watched through half closed lids, a growl deep down in his throat and
his bob tail lashing from side to side.
“What is the use?” Twinkly had asked himself. “I don’t want his old
fish, and I don’t want to fight. This isn’t my idea of going fishing at
all! Though, of course, if no one had been there to claim that trout, I
certainly shouldn’t have let it go to waste.”
Then suddenly both youngsters turned to sniff, as a new odor stole
through the forest on the breath of the wind,—an odor so acrid and
alarming that their fear of each other was forgotten in the face of a
common peril.
With the smell came a soft gray cloud floating through the aisles of
trees from Pollywog Pond.
Here the timber was chiefly hardwood, though an occasional birch reached
white arms up against the green, and a tangle of high-bush blueberries
and wild blackberry vines grew densely to as high as Twinkly Eyes could
see from on tiptoe.
It had been a dry spring in the region around Mount Olaf. For weeks
there had been no rain, and though Rapid River still ran broad and full
from the thaw, the hot sun had drunk up every drop of moisture it could
draw from the forest floor of dead leaves and fallen branches.
On the very night that the Red Fox family had gone frogging at Pollywog
Pond, and Unk Wunk the Porcupine had amused himself by rolling down
hill, and Bobby Lynx had met Twinkly Eyes on a fishing trip, the Hired
Man at the Farm had set forth an hour before cock-crow to set a line of
skunk traps.
Following the Old Logging Road toward Pollywog Pond, he had paused on a
fallen log to tie his shoe-string and light his pipe, and as he rose he
had given his match a shake and thrown it away.
Now of course the Hired Man meant to put his match out before he dropped
it, but he didn’t look behind him to make sure. No sooner was his back
turned than a thin flame sprung up in the dead leaves beside the fallen
log, and soon a healthy bon-fire was snapping and curling around the
log.
A white birch, with its paper bark, had caught a spark and started a red
snake of flame that crept along the ground with the wind, first back
towards the Farm, then around to the River. And before ever the Hired
Man could race back home for help, the fire had gained such headway that
the whole area between the pond and the river was ablaze and the
underbrush going like kindling.
It was the smoke of this red ruin that had so terrified both bear and
lynx that they forgot their feud.
[Illustration: [Bear & lynx]]
XLVIII
THE FOREST AFLAME
It takes a common peril to make people forget their hard feelings toward
one another.
Bobby Lynx was quite as willing as Twinkly Eyes to overlook the little
matter of the fish, once they had sniffed the acrid smoke that now came
creeping between the aisles of trees.
It was not big as forest fires go, and the trees were mostly hardwood,
which go slowly. But the fire lay between Bobby and home. It was to the
Lynx kitten a peril new to his experience.
His first thought was concealment, and he leaped into a tall pine and
clambered to the topmost branches that would hold him.
Twinkly Eyes, mere curiosity once the first shock of his alarm was past,
went shambling through the underbrush to see whence came that pungent
cloud.
What Bobby saw from his outlook was a wall of fire. This advanced
rapidly on the freshening wind. It devoured the underbrush that covered
the forest floor, and it all but outsped the creatures he dimly saw were
fleeing before it.
Here leaping flames climbed to the very tree-tops on the arms of the
paper birches, and even the hard pines gave up their deadwood and
smaller branches.
Long arms of scarlet raced through the open patches, devouring the dead
pine needles and dry oak leaves. Their snapping and crackling widened
Bobby’s eyes with terror as he flattened himself along his limb.
Soon, as Twinkly Eyes discovered before he had gone very far, the
thickening smoke cloud was becoming uncomfortably hot. Its breath stung
his nostrils and closed his eyes, and he gasped and stumbled, and
finally turned back in one mad dash of terror.
Bobby turned to peer longingly across the river, which here stretched
wider than he dared to swim.
He feared the water almost more than these unknown creatures of fire and
smoke that seemed to be circling in on him now from every other side.
He crept stealthily down his pine tree on the side opposite the flames,
and on to another that all but overhung the water, and there he lay,
green eyes dilating nervously as he peered down at the scene around him.
Twinkly Eyes dashed first up-stream, then down, in his anxiety to get
back to his den on Mount Olaf. For added to all his other troubles it
was by now broad daylight, and he wanted to hide himself away and sleep
till the shelter of the dark came round again. But there was no way out,
and he took his stand at the edge of the water, eying the swift current,
loath to venture the long swim to the other shore unless compelled to.
