to be both resourceful and indomitable. From her lair under the
hemlock, which was sheltered from all winds, her deeply trodden trail
led both to the meadows and the birchen hill-slopes. She could paw her
way down to the deep-buried grasses; but it took so much digging to
uncover a few poor and unsatisfying mouthfuls that she could never
have kept herself alive in this fashion. Being adaptable, however, she
soon accustomed herself to browsing on the slimmest of the birch and
poplar twigs, and so, having proved herself one of the fittest, she
survived. When the late, reluctant spring brought the first green of
sprouting grasses to the meadows of the Quah-Davic, it found the red
cow a mere bag of bones, indeed, but still alive, and still presenting
an undaunted pair of horns to a still distrusted world.

Into this unfriendly world, when the painted trilliums and the purple
wake-robins were dotting every half-exposed glade, was born a sturdy
bull-calf. His sire was a handsome black half-breed Durham which had
been brought into the settlement the previous summer for the
improvement of the scrubby backwoods stock. The calf was jet-black in
colour. As he grew, he soon began to show hints of his sire's broad
forehead and massive fore-quarters. He had his mother's large,
half-wild, discriminating eyes; and his legs, soon throwing off the
straddling awkwardness of calfhood, developed his mother's almost
deer-like activity.

The summer passed uneventfully for the pair of aliens in the
wilderness. With abundant pasturage on the Quah-Davic water-meadows,
they had no occasion to wander into the perils of the deep wood; and
the little red cow had none of that prevision of wild mothers, which
leads them to instruct their young in the two great vital points of
woodcraft,--the procuring of food and the avoiding of enemies. She
herself knew little woodcraft save what she and the calf were
absorbing together, unconsciously, day by day. For the time they
needed none, their food being all about them, their enemies kept at
bay by the ceaseless _tunk-a-tonk_ of the mellow bell. Thus it came
about that to the black bull-calf the wilderness seemed almost empty
of life, save for the birds, the insects, the squirrels, and the fish
leaping in the pool. To all these the bell was a matter of
indifference.

Once only, late in the autumn, did he get a glimpse of the old
Quah-Davic panther. He and his mother were lying in the sun by the
meadow's ed