to the great chestnut which was hollow at
its first fork, high above the ground. Up it they
went, one by one, and into the hole above the
spring of the huge limb, a hole invisible from the
ground. Inside the hollow were five other ’coons,
who stirred wakefully at the arrival of the new-
comers, for the day was warm, but offered no
resistance. Working into such nooks and corners
of the interior as were not occupied by ’coons,
Rastus and his family likewise settled down, curl-

return of spring. And Rastus, at least, I think

you will agree, had earned the right to leave no
call.

CHAPTER X
“THE LAST AMERICAN”’

E clasped the crag with crooked hands, but

he was not close to the sun in distant lands;

he was eight hundred feet up on a ledge over-
looking the wild gorge of the Deerfield River,
where it breaks out of the Green Mountains, hits
a buttress of the Berkshires, and turns east to cut
its way to the Connecticut. ‘To be exact, he was
not even clasping the crag, but the storm-twisted
stem of a low pitch pine which grew on the crag.
As he sat there, intent and still, the brown river
rippling over its shallow, stony bottom like a thin
ribbon far below him, the juts of naked rock
around him, across the gorge the precipitous op-
posite wall and then the fold on fold of wild, |
tumbled, forest-clad hills, he made a picture
peculiarly fitted to its rugged setting. He stood
almost three feet high, his feathers a glossy black-

ish brown where the sunlight glinted on wing
287

288 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

curve and shoulder, his head and neck as white as
snow, his bill and feet yellow, and a hint of more
snow white where his tail could be seen below the
folded wing tips. He, the bald eagle, the largest
and most powerful creature that now takes the
air over our eastern lands, since his cousin, the
golden eagle, has vanished, he, the symbol of
America, emblem of our might, emblazoned on
our shield (and our money!), sat like a carved
image eight hundred feet above the rippling
brown ribbon of the Deerfield River—watching
for a dead fish!

His distant relatives, the duck hawks, two of
whom had nested not far away, on these same
precipitous ledges, for many years, live on birds,
killing them on the wing. The fiery goshawks
who come down from the north in winter are the
terrors of the air, killing for the pure love of the
fight, and attacking any game, even poultry or
rabbits twice their own weight. The low-flying
cooper’s hawks (Baldy could see one of them
now, below him, flowing up over a small orchard
in a farm tucked down like a piece of green car-
pet by the side of the river, and diving like a

“THE LAST AMERICAN ” 289

bullet in among the chickens) falls upon his liv-
ing prey and kills like a bolt from the blue. But
the bald eagle, in his serene strength, his majestic
beauty of flight—preys upon dead fish. At least,
he preys upon them when he can, in summer.
Hunger, or the demands of his young, may drive
him to other offal, or even to killing. But he is,
nonetheless, driven to it. His nature is not
pugnacious; his instincts may be vulturine, but
they are pacific. Not Jove’s thunderbolts but a
carrion pickerel should be represented in his
talons, were we realists in our art.

But we are not realists. Man lives by symbols.
His imagination transcends facts. See, Baldy
rises suddenly from his perch on the cliff side, and
with a kind of barking scream, cac-cac-cac, and a
few air-stirring beats of those vast wings, more
than six feet from tip to tip, leaps upward, banks,
ascends on a spiral, and is now overhead, against
the blue! Look at him now, and do not marvel
that man has placed the thunderbolts of Jove
within his yellow talons, or carved his form upon
a nation’s shield! Against the sky he is outlined
with sharp distinctness, the outer feathers of his

230 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

wings a trifle separated, letting through the
light. All brown has disappeared from his plu-
mage—he looks jet black now, save his splendid
white head and neck, and the great white fan of
his tail. His domineering eyes are still visible,
too, as he banks and swings in soaring loops above
the hole of the river gorge, keeping his head down,
his vision fixed below him. How superbly easy
is his flight, over what spaces he seems to float on
the buoyancy of air, with spread wings motion-
less, what power to strike would be his if sud-
denly those wings were folded and the thunder-
bolt fell! A great, brave bird, for battle born,
his very cry achallenge! So splendid a sight was
Baldy, as he swung his loops over the gorge, and
suddenly saw his prey below him, a prey totally
invisible to the human eye from the top of the
precipice, even with powerful glasses, and, fold-
ing his wings, dropped a dead weight through
space to snatch from the river—a dead fish.