[Illustration: [Flames]]
XLIX
IN THE FACE OF A COMMON PERIL
As the morning wore on, the wind grew stronger, blowing the leaping
flames straight toward the river bank, where Bob and Twinkly Eyes
huddled side by side in terror.
It was not a big fire, but it swept through the dry underbrush of the
hardwood grove from Pollywog Pond to the plowed fields at the Valley
Farm, and from the Old Logging road to the river.
Had the trees not been of hardwood, a fire might have started that would
have eaten its way over miles of woodland. As it was, everyone at the
farm turned out with wet gunny sacks to beat back every flame that
leaped across the road as it wound from the pond on around at right
angles to the river. It should at least be kept within those natural
boundaries.
But to the Forest Folk whose homes were in the burned area, the fire
seemed the most terrible thing that had ever happened to them. To those
who crouched, waiting, on the bank of the river, the approaching flames
and the long swim across the current to the opposite bank seemed equally
impossible to face. Bobby Lynx, coughing and blinking in the acrid
smoke, as he clung to the limb of his pine tree, felt, catlike, that it
would scarce be worse to stay where he was than to plunge into the
water.
Twinkly Eyes, sitting like a black stump beneath, stared with amazement
as a band of hares, cousins of Mammy Cottontail, came galloping madly
before the racing flames. They were gasping for breath, their round eyes
bulging in terror and their hearts beating like trip-hammers in their
furry chests.
One scatter-brained brown bunny so far lost his wits as to circle around
and go dashing straight back into the advancing fire, while another
sought shelter fairly between Twinkly’s black feet. But the little Bear
was far too interested in the crackle of the flames to notice.
Almost on the heels of the hares loped Red Fox and his family, whom a
sudden shift of the wind had cut off from safety. But they likewise gave
the hares no more than a passing glance, but sat down opposite them at
the river’s brink to watch, and cough, and blink their smoke-stung eyes.
Next came Mother Red Squirrel and others of her kin, leaping from branch
to branch above the smoking ground till they had taken up their places
directly above the stream’s edge.
Here, too, came Betty Bluebird and Conqueree the Blackbird, and Mother
Grouse Hen, hurrying her fledglings along as best she could. Jim Crow
and his black brothers, frightened from their nest in the top of the
Pine, had gone soaring high above the smoke line, and so off to a point
from which they could watch in safety.
There were other creatures, too, who sought haven along the River Bank.
There was Writho the Black Snake, and Timothy Field Mouse, and Fleet
Foot, the Spotted Fawn who had strayed too far from her mother. The
little deer huddled with the hares as far from Twinkly Eyes and Red Fox
as they could crowd, without actually leaping off the bank.
The Red Squirrel family hid out of sight of both Bobby Lynx and Red Fox,
and Timothy Field Mouse and his deadliest enemy, the Black Snake, both
tried to hide in the same hole under the very nose of Red Fox, without
any one of the three having a thought beyond their common peril.
[Illustration: [Fleeing]]
L
WHILE THERE IS LIFE THERE IS HOPE
Yes, Sir, “while there is life there is hope!” But things certainly
looked bad for Bobby Lynx and Twinkly Eyes and Red Fox and his family as
the flames licked nearer and nearer through the circling trees.
The heat fairly seared their eyeballs, the smoke set them gasping every
time the wind turned their way, and the huge sparks that now began to
drop on their fur added pain to their terror.
Yet there was no way out, save the River which here ran wide and deep.
But if the larger animals were terror-stricken, imagine the feelings of
Mother Red Squirrel’s family, and the brown bunnies, and Fleet Foot the
Fawn, and Writho the Black Snake, and Timothy Field Mouse! For would
they not escape the red flames and the cutting smoke but to furnish
luncheon for their enemies, at whose very feet they crouched?
Of a sudden, as a blazing brand fell hissing beside Red Fox, he took a
good grip on his resolution and plunged into the stream, and yelped to
his family to follow. It was, after all, the only thing to do, as he had
known for some time. His hesitation had lain in the fact of the puppies’
inexperience in the water. But after all, the youngsters of the
wilderness could nearly always swim, once they were forced to it. And
there was Mother Red Fox and himself to help the pups along, should they
become too tired to make the entire distance.
