The Adventures of Fleetfoot and Her Fawns Part 8

But the meeting was brought to a sudden end. For out of the woods pranced another buck, belling a saucy challenge to a fight. Fleet Foot withdrew to a safe distance, as did the fawns, and watched admiringly as the two bucks came together; and the excitement, no less than the keen, frosty air, set the blood to racing hot through their young veins.

Stamping their steel-shod hoofs defiantly and tossing their antlered heads in the pride of their strength, the two bucks bellowed their battle challenge.

"Well, where did you come from?" shrilled Fleet Foot's champion.

"Never mind that. I've come to stay," bellowed the new-comer. "If either of us has got to go, it will be yourself, because I'm the strongest."

"Not if I know myself!"

"Look out! The strongest wins!"

"Yes, the strongest wins. So look out for your own self!" and the first buck gave a shrill snort of defiance.

Straightway the pair began dancing a sort of war-dance around each other. Slim and supple, they looked about equally fit.

Fleet Foot stepped gracefully a little nearer, and stood looking on, with her back to the fawns,-who thought best to keep their distance.

They noticed that another little audience had gathered on the opposite side of the lake,-a couple of yearling bucks with proud spikes of horns and three with two-p.r.o.nged antlers.

Around and around the two combatants tip-toed, heads flung back, chins in air. Then they lowered their antlers like s.h.i.+elds, and Fleet Foot's champion got in a good dig at the other's ribs. With a bellow of rage, the second buck came plunging, and the two crashed together, antlers against antlers. Their sharp hoofs fairly ploughed the ground as they strove and struggled and pushed each other about, the very whites of their eyes showing in their rage.

"There's ginger for you!" thought the fawns.

Now the fighting pair were shouldering each other about roughly with their horns, lips foaming, gasping for breath,-almost locking horns in a b.u.t.ting match. At last the first buck lifted his knife-edged forelegs and struck at the intruder. The next moment he was belling in triumph, for he had cut a great gash in the other's shoulder, and the latter had had enough.

The victor now turned for the look of admiration he felt he ought to find in Fleet Foot's eyes. But instead, he barely caught a glimpse of her dancing away through the thicket, with just one merry backward glance to see if he would race her.

But he knew where to follow; for there was the faintest, loveliest perfume on the air where she had pa.s.sed.

The fawns gazed after the pair, as they disappeared, then found themselves alone. All that month, while the woods turned from scarlet and yellow to brown and gray, and the nights grew frosty under the stars, the fawns were left very much to their own devices. But they were well capable of looking out for themselves at this time of year, for they found a beech wood and began fattening on the beech nuts against the increasing chill.

Their coats were changing from tawny red to bluish gray, and their fur thickening to keep a layer of warm air next their skins. There were coa.r.s.er hairs growing out as well, that helped to shed the rain. Their new fur glistened in the suns.h.i.+ne, and the fawns raced and hurdled in the keen air, and took running high jumps to work off their surplus energy.

Then Fleet Foot and the winning buck returned, and with them came two of the young bucks who had watched the battle. The six ranged happily from cranberry bog to evergreen swamp, feasting, feasting, feasting on mosses, lichens, anything and everything that grew, till their sides rounded with their winter plumpness, and a layer of warm fat lay just underneath their skins.

But with the first powdering of snow came a new danger. The hunting season had opened, and to the huntsman our little family meant merely a few pounds of venison for his table, and the pride of a pair of antlers to hang his gun upon.

To the buck, however, one little bullet might in an instant rob him of life and the keen joy of his airy speed, and all the glad wonderful world about them, and leave his family defenseless through the long, hard winter.

He was therefore more than wary. With the first crash of the Hired Man's thunder stick, he led his little herd to a distant cedar swamp, where they were soon joined by other groups as nervous as themselves at this new peril that could pick them out and wound them from so far away.

Sometimes, even then, a member of the band would have a race for his life.-And sometimes he never came back! But Fleet Foot and her five pulled through in safety.

Then the thunder-stick ceased to roar in the woods about Mount Olaf. The "season" was over, and the entire, band set about making active preparations for the on-coming winter. Already there were chill, drizzly days when all the world looked gray.

The former rivals now chewed their cuds together as peacefully as you please, the bucks sleeping on one side of the thicket, the does and their fawns on the other.

Then came a big surprise for the fawns.

It was a surprise for the Red Fox Pup as well.

CHAPTER XIII.-THE QUEER FEATHERS.

Frisky, the Red Fox Pup, had learned many lessons since the day he so nearly hanged himself in the wild grape-vines.

There was the day of the first snow, for instance.

Awakening one morning, cramped and chilled because he had not lined his bed deeply enough with leaves to keep off the cold, he peered from his little den on the hillside with wide eyes.

The air seemed filled, as far as he could see, with tiny white feathers, and the ground was covered with them.

He peered this way and that, wondering what kind of birds they could be whose plumage was being shed so freely. It must be a flock large enough to cover the whole sky, he decided, mystified.

He crept stealthily from the den, afraid, because he did not understand.

The instant his black feet touched the cold stuff, he leaped high into the air, with a yip of fright and amazement. But when he opened his mouth he got a taste of the falling flakes.

"Ha!" he said to himself, "that accounts for it. It is just rain turned white."

Still, he crept warily down to Pollywog Pond for his breakfast, stepping high, because he hated wet feet.

Arrived at the pond he stopped for a drink, when his lapping tongue came plump against a film of something hard and s.h.i.+ning that seemed to cover the water. What could it be, he asked himself, lapping up a mouthful of the snow-flakes to ease his thirst. (He wisely held them in his mouth till they had melted, for fear of chilling his stomach.)

It was certainly very queer. Now the very trees were beginning to be outlined in white. It made the world look quite a different place.

As for the deer, they took to a thicket of poplar, birch and spruce, on which they could feed when the snow lay deep.

There was one other to whom winter brought a change and that was Old Man Lynx.

Now it is very, very seldom that good luck falls right at one's feet undeserved.

So Old Man Lynx warned himself when he came upon the muskrat in the trap.

Of course the giant cat did not know it was a trap, as he circled around and around the struggling rat. His green eyes gleamed hungrily in his tawny face, and he crouched so close to the snow crust that his whiskers dragged on the ground. His ta.s.seled ears twitched nervously, his stubby tail thrashed the earth and his claws were bared in a fringe across the great awkward paws, as he crept nearer and nearer the struggling bait.

To the nostrils of the cat tribe the musky smell of the water-rat is most tempting, and his mouth watered till he licked his jaws at thought of the feast within such easy reach.

And yet-and yet-some spirit of the wild-some instinct of the dumb brute who must fight to live-seemed to warn him that where man had been, there would be trouble for him. And he circled his prey without quite daring to close in upon it and end its squeaking protest.

Now the Hired Man at the Valley Farm had not meant the trap for Old Man Lynx. He had placed it there on the bare chance of there being a wolf at large in the forest around Mount Olaf.

As the midwinter dawn deepened from salmon to rose, and the snow began to glitter in the sun's first rays, Old Man Lynx decided that the thing was altogether too mysterious to be wholesome. Instead, he trotted down to Lone Lake, where muskrats were supposed to be. And he promised himself that even were it too late in the day to catch a rat, he could at least afford the pleasure of sniffing at the chimneys to their round houses,-those air-holes in the top, where their musky breath steamed out, while the rats themselves lay snug and warm within.