Yet Baldy, the eagle, had his battle, his long,
incessant battle—his battle to rear his young and
perpetuate his breed; only it was not waged with
other birds or other beasts, but with man, with

“THE LAST AMERICAN”? 291

the very Americans who had proclaimed him their
national bird, their proud and dominant emblem.
And in this battle, he, like all the other creatures
of the wild, was at a tremendous disadvantage,
for to man alone belongs the coward’s weapon
which kills from afar—gunpowder. Before gun-
powder, man had bows and arrows and spears.
If, instead of primitive man, some other creature
had learned to kill from afar, how different would
have been the history of the world! But that is
idle speculation now. To return to Baldy ——

As he rose from the river with his fish, he did
not come back to a tree on the cliff to devour his
meal. Instead he climbed rapidly till his pierc-
ing yellow eyes could see well over the upper rim
of the gorge, on either side, and then sailed west-
ward, following the curves of an erosion cafion
which ran back into the folds of the hills, hiding
a rushing stream at the bottom, beneath its hem-
locks. Soon, from the rock where he was first
seen, he became only a moving fleck of black and
white against the dark mountainsides, and then
the eye lost him and could not tell where he sank
into the tree tops—if he did sink into the tree tops

292 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

instead of passing on and up over the crest of the
divide.

As a matter of fact, far up at the head waters
of this cafion brook, almost two thousand feet
above sea level, and surrounded by dense forest
and laurel hells, was a small mountain tarn, a
spring-fed pond of a dozen acres, its waters look-
ing almost black from the accumulation of leaf
mould on the shallow bottom. Just back from
the rocky shore of this pond, rising a trifle above
the other hemlocks so that its top commanded a
view of the water, stood a great hemlock. It was
not yet dead, but it appeared to be dying. In the
last strong fork of its top was a big structure of
sticks. It was toward this nest that Baldy
dropped, cac-cac-cac-ing as he sank. His call
was answered by a lower toned, broken call from
a tree close to the shore, a sound which, coming
suddenly in the silence of the forest, was as
startling as the laughter of a maniac, which it
somewhat resembled. At the same _ instant,
Baldy’s mate rose from the limb where she had
been watching the water. And at the same time,
too, a noise arose from the huge lump of sticks

THE NEST IN THE HEMLOCK

“THE LAST AMERICAN” 293

like a gigantic inverted thimble, in the tree top—
the noise of two small and very hungry eaglets
anticipating dead fish. Both parents sank to the
rim of the nest, where they stood outlined sharply
against the sweet May sky, and the fish was ap-
portioned between the infants, which were then
two yawning gullets opening into a small collec-
tion of white, downy feathers. There is a time
at the beginning of its career when even the hu-
man infant is not a pretty thing, save to its in-
fatuated parents, resembling rather a wizened
Chinaman or a four alarm fire than something
fashioned in the image of its Maker. A baby
bird, especially when about to be fed, is even less
pleasing to look upon. Yet Baldy and his mate
were tremendously pleased with what they had
produced. And why wouldn’t they be? This
nest was built on the ruins of one they had made
the year before, and in which the mother had laid
two sets of eggs. The first set had been laid on
the first day of March, and the chicks broke
through the first of April, only to be taken al-
most immediately by some man or boy while both
parents were away fishing. ‘Two more eggs were

294. ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

laid, and this time the eggs were taken before
they were hatched. It may have been by the
same person—the parents never knew. SBaldy’s
mate, seeing something in the tree while she was
in the air a full five miles away, had made for the
spot with all speed, but the robber saw and heard
her coming before she was near enough to do
anything, and slid rapidly to earth, with the
precious eggs. As she hovered and dove, crying
and screaming, over the spot, a flame smote her
eyes, a noise assailed her ears, and something
twanged by her in the air, nipping a wing feather
as it passed. ‘There were no more attempts at a
family that year.

But now, this second spring, the nest had been
rebuilt on the ruins of the old (making it, to be
sure, yet higher and more conspicuous), and two
eggs had been laid and hatched, and no robber
had come to disturb them. They were proud and
happy parents at last. And what wonder and
beauty they added to the wild mountain uplands,
as their calls dropped down from the high air into
the silence of the forest; as they looped their
majestic circles over the billowing waves of tree

