ed.

Now that he was alone, and no longer accompanied by a human presence
whose footsteps and scent held the wild things aloof and still, Peter
felt nearer and nearer to him the beat and stir of life. Powerful
beaks, instead of remaining closed and without sound, snapped and
hissed at him as the big gray owls watched his passing. He heard the
rustling of brush, soft as the stir of a woman's dress, where living
things were secretly moving, and he heard the louder crash of clumsy
and piggish feet, and caught the strong scent of a porcupine as it
waddled to its midnight lunch of poplar bark. Then the trail ended, and
Jolly Roger's scent led into the pathless forest, with its shifting
streams and pools of moonlight, its shadows and black pits of darkness.
And here--now--Peter began his trespass into the strongholds of the
People of the Night. He heard a wolf howl, a cry filled with
loneliness, yet with a shivering death-note in it; he caught the musky,
skunkish odor of a fox that was stalking prey in the face of a
whispering breath of wind; once, in a moment of dead stillness, he
listened to the snap of teeth and the crackle of bones in one of the
dark pits, where a fisher-cat--with eyes that gleamed like coals of
fire--was devouring the warm and bleeding carcass of a mother
partridge. And beaks snapped at him more menacingly as he went on, and
gray shapes floated over his head, and now and then he heard the cries
of dying things--the agonized squeak of a wood-mouse, the cry of a
day-bird torn from its sleeping place by a sinuous, beady-eyed creature
of fur and claw, the noisy screaming of a rabbit swooped upon and
pierced to the vitals by one of the gray-feathered pirates of the air.
And then, squarely in the center of a great pool of moonlight, Peter
came upon a monster. It was a bear, a huge mother bear, with two
butter-fat cubs wrestling and rolling in the moon glow. Peter had never
seen a bear. But the mother, who raised her brown nose suddenly from
the cool mold out of which she had been digging lily-bulbs, had seen
dogs. She had seen many dogs, and she had heard their howl, and she
knew that always they traveled with man. She gave a deep, chesty sniff,
and close after that sniff a _whoof_ that startled the cubs like the
lashing end of a whip. They rolled to her, and with two cuffs of the
mother's huge paws they were headed in the right direction, and all
three crashed off into darkness.

In spite of his swelling he