the shallow margin.
Before the flames were actually upon her, she was beyond the zone of
their fury. But she felt the withering blast of them, and their
appalling roar was in her ears. With starting eyes and wide,
palpitating nostrils, she ran on and on, and stopped only when she
sank exhausted in a rude cove. There she lay with panting sides and
watched far behind her the wide red arc of terror drawn across the
sky.

The next day she wandered some miles farther down the Quah-Davic, till
she came to a neighbourhood where the water-meadows were strung
thickly along the stream and where the pasturage, though now dry and
untasty, was abundant. Back from the water-meadows was a region of low
hills covered with a second growth of young birches and poplars. Among
the hills were ravines thick with hemlock and spruce. Here she
established herself, and at night, either because she missed the
narrow quarters of her stable, or because some wild instinct within
her led her to adapt herself quickly to the ways of the wild kindred,
she would make her lair in the deepest and most sheltered of the
ravines, where a peculiarly dense hemlock veiled the front of an
overhanging rock. This retreat was almost as snug as her old stable;
and, lying down with her long horns toward the opening, she felt
comparatively secure. As a matter of fact, though all these woods of
the Quah-Davic were populous with the furtive folk, the little red cow
saw few signs of life. She was surrounded, wherever she moved, by a
wide ring of resentful solitude. The inexplicable _tunk-a-tonk,
tunk, tonk_ of her deep-throated bell was disquieting to all the
forest kindred; and the least move of her head at night was enough to
keep the most interested prowler at a distance from the lair behind
the hemlock. There was not a bear, a wolf, or a panther on the
Quah-Davic (there was but a single pair of panthers, indeed, within a
radius of fifty miles!) that cared to investigate the fighting
qualities of this keen-horned red creature with the inexplicable
voice.

Till the snow fell deep, covering the dry grass on the meadows, the
little cow throve well enough. But when the northern winter had fairly
settled in, and the great white stillness lay like sleep upon the
ancient wood, and the fir-trees, with their cloaking of snow, were so
many spires and domes and pinnacles of glittering marble under the icy
sunlight, then the wanderer would have starved if she had not chanced