“THE LAST AMERICAN”? 295

tops that were mountains and gorges, but which,
from their altitude, looked like a heaving green
sea; as they sat silent above the mountain tarn,
the rushing river, or perched on the rim of the
nest, a living sculpture of the nation’s shield set
against sky-blue enamel! The forest watcher, a
wild duck on the pond, perhaps, could sometimes
hear Baldy’s high, clear cac-cac-cac when Baldy
himself was actually invisible, or at most a tiny
black speck, no larger than a pin point, against
the white bosom of a cumulus. The ducks knew
that call! They knew, too, that Baldy’s yellow
eyes could see them when they could not see him.
They grew alert and watchful, ready to dive.
For Baldy and his mate were often driven to
seek other game than dead fish. It is a part of
man-made warfare to establish a blockade and
starve out an enemy. Under this method, the
enemy is helpless; he cannot strike back. He
can only do his best to keep body and soul to-
gether on what is left of his own resources.
Similarly, though unconsciously, man has warred
on the eagles, among other birds and beasts. He
has cut off or taken away their food supply, as

296 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

well as directly attacking them in battle. When
I was a boy, I will not say how many years ago,
men used to drive a few miles into the north
woods from a certain village in Maine and bring
out two hundred trout in a couple of days. They
fished with two or three hooks on a line. To-day
a couple of trout in as many days in that stream
would be a fair catch. In those same days the
eagles bred in the pine-hung gorges where the
stream cut through the mountain defiles. They
breed there no more. It is hard enough to fight
nest robbers and hunters, but harder yet to keep
the race going with the food supply cut off, for
an adult eagle is a big bird, and a baby eagle is a
hungry one, and both of them need much pro-'
visioning. So it was hunger—his own or his
children’s—that drove Baldy to his many de-
partures from his most instinctive diet of dead
fish.

When the ducks passed northward on their
migration he would sometimes spy a flock, float-
ing on some little, wood-encircled pond, as he
coursed the upper air watching the earth-pano-
rama below. ‘Then he would drop down and

“THE LAST AMERICAN”? 297

hover above the spot, hoping perhaps that some
duck might be weak or crippled or young, and
so an easy prey; but, failing to see such a one,
he would strike anyway, into the startled flock.
A canvas back duck, or a grebe, however, he
never succeeded in getting, for the race is not al-
ways to the strong. Sometimes it is to the quick
and crafty. Any diving bird could almost in-
variably escape him. He could not cleave below
water as could the osprey, or great fish hawk, who
lived over the mountain by the big pond. Conse-
quently he hunted the water fowl] as little as need
be, for he hated effort spent in vain. Rather,
when dead fish were few and hard to find, he pre-
ferred to cruise for miles a few hundred feet up
above the river bed, or circle over lakes and ponds,
his wonderful eyes bent downward, watching for
live fish under the water, estimating their dis-
tance from the surface, waiting the moment they
should rise to the top to give him the chance to
snatch them out of their element. This great,
lonely bird, coursing the waterways on tireless
wings, was fighting an incessant battle, after all,
the long battle with hunger, for the preservation

298 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

of his own life and the perpetuation of his
breed.

And how long it took his brood of young to
put on their wing feathers and escape at last from
the terrible conspicuousness of the nest into the
freedom and concealment of the forest! Baldy
might well have envied the robins and sparrows
and the other little birds who get their broods
quickly out and foraging, or especially the pretty
brown grouse whose chicks can scurry into the
protection of the undergrowth almost as soon as
they break the shell. While his two fledglings
were still more white than brown, and quite help-,
less, a mother partridge in the forest below, not
three hundred yards from the eagle tree, was
leading her twelve or fourteen chicks, little puffs
of daintiness, into the shelter of last year’s leaves.
It would be August before his young hopefuls,
still without the proud white collar and white
fanned tail, but brown all over save for little
streaks of white, would be able to mount the nest
rim, hop up on a branch of the hemlock, look
scared and stupid, and then fall off into clumsy
flight, while he and their mother swooped over-

‘““THE LAST AMERICAN ” 299

head and round about, illustrating and crying
encouragement. Meantime, they were growing
all the while, with enormous appetites, and they
dwelt in a great nest as conspicuous to any per-
son wandering in that forest as would be a huge
hogshead tied to the peak of the Methodist
steeple. But so Baldy’s parents, and their
parents before them, had built the nest, and no
experience taught him concealment, no instinct
came to his rescue. When, in the dim ancient
days of his race, the nest had been built that way,
the eagle knew no fear. He was king of the air,
and only from the air could danger come or, if it
came from below, the higher in the tree, the better
for the nest. Accordingly the instinct was fixed
to build it there, and when man finally came as
his enemy he was utterly unprepared to meet the
new foe. Instinct, of course, is the greatest con-
servative force in the world. When it is a law
of one’s being, it precludes change. Nothing can
change it but the power of reason. When an
animal changes its instinctive habits to meet new
conditions and thus protect itself, we may fairly
credit it with something like reasoning powers.