Young Frisky Fox splashed in like any healthy puppy, his fat legs
paddling so energetically that he had little difficulty in keeping up
with his father. There did come a moment, however, when he felt as if he
would have to rest or sink, and with one of these sudden bright ideas
that make the foxes the cleverest creatures in all the wilderness, he
grabbed the tip of his father’s plumy tail in his teeth and clung. The
wiry fellow, from whom Frisky had inherited both strength and cunning,
cut across the current and towed him to the shallow waters of the
opposite bank.
Seeing Frisky, Mother Red Fox gave a sharp command to the youngest pup,
while she towed him the same way. Then both parents swam back to aid the
remaining youngsters, one by a timely word of encouragement, another by
holding to his ear, and the third as they had aided the first two.
Seeing the Fox family making so valiantly for safety, Twinkly Eyes flung
himself into their wake, and began gasping and snorting in his fight
with the current. Bobby Lynx, half blinded by the smoke, peered vaguely
at the sounds beneath his tree, then, with the courage of desperation,
leaped far out into the unknown element.
But so ill do the great cats take to water that his head went under, and
he felt that now surely it must be all up with him. Then, suddenly, he
clutched at the little Bear’s haunches and was half towed to shore.—Thus
ended their quarrel!
LI
THE BOY FROM THE VALLEY FARM
Landed on the other shore, Twinkly hid in a tree-top to see what else he
might see.
Now it often looks darkest just before daylight.
That was the way in this case. The little group of refugees on the shore
were all but ready to leap into the river, preferring death by drowning,
as the flames swept nearer through the underbrush, snapping and
crackling and spitting red sparks.
The wind had veered upstream, driving the smoke with it, but the heat
was fast becoming unbearable.
The brown bunnies, huddling close together in their terror, were not
built to swim at all. Fleet Foot, the spotted fawn, was yet too young
for the water, having indeed acquired the art of walking but a few days
before. While Mother Grouse Hen could have flown across, her chicks
could not, and she of course would not leave them.
All these stared with wide, hopeless eyes as the flames ate their way
toward them. Their throats were parched and their hearts beat visibly.
Mother Douglas Squirrel and her family were perched on the very tipmost
branch of the tree nearest the water, and there they raged and scolded.
Shadow Tail measured the distance to the nearest tree of the opposite
shore, half tempted to try the leap at the risk of landing in
mid-stream, but Mother Douglas was too wise to attempt it, for any
squirrel with half an eye could have seen it was impossible.
Then, suddenly, up the stream came creaking a broad, flat-bottomed
row-boat, and at its oar locks sat the Boy from the Valley Farm and his
sister,—the Little Girl on one side of the broad seat, he on the other.
The two children being too small to aid the men with the fire-fighting,
back along the Old Logging Road, had ventured up here on their own
account, to see if any sparks had leaped across the river to the dry
timber on the other side. Once they had seen a flying brand which the
Boy had gone ashore to quench with mud from the river’s bank.
Now they rounded the bend just in time to see Twinkly Eyes, the little
Black Bear, and his passenger, Bobby Lynx, climb up the farther bank and
dart off to hiding.
“Oh, see!” cried the Girl, pityingly, as she saw the group on the river
bank.
“Let’s get ’em!” proposed the Boy.
“Let’s!” agreed the Girl, and the pair rowed swiftly up the doomed right
bank and began grabbing the trembling hares by their long brown ears,
dropping them into the bottom of the boat.
Once the leaders were aboard, some sign seemed to go the rounds, and the
rest of the bunnies did not wait for assistance, but went scuttling over
the side of the boat so fast that the children could scarce find a place
to put their feet.
At that instant a flaming branch fell hissing almost into the boat.
“Pull out, quick!” gasped the Boy, swinging the boat around.
“Oh, but the Fawn!” wailed the Girl. “We can’t leave the Fawn!”
“We’ve got to!” commanded the boy, sternly, “or that whole tree will be
down on us!”
[Illustration: [Fleeing]]
LII
TWINKLY’S FELLOW REFUGEES
The Boy’s judgment told him it was not safe for them to linger a moment
longer so near the racing flames. Any moment the wind might shift and
blind them with its yellow smoke cloud, and it was hard enough at best
for the children to handle the heavy row-boat.
But there stood Fleet Foot, her broad ears turned inquiringly at the
newcomers, whom she was too young to fear, her great velvet eyes round
with terror and her pink nose twitching nervously.
She was tinier than a three weeks’ calf, and nothing could have been
lovelier than her white-spotted red-brown coat shading into light tan on
throat and chest.
