bare branches,
and the ground-spruce nodded briskly, beating time with their green
tips, as if glad of any sound or music that would break the chill
silence until the birds came back.

Here and there the snow told stories; gay stories, tragic stories, sad,
wandering, patient stories of the little woods-people, which the
frost had hardened into crust, as if Nature would keep their memorials
forever, like the records on the sunhardened bricks of Babylon. But
would the deer live? Would the big buck's cunning provide a yard large
enough for wide wandering, with plenty of browse along the paths to
carry his flock safely through the winter's hunger? That was a story,
waiting somewhere ahead, which made me hurry away from the foot-written
records that otherwise would have kept me busy for hours.

Crossbills called welcome to me, high overhead. Nothing can starve them
out. A red squirrel rushed headlong out of his hollow tree at the first
click of my snowshoes. Nothing can check his curiosity or his scolding
except his wife, whom he likes, and the weasel, whom he is
mortally afraid of. Chickadees followed me shyly with their
blandishments--tsic-a-deeee? with that gentle up-slide of questioning.
"Is the spring really coming? Are--are you a harbinger?"

But the snowshoes clicked on, away from the sweet blarney, Leaving
behind the little flatterers who were honestly glad to see me in the
woods again, and who would fain have delayed me. Other questions,
stern ones, were calling ahead. Would the cur dogs find the yard and
exterminate the innocents? Would Old Wally--but no; Wally had the
"rheumatiz," and was out of the running. Ill-wind blew the deer good
that time; else he would long ago have run them down on snowshoes and
cut their throats, as if they were indeed his "tarnal sheep" that had
run wild in the woods.

At the southern end of a great hardwood ridge I found the first path
of their yard. It was half filled with snow, unused since the last two
storms. A glance on either side, where everything eatable within reach
of a deer's neck had long ago been cropped close, showed plainly why the
path was abandoned. I followed it a short distance before running
into another path, and another, then into a great tangle of deer ways
spreading out crisscross over the eastern and southern slopes of the
ridge.

In some of the paths were fresh deer tracks and the signs of recent
feeding. My heart jumped at sight of one great hoof mark.