300 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

When it does not change its instinctive habits but
falls a victim to them, it surely lacks what a
Yankee would call the ability to put two and two
together. So much for the brains in Baldy’s
snow white, viking head.

Yet he knew a thing or two, at that. He knew,
for instance, that the osprey, the great fish hawk,
was a far better catcher of live fish than he was,
and he knew he was a better fighter than the
osprey. At any rate, he was ready to chance it.
Accordingly one day after heavy rains had raised
the stream levels and made fishing difficult, Baldy
rose high in the air and drifted over the divide to-
ward the pond where the fish hawk lived. As he
crossed the range, he rose higher still till he was a
speck against the blue, a floating speck that yet
could see most that went on below him. The
osprey was nowhere visible at first, and Baldy
patiently swung in great circles, with the least
possible expenditure of wing effort, keenly
watching the air and the forest below him. His
patience was at last rewarded, for he saw a second
speck coming from afar, a thousand feet lower
than he was, headed toward the pond. The eagle

“THE LAST AMERICAN ” 301

tilted his planes and rose yet higher, to escape ob-
servation. But the osprey was watching the
water. He, too, was hungry. Far below Baldy,
he too circled, a smaller bird, but still impressive,
with his five-foot spread of wing. Had Baldy
been a philosopher, he would have reflected that
the fish hawk, also, even as himself, was fighting
an unequal battle against man, not so much, per-
haps, to protect its nest of sticks in a tree top by
the pond, as to find food in the ponds and streams
where once fish were so abundant. Residents by
the seashore can have little idea how rare a fish
hawk has become by inland waters, except in the
migration seasons. Even Baldy himself, in fact,
knew of no other hereabouts. But Baldy was
not philosophizing just then. He was thinking
only of fish, and watching the hawking bird be-
low him, on whose sleek back the sunlight flashed.
Slowly and still as a feather falling he wound his
way down the invisible spirals of the air to be near
his prey, until he, too, could see right through the
brown, sun-flecked water of the pond to the sand
and weeds on the bottom, and his eyes caught the
ghost-wraith of a pickerel moving languidly

302 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

about. Though he could see it, he could not esti-
mate so well as the osprey its distance from the
surface. He grew impatient that the osprey did
not strike. ‘Then the fish became clearer;. the
great hawk dropped like a plummet, his talons
buried in the water with unerring aim as his big
wings went out like brakes and instantly he rose
again, the fish held fast, and started for the woods
above the rocky shore. Then another bullet fell.
Baldy tore at him through the air, almost collid-
ing in his passage, and with a precision of aim no
less marvelous than the hawk’s when he struck the
fish in the water, the eagle shot past his feet and
snatched the fish away. The hawk, who had
caught the wind of his coming, and put on steam
to get away, was screaming angrily as the great
black bird tore by, and struck at him with his
beak. But the blow was vain. With a cac-cac-
cac of shrill triumph, Baldy was off with his
stolen feast, rising on mighty wing beats toward
the crest of the eastern range. Unto the victor’s
children belong the spoils.

There were other food quests of Baldy’s which
were less spectacular, but perhaps almost as satis-

“THE LAST AMERICAN ” 303

fying. Once he found the body of a rabbit killed
by a weasel in the woods. Again he spied five
fish in a pail on the bottom of a boat drawn up on
the shore, and the fishermen nowhere visible. (It
was noon and hot, and they had retired to a cool
spring in the woods.) When they returned the
pail was upset, the fish gone, and not a track but
their own in the muddy margin around the bow
of their boat. They still discuss the mystery.
Yet again, coursing over a pasture early one
morning, while the sun, visible enough to Baldy
from his aerial pathway and casting a rosy light
on his snow white neck, was still hidden by the
mountain wall from the valley farm, he saw a dog
stalk a flock of sheep, cut out a lamb, and kill it.
Baldy was excessively hungry that morning, and
his young back in the eyrie, were, he knew, call-
ing pathetically for food. Below him was a dead
sheep, and none to dispute possession but a brown
and black dog, which even now was craftily
dragging the little carcass toward a thicket where
he could feast unseen. Made bold by need,
Baldy swooped, uttering his cac-cac-cac like a
battle ery, and struck for the carcass. The aston-