[Illustration:
“He lifted her bodily into the boat”
—Page 161
]
The Boy dropped his oar again and stepped ashore, while his sister held
the boat, with its cargo of brown bunnies, in position, by reaching out
and clinging to an overhanging bush.
In all her three weeks of life the Fawn had never laid eyes on human
kind, nor, indeed, on any creature larger than herself save her mother,
the Doe. She therefore raised trusting eyes to the Boy, licking his palm
as he rubbed her nose, and she made no protest when he lifted her bodily
into the boat, shoving the hares aside till he had found a place for her
at the Little Girl’s feet.
Just at that moment they caught sight of the Squirrels. Mother Red
Squirrel and Shadow Tail and his brothers clung to a branch almost above
their heads, and their cries grew shrill as a creeping flame began
ascending the very tree they were on.
“Oh, please see if you can’t get them!” begged the Girl, calling and
coaxing to make them come down. The Boy tried, too, but in vain. Poor
Mother Red Squirrel didn’t understand, and she feared the children quite
as much as she feared the flames.
In vain, too, the Boy pursued the Grouse chicks, while the sparks began
showering all around them.
“Pull out, quick!” he cried. The Girl’s eyes filled as she thought of
Shadow Tail, the squirrel baby she had once held in her hand.
Mother Grouse Hen had clucked her chicks beneath her wings and now
crouched despairingly on the wet mud of the jutting bank. She would
protect them with her own body till the last possible moment.
“I have it!” exclaimed the Boy, bending to one strong oar while his
sister took the other. “Let’s get across quick, and then I’ll show you!”
[Illustration: [Hen]]
LIII
A WAY FOR THE SQUIRREL FAMILY
For the space of four minutes the children bent to their oars, while the
breath of the flames on the shore behind them scorched their cheeks and
parched their nostrils, and the fire ate its way through the brush to
the very water’s edge.
The bunnies fairly stood on top of one another till they filled the
rowboat with brown billows of soft fur. And Fleet Foot, the little
spotted Fawn, crouched with soft eyes fastened appealingly on the
children’s faces. In all the wilderness there is no creature so innocent
and so helpless and so altogether lovely as a spotted fawn. So at least
the children thought.
“Poor, poor bunnies!” sighed the Girl, as one was all but crowded over
the edge of the boat.
“Aw, they’ll be all right once they’re on the other side,” said the Boy.
“Get in there, you!” and he shoved the hare back from the edge with his
foot. His voice was just gruff enough to hide the pity in it.
But once drawn up on the opposite bank, he paused not even to help lift
the bunnies out, but grabbed the belt axe that a backwoods boy always
carries, and went hacking away at a slender sapling just opposite the
tree the squirrels were on.
He made quick work of it, I can tell you, for there wasn’t a moment to
lose. Notching it first on the side toward the river, he took care that
it fell so that its slender top reached into the far-hanging branch on
which the little family had taken its last stand.
As the sapling landed, Mother Red Squirrel’s black eyes snapped with a
sudden hope. I can assure you she needed no second invitation to use the
bridge thus mir-a-cu-lous-ly thrown across to her. With a glad bark to
the youngsters to follow, she raced down the sapling across the stream,
Shadow Tail at her heels. They didn’t even stop to draw breath till they
had scrambled up a pine tree set well back from the sight and the smell
of the fire across the stream.
The Boy’s eyes shone. “It didn’t take them long to make up their minds,”
he chuckled.
“Now, get out of here,” and he lifted the last of the bunnies out of the
boat, to go bounding off into the depths of the green woods beyond,—far
too fast for either Bob or Twinkly, I can assure you.
For the truce of their common peril was over, and the hares well knew if
they didn’t get into hiding before Bobby Lynx got sight of them, he’d
celebrate his escape on one of his fellow-refugees.
Back on the wet mud of the bank they had left, Mother Grouse Hen seemed
in a fair way to pull through after all, for the fire had stopped at the
River’s brink, and there was now but one great vista of charred and
smoking tree trunks for as far as the eye could reach.
[Illustration: [Squirrels]]
LIV
WHAT HAPPENED TO FLEET FOOT
“What worries me,” said the Boy, with an amused glance after the fleeing
hares, “is what we are going to do with the Fawn. She’s far too young to
look out for herself,” nodding toward the green depths into which bear
and lynx had disappeared.—Twinkly wondered too.
“She is certainly too young to get along without her mother,” agreed the
Girl, as the children from the Valley Farm studied the last of the
refugees, who gazed into her face with her great trusting eyes.
