d through the woods again. Her tail was straight up, the white
flag showing like a beacon light as she jumped away. Behind her the
fawns stood startled a moment, trembling with a new wonder. Then their
flags went up too, and they wabbled away on slender legs through the
tangles and over the rough places of the wood, bravely following their
leader. And I, watching from my hiding, with a vague regret that they
could never again be mine, not even for a moment, saw only the crinkling
lines of underbrush and here and there the flash of a little white flag.
So they went up the hill and out of sight.

First, lie still; and second, follow the white flag. When I saw them
again it needed no danger cry of the mother to remind them of these two
things that every fawn must know who would live to grow up in the big
woods.

[Illustration]

A Cry in the Night

[Illustration]

This is the rest of the story, just as I saw it, of the little fawns
that I found under the mossy log by the brook. There were two of them,
you remember; and though they looked alike at first glance, I soon found
out that there is just as much difference in fawns as there is in folks.
Eyes, faces, dispositions, characters,--in all things they were as
unlike as the virgins of the parable. One of them was wise, and the
other was very foolish. The one was a follower, a learner; he never
forgot his second lesson, to follow the white flag. The other followed
from the first only his own willful head and feet, and discovered too
late that obedience is life. Until the bear found him, I have no doubt
he was thinking, in his own dumb, foolish way, that obedience is only
for the weak and ignorant, and that government is only an unfair
advantage which all the wilderness mothers take to keep little wild
things from doing as they please.

The wise old mother took them both away when she knew I had found them,
and hid them in a deeper solitude of the big woods, nearer the lake,
where she could the sooner reach them from her feeding grounds. For days
after the wonderful discovery I used to go in the early morning or the
late afternoon, while mother deer are away feeding along the
watercourses, and search the dingle from one end to the other, hoping to
find the little ones again and win their confidence. But they were not
there; and I took to watching instead a family of mink that lived in a
den under a root, and a big owl that always slept in the same hemlock.
The