304 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

ished dog, with the rush of wings above him and
then the almost complete envelopment of his body
by the beating things, let go his hold, almost in-
stantly to repent and spring at the foe. The
lamb was dead weight, and Baldy could not lift
it in time to avoid this spring. Crashing his
wings down, to keep the dog from getting the
carcass, he struck with his beak at the dog’s eyes,
and for a brief and savage moment the fight was
furious. Once the dog got a grip on the lamb,
almost pulling the eagle out of the air, but Baldy
managed to strike him clear, and rise with one
great wing shove just out of range, and maintain
that level up along the pasture top to the woods,
where he hung the carcass over a limb, tore apart
as much as he could conveniently carry, ate a bit
himself, and then rose and headed for home, well
satisfied.

But it was a fatal morning’s work, nonethe-
less, for the farmer, walking from the barn to the
house with a pail of milk in each hand, happened,
as luck would have it, to glance up the pasture
just then, and saw Baldy take the air with what,
certainly looked like part of a lamb dangling

“THE LAST AMERICAN” 305

from his talons. Then he saw the flock huddled
in their stupid terror at one corner of the pasture.
The dog, of course, had disappeared. The
farmer never saw him. He set down the pails
and started up the slope. Yes—a lamb was miss-
ing! The man cursed Baldy. Then he sud-
denly remembered that a year ago young Rob
Browning, before he went down to the city to
work, had found somewhere up in the hills an
eagle’s nest, and brought two young birds home
(which, to be sure, had died). Rob said eagles
used the same nests year after year. ‘That night,
when the chores were done, the farmer got out
the family ink bottle, spit on the pen, and wrote
a letter to Rob. When the answer came, he
called in two neighbors, and they started off up
the mountainside, with guns on their shoulders. .
Rob’s directions were, for them, easy to fol-
low, for they had logged over these mountains in
years past, or hunted ’coon and wildcat. After
nearly three hours of steady plodding they
emerged on a point of rock that commanded a
view of the wooded hollow where the tarn lay, and
they scanned the tree tops, almost immediately,

306 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

spotting the nest. It was nearly time now for
the young eagles to fly; a few days more and they
would have been safe! But this was not to be.
There they were, up on the rim of the nest, great
brown conspicuous things with eyes scanning the
sky for a vision of father or mother coming with
food. The three men exclaimed in triumph,
dropped down the rock into the scrub, and made
as fast as they could for the eagle tree.

Finding a spot not far away where they could
secure an open sight of the nest, they concealed
themselves under the boughs of a low hemlock
and waited for one or both of the parent birds to
return. They were warned first by the sudden
impatient racket of the two eaglets, and then by
a far, high scream from the air, before they got
a glimpse of the parent bird at all. It was the
mother returning with a fish. She did not see
the danger lurking under the hemlock screen, nor
catch the glint of steel peeping through. Unsus-
pecting and happy, she dropped lightly as a para-
chute to the nest rim by her babies, and began to
give them food.

Three tongues of flame spit from the hemlock

“THE LAST AMERICAN”? 307

on the ground. Three explosions jarred the
silent air. One eaglet fell back into the nest, one
crashed over the edge into the eagle tree and fell,
bouncing from limb to limb, till it hit the ground
with a thud. The mother, falling also, flapped
screaming with one broken wing, caught at a
limb with her talons, could not hold her weight,
and likewise fell to the ground. The men sprang
forward. She half raised her proud head, her
yellow eyes ablaze, and made ready for a last
stand, but a blow came down on her white fore-
head, and she crumpled in a heap.

** Get her out of sight,” said one of the men.
“We'll wait for the other one now.”

They dragged the mother and the little eagle
which lay on the ground in under the hemlock
with them, and waited a long time. But Baldy
was coursing a stream far away, and did
not return. An hour, two hours, went by, and
still they did not see him coming. One of them
grew impatient and lit a pipe. Another did the
same. But now Baldy was in sight of the nest,
though he was three miles away and almost a
thousand feet up. He looked down for his