“The trouble is,” said the Boy, “she probably has a mother somewhere,
and then she’s a wild thing. She’d never be really happy with the cows.
I suppose the doe just managed to save the other fawn. Aren’t there
always two?”
“You think her mother got away then?” asked the Girl.
“Well I don’t know,” returned the Boy, gazing searchingly across the
River through the charred tree trunks. Here the ground still smoked
yellowly as the fire ate into the damp leaves of the nether layer of the
forest floor. Red embers glowed where the flames had raged through the
underbrush.
Now, as it happened, the Doe was searching despairingly that very moment
for her Fawn. She had made her escape in good season with the larger
fawn, but Fleet Foot she had missed from her side when it was too late
to return, and a wall of flame had risen between her and her little one.
The lost Fawn had raced, with the other Wood Folk, on before the flames
to the River’s brink, where the children had found her.
Meantime her mother had circled clear around the fire with her remaining
little one, trotting up-stream until she came to a narrow part where her
fawn could cross, peering and searching everywhere for Fleet Foot.
Now suddenly the children heard a dainty stamp and a shrill whistled
“H-e-e-e-yew, he-u!” And over a copse of hazel bushes peered a red-brown
doe, who instantly turned and leaped out of sight, tail raised like a
little white flag behind to show the fawn which way to follow.
And “He-w!” said Fleet Foot, with a tiny stamp, and followed.
And Twinkly Eyes, the bear cub, took it all in, from the hiding of his
tree-top.
[Illustration: [Bear]]
LV
TWINKLY EYES GOES HOUSE-HUNTING
Betty Bluebird, like most of the other feathered folk, was beginning to
think of starting south. For the wild ducks honking overhead told her it
was going to be a cold winter and advised her to start without delay.
Twinkly Eyes also heard the warning. And it set him restlessly searching
about for a snug den in which to pass the winter. For Twinkly Eyes was
going to hi-ber-nate. With the first snow-fall he would cuddle up in the
depth of some cave and pull the dead leaves after him, and tuck himself
in bed for a sleep that would last until spring.
Every day now he rose with the dawn to begin his search. And every night
he kept up till black darkness made it im-pos-sible to see.
But with all his searching, Twinkly Eyes never once ceased to eat
everything good he came to.
No, indeed, Twinkly Eyes was not the bear to stop eating just because he
was busy house-hunting.
Not a bit of it! In fact, if anything he ate more. Though he cut himself
down to one meal, that one meal lasted from the moment he awoke in the
morning to the moment he dropped to sleep in the chill of the autumn
night.
One effect of so much eating was, of course, to make him as fat as a
ball of butter. Another was to make his fur as thick and warm and glossy
as the finest sleeping bag that ever was invented.
But search as he would, Twinkly Eyes could not find just the right place
in which to den up for the winter. Of course, the first place he had
visited was the den where he had been born. But his mother was there
with this year’s cubs, and she had made it quite plain that there would
not be room for him too.
Then he thought of the pine woods on the slope of Mount Olaf, on the
side toward the Valley Farm. And one chill October morning, when a fine
drizzle reminded him that up north here winter was not far away, he
decided to explore these woods.
The dried pine needles lay like a velvet carpet over the forest floor,
and everywhere was the fragrance of wet pine. Through the thick gloom he
could make out countless mushrooms growing at his feet, and each one he
had sniffed, eating such as he knew would not poison him.
For his mother had taught him as a cub to know mushrooms.
The ground here slanted up a rocky knoll, and here and there were
boulders, and here and there a fallen tree trunk.
But nowhere could Twinkly find a cave. And besides, he smelled lynx
tracks everywhere, and it would never do to go to sleep for the winter
in a place where Old Man Lynx could find him.
No, decidedly, the pine woods would not do.—Where, then, should he
search?
Cutting down through a mixed wood that led to a tiny lake, Twinkly soon
found himself neck-high in blueberry shrub. Only now the berries were
all gone. He had been here many times before, only never with a den in
mind. So now he went over the ground again and through the brush around
the lake, and back up the slippery hillside.
Suddenly a strange, sweet odor smote his nostrils. He was approaching an
old deserted shack, with roof tumbling in and door hanging on one hinge.
It had once been a sugar camp, had Twinkly Eyes but known. And the
knowledge would have hastened his clumsy foot-steps. For that new smell
was the fragrance of maple sugar, the one thing in the world that bears
consider even better than honey.