alas! the law will be off; then there will be hunters in these woods,
some of whom leave their hearts, with their wives and children, behind
them. You can't trust them, believe me, little chap. Your mother is
right; you can't trust them."

The night was coming swiftly. The mother's call, growing ever more
anxious, more insistent, swept over the darkening hillside. "Perhaps," I
thought, with sudden twinges and alarms of conscience, "perhaps I set
you all wrong, little chap, in giving you the taste of salt that day,
and teaching you to trust things that meet you in the wilderness." That
is generally the way when we meddle with Mother Nature, who has her own
good reasons for doing things as she does. "But no! there were two of
you under the old log that day; and the other,--he's up there with his
mother now, where you ought to be,--he knows that old laws are safer
than new thoughts, especially new thoughts in the heads of foolish
youngsters. You are all wrong, little chap, for all your pretty
curiosity, and the stamp of your little foot that quite wins my heart.
Perhaps I am to blame, after all; anyway, I'll teach you better now."

At the thought I picked up a large stone and sent it crashing, jumping,
tearing down the hillside straight at him. All his bravado vanished
like a wink. Up went his flag, and away he went over the logs and rocks
of the great hillside; where presently I heard his mother running in a
great circle till she found him with her nose, thanks to the wood wires
and the wind's message, and led him away out of danger.

One who lives for a few weeks in the wilderness, with eyes and ears
open, soon finds that, instead of the lawlessness and blind chance which
seem to hold sway there, he lives in the midst of law and order--an
order of things much older than that to which he is accustomed, with
which it is not well to interfere. I was uneasy, following the little
deer path through the twilight stillness; and my uneasiness was not
decreased when I found on a log, within fifty yards of the spot where
the fawn first appeared, the signs of a big lucivee, with plenty of
fawn's hair and fine-cracked bones to tell me what he had eaten for his
midnight dinner.

* * * * *

Down at the lower end of the same deer path, where it stopped at the
lake to let the wild things drink, was a little brook. Outside the mouth
of this brook, among the rocks, was a deep pool; and in the pool lived