308 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

babies, for his mate—and saw only one still body
lying in the rough thimble of sticks. Dropping
down lower as he sped on, his keen eye saw the
faintest almost imperceptible smoke wraith drift-
ing up from the hemlock blind. He had never
seen anything like that before, except from men,
or about the houses of men. Suspiciously he
circled, dropping lower and lower, and suddenly
calling to his mate in shrill cac-cacs. There was
no answer. No answer from her, no answer from
the nest. The single form within it lay still.
Baldy knew it was dead. His piercing eye kept
watch where he had glimpsed that smoke, and he
saw a hand part the boughs a little and push up
something that gleamed. Instinctively he shot
up a few feet, as the gleaming thing spit and
roared, and he heard the bullet twing past his ear.
Another great downward shove with his wings,
and he sprang higher still, wheeling and crying
in anger and perplexity. Gradually he sank to-
ward the nest again, but again came the spit and
roar from the hemlocks, and again the twing of
something past him, this time clipping a feather
from his tail. He shot up violently, and swung

“THE LAST AMERICAN’? 309

his circles far aloft, widening them slowly till the
loop carried him a mile or two away, and then, as
‘he banked and swung back, he saw distinctly
three men in the open, watching him, and one of
them holding his dead mate by the feet! They
thought he was too far away to see them! As he
came wheeling back, high aloft, they jumped un-
der the hemlock again, but he did not sink. In-
stead he passed on, still crying shrilly, and faded
to a speck against the afternoon sky. The
hunters gave him up, and started homeward,
carrying their two kills which had fallen, but
leaving the baby up in the nest.

“°Tain’t worth stuffin’,” they said, “ leastways,
’tain’t when you have ter shin a seventy foot hem-
lock ter git it.”

But Baldy, swinging back now, saw them pass-
ing over the rock whence they had first spied the
nest, and unseen of them, because he was against
the sun, dropped down low enough to make quite
sure it was his mate they carried, her great,
bedraggled wings trailing the ground. Then he
shot upward and looped far to the north, to the
east, to the south, and only as the sun was setting

310 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

came down to the lonely, pitiful nest and looked
close at his dead baby.

That night he perched, his head_ on his breast,
in a tree close by. In the morning he rose and
called his mate, as if his cries might bring her,
but no mate came, and no shrieks for food came
from the great mass of sticks in the hemlock.
Baldy circled slowly, indeterminately, in the
upper air, the dawn light rosy on his head and
neck and tail. Then, as if some impulse had
suddenly come, he spiraled up and up till the
cloud around the peak of Greylock was but a
white mat on the floor of the world, and far off to
the east, like a silver wire, was the flash of a great
river. He pointed into the east, and sailed to
meet the sun.

All that morning he flew, high at first, and then
lower, over the great river, save where the smoke
of cities caused him to shoot aloft again, and in
the afternoon his ears heard a strange bumbling
in the air and his eyes saw coming at him, with
incredible speed, the most astonishing bird he had
ever beheld. Compared to it, he was as small as
the tiniest humming bird. And it was above him,

“THE LAST AMERICAN” 311

too, though he was flying at the thousand foot
level. Its wings did not dip and rise, but were
rigid—yet it moved, it came rushing on, a mys-
terious blurry circle at the centre where a head
ought to be. As it tore by above him, with its
incredible speed and more incredible, jarring
whirr, he banked to follow it with his eyes, be-
holding a man creature sitting therein! Then it,
too, banked as if to turn, and Baldy worked his
wings with all his power, fleeing down the fields
of air to escape.

But the plane had only sheered off to the west,
and soon the jarring bumble grew fainter and
died away. ‘Then Baldy saw the shining floor of
the sea, blue and far away—a great pend lying
to the rim of the world. It drew him down the
air lanes with steady beat of wings, and in a patch
of woods by the great pond margin he came to
rest, and thought of fish.

The fishing by the sea was good—better than
he had even known before. He wandered down
the coast till he reached a land of salt water ponds
making in behind the yellow sand bars, and be-
hind them a region of thick swamps, with fresh

312 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS

water ponds in their depths, and tangles of scrub
oak and pine where no roads led, no clearings told
of hated men. And here Baldy came to rest once
more and called a certain pitch pine home.

But he took no other mate. ‘There were other
eagles—a few—in those swamps and along that
shore. But his mate was dead, and he wanted no
other. Age was upon him now, age and loneli-
ness. He had done his best to fulfil his function
and raise new eagles to soar above the land which
called him its national bird; but this same land
would not permit it. He had fought his fight—
and lost. So, like King Philip of old, he made
his last stand in King Philip’s swamps, or soared,
a proud and solitary figure, over the murmuring
shore of the ocean, looking with those piercing
eyes—for a dead fish. It was so little he asked
of the land, after all. He was as harmless as he
was magnificent—as harmless asa wren. Yet no
wren but can rear its brood in houses built for it
by man, while he, without a mate, must fold his
great wings in the deepest swamps. Such is the
fate to-day of him who clutched Jove’s thunder-
bolts.

