These hot days in August, when the trout took to the very deepest,
coldest pools they could find, and hid themselves all day under the
over-hanging rocks, and every creature that couldn't take to the water
longed for rain, Fleet Foot used to lead her little family up the steep
trails to the top of Mount Olaf or some near-by mountain-top, where the
wind blew cool night and day.
These trips were full of much joy for the fawns, for there was all the
spice of adventure in following a winding hoof-path that led--they knew
not where. For one never knew what might be just around the next turn.
How their hearts thumped when they came suddenly to the edge of a
precipice, where they could look down at Beaver Brook tumbling over the
rocks away, 'way down below I Or perhaps they could get just a glimpse
of Lone Lake lying gleaming in the hollow of the hills.
Not that there was any trail in the real sense of the word.
Left to themselves, they could not have told one rock from another, save
here and there where a bit of mica gleamed silver against the gray, or a
scraggly pine leaned too far out over a ledge to look safe.
But to their mother their trail was as plain as the nose on your face.
It was just a matter of turning and twisting, here to pass between those
two queer-shaped boulders, and there to go around that flat rock which
teetered alarmingly beneath one's feet. She had been over it all so many
times that she had learned the look of each new turn of the pathway. Had
so much as one pinnacle been out of place, she would have known,--and
wondered why.
One still, sunshiny morning, after they had drunk their fill at a cool
green pool of Beaver Brook, they started up the mountain-side for a day
under the shade of the last fringe of evergreens before one came to the
bare, rocky ridges, where it got too cold for anything to grow, except
in sheltered crevices.
The fawns danced and capered to the music of the bird song that filled
the woods, while Fleet Foot cropped all sorts of delicious
tid-bits,--now a clump of oyster mushrooms growing shelf-like on a
fallen log, and now a bunch of blue-berries, plump and juicy and
sun-sweet. Life was one long holiday.
One misty morning, as Fleet Foot was leading them in great bounds
through the tall meadow grass, the fawns came to a sudden stand-still,
their eyes popping with surprise. For they had just barely escaped
stepping on the writhing coils of a great long snake.
Their bleat of fear brought Fleet Foot instantly.
"Pouf! That's only a garter snake," she reassured them, with one glance
at the length-wise stripes (yellow and dark gray). "That's nothing to be
afraid of. The only kind you want to look out for is the kind with
cross-wisp stripes. I don't believe there is more than one snake in all
the North Woods that is poisonous,--and there are at least a dozen that
are perfectly harmless."
"What is the poisonous one?" bleated the trembling fawns.
"The rattler. But you won't see one of those in a year's time,--not in
these woods, where it gets so cold in winter. They love it hot and dry,
and so of course they live mostly out West, though you do find a few
sometimes among the rocks on the warm south side of a mountain."
"Oo! What if we'd meet a rattler?" shivered the fawns.
"Well, he'd warn you before you went too near."
"Warn us?--How?"
"He'd rattle, of course. He has a little set of bones on his tail that
he can rattle, and when you hear that, you need to look out, and get
away quickly."
"Are the others really harmless, Mother?"
"Harmless to fawns. That is, they have no poison bite. Snakes do a lot
of good, eating pests."
"But I don't like snakes," insisted the tinier fawn.
"Well, neither does Mother. But it's so silly, children, to be afraid.
Where is that garter snake? Gone, to be sure! And even the rattler only
strikes because he thinks you are going to kill him."
The fawns were very thoughtful after that. "Mother," they finally
bleated, "Seems as if even the meanest creatures in the woods had _some_
use."
"That's right," their mother answered them.
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