BOOKS BY

Walter P. Eaton

The Boy Scouts of Berkshire

A story of how the Chipmunk Patrol was started, what they did
and how they did it. 313 pager

The Boy Scouts of the Dismal Swamp

This story is a continuation of THE BOY SCOUTS OF BERKSHIRE
and is an unusually interesting book on Boy Scouting. 310 pages

Boy Scouts in the White Mountains

Intimate knowledge of the country as well as of the basic princi-
ples of Boy Scouting characterizes this new volume by Mr, Eaton.
$20 pages

Boy Scouts of the Wildcat Patrol
A Story of Boy Scouting .

This story is a continuation of the history of Peanut and the other
characters which appeared in previous volumes by this author.

815 pages
Peanut — Cub Reporter

A Boy Scout’s life and adventures on a newspaper

A rattling newspaper story with Peanut as the central character
-— he who has figured so prominently in the author's four Boy Scout
books. $20 pages

Boy Scouts in Glacier Park

The adventures of two young Easterners in the heart of the high
Rockies. The volume gives an accurate and descriptive picture of
this Park, and might well be used as a guide book. This book is
illustrated by wonderful photographs. 386 pages

On the Edge of the Wilderness
Tales of Our Wild Animal Neighbors

Interesting and intimate stories of neighborly wild animals who
through stress or mistake have wandered close to civilization, and
of whom glimpses have been obtained. Beautifully illustrated by
Bull, the great animal illustrator. 836 pages

“Every story written by Walter P. Eaton runs true in its de-
scription of nature. He is a lover of the out-of-doors, a
‘keen observer of animals and a remarkable leader of boys.
His pictures are realand the spirit behind them betokens
the lover of Nature that he is, and best of all, you can de-
pend upon the truth of what he writes.’’-— Ghe Herald

$1.75 each
All prices are NET

By William Drysdale
The Famous

“Brain and Brawn’’ Series

No boy should grow up without reading these books

The Young Reporter
A STORY OF PRINTING HOUSE SQUARE. 300 pp.
A genuine boys’ book for genuine boys. Full of
life, clean, clear cut andinspiring. It will enlist the
interest of every stirring and wide-awake boy.

The Fast. Mail
THE STORY OF A TRAIN BOY. 328 pp.

The story of the adventures of a boy who fought
his way to success with clean grit and good sense,
accomplishing what is within the power of every
American boy if he sets about it. I+ is full of move-
ment, sound in sentiment, anc wholesome in
character.

The Beach Patrol
A STORY OF THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE. 318 pp.
A spirited picture of the labors and dangers to
which members of the life-saving service are ex-
posed and which few realize.

The Young Supercargo
A STORY OF THE MERCHANT MARINE. 352 pp.

This book has all of the interest of ‘‘ Oliver
Optic’s’’ books, with none of their improbabilities.

The Volumes are Fully Illustrated. Price, $1.75 each.

W. A. WILDE COMPANY
Boston and Chicago

By William Drysdale

United States Government
Series

Every boy wants to know how our government is run, and to be
a good and useful citizen ought to know. The books of this series
are filled with the experiences of Mr. Drysdale’s boys, who work up
through the various positions in the Treasury and State Departments.

The Treasury Club

A STORY OF THE UNITED STATES TREASURY
DEPARTMENT. 330 pp.

To any boy interested in our national govern-
ment, this volume will appeal, for it treats of the
workings of our Treasury Department. It is in
Mr. Drysdale’s happiest vein.

The Young Consul

A_ STORY OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT.

‘ane

330 pp.
This story takes up the State Department and
presents an accurate and interesting picture of the
consular service.

Cadet. Standish of the St.. Louis

ee OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
Pp. :

A story of an American boy to whom the Spanish
War brought novel and exciting experiences, taking
part in the cable cutting off Guantanamo, the first
exploit in which the great ‘‘merchant cruiser’’
distinguished herself.

Each Volume Fully Illustrated. Price, $1.75

W. A. WILDE COMPANY
Boston and Chicago

By Captain Edw. L. Beach, U.S.N.

Ralph Osborn— Midshipman at An:
napolis
A STORY OF ANNAPOLIS LIFE. 336 pages

Midshipman Ralph Osborn at Sea

A STORY OF MIDSHIPMAN LIFE AT SEA, AND
CONTINUING *‘ RALPH};OSBORN — MIDSHIPMAN
AT ANNAPOLIS.” 360 pages

Ensign Ralph Osborn

THE STORY OF HIS TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS
IN A BATTLESHIP’S ENGINE ROOM. 338 pages

Lieutenant Ralph Osborn Aboard a
Torpedo Boat Destroyer

BEING THE STORY OF HOW RALPH OSBORN
BECAME A LIEUTENANT AND OF HIS CRUISE
IN AN AMERICAN TORPEDO BOAT DESTROYER
IN WEST INDIAN WATERS. 342 pages

The ‘‘OSBORN”’ books show the steps of advancement in the
American Navy, from Cadet to Lieutenant, with a true picture of naval
life as itis. The information given is authentic, and many of the
related incidents were actual occurrences. They are books of infor
mation and adventure combined.

Such stories as these are not only interesting to the young people but
earry with them an insight into naval life which will make the neader
have more respect and appreciation of the work of Uncle Sam's navy.
They are first-class stories for boys—clean, good, and worthy of a
place in the home, private or school library.

'

“These are the best stories on the United States Navy which have

ever been written. They givea clearinsight into the workings of this

important branch of American government and the characters are true

to life as befits & book written by such a man as Commander Beach,

who has enjoyed &n enviable career ever since he entered the United
States Navy.’’— New York Timea.

These volumes are all fully illustrated
Price, Cloth, $1.75 net each

W. A. WILDE GO. Beston and Chicago

BOOKS BY

Com. Thos. D. Parker, U.S. N.

Young Heroes of the American Navy

Lah ee and adventures of the most noted young heroes
of our Navy

The naval history of our country has developed many young men
who through patriotism have performed many acts of daring hero-
ism and whose names are in the hall of navalifame. The book is
tully illustrated with reproductions of the events which the various

characters made memorable.
820 pages

The Cruise of the Deep Sea Scouts

Or, Boy Scouts Afloat. Mlustrated with colored frontispiece

The activities of the Boy Scauts Afloat are today more interesting
than ever before. Deep sea scouting is one of the most important
activities of the Boy Scout Organization and the call of the sea is
as strong as the call of the woods or the mountains, while the life
of the sailor promotes the same discipline and training as does the
life of the soldier.

The Spy on the Submarine

A thrilling story of adventure on board a submarine destroyer
and upon a submarine itself. This is an up-to-date story, full of
the experiences which are daily happening and serving to make a
large part of the history of this great war.

The Air Raider '

Winning the Gold and Silver Chevron

Our navy and shipbuilding yards were exposed to many dangers
from enemies both within and without during the war. Few real-
ized it, but Commander Parker did. THE AIR RAIDER gives a
thrilling picture of what might have occurred in one yard, if cer-
tain loyal young men had not kept an ever watchful eye open for
every emergency.

$20 pages

$20 nages

Mr. Parker’s stories are based on his intimate knowledge of
naval offairs. The experiences which his characters go
through will show to every reader of his books just what is
happening or may happen within the gates of any of our
Navy Yards, or on the high seas on board one of our great
Be pie sine They are true pictures of naval life afloat and
ashore.

Price, Cloth, $1.75 each
All Prices NET

BOOKS BY
Lewis E. Theiss

In Camp at Fort Brady—A Camping

Story — cotorea Mlustrations

This story will be found helpful to all boys, especially those be-
longing to the Boy Scouts movement.

$20 pages

Lumberjack Bob

A tale of the Alleghanies, with colored frontispiece
818 pages

His Big Brother

Astory of the struggles and triumphs of a little Son of Liberty
Illustrated. 820 pages

The Wireless Patrol at Camp Brady

A story of how the boy campers, through their knowledge of
wireiess, ‘‘did their bit.” lustrated with colored frontispiece
320 pages

The Secret Wireless
A story of the Camp Brady Patrol. Colored IHustration
A $20 pages

.

The Hidden Aerial

The Spy Line on the Mountain. Colored Illustration
390 pages

The Young Wireless Operator—Afloat
Or, How Roy Mercer Won His Spurs in the Merchant Marine

Storms, fog and accidents at sea all lose much of their dangers
when aboard each vessel is an up-to-date wireless outfit and a
staunch, reliable boy like Roy Mercer to operate it.

Price, Cloth, $1.75 each
All Prices are NET

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