s of existence he
yearned to give battle to something that was alive. He was a changed
Peter, no longer satisfied with the thought of gnawing sticks or stones
or mauling a rabbit skin. At the crest of the slope he stopped, and
yelped down, almost determined to go back to that black patch of forest
and chase out everything that was in it. Then he turned toward Cragg's
Ridge, and what he saw seemed slowly to shrink up the pugnaciousness
that was in him, and his stiffened tail drooped until the knotty end of
it touched the ground.

Three or four hundred yards away, out of the heart of that cup-like
paradise which ran back through a break in the ridge, rose a spiral
of white smoke, and with the sight of that smoke Peter heard also the
chopping of axe. It made him shiver, and yet he made his way toward it.
He was not old enough--nor was it in the gentle blood of his Mackenzie
mother--to know the meaning of hate; but something was growing swiftly
in Peter's shrewd little head, and he sensed impending danger whenever
he heard the sound of the axe. For always there was associated with that
sound the cat-like, thin-faced man with the red bristle on his upper
lip, and the one eye that never opened but was always closed. And
Peter had come to fear this one eyed man more than he feared any of the
ghostly monsters hidden in the black pit of the forest he had braved
that day.

But the owls, and the porcupine, and the fiery-eyed fox that had
run away from him, had put into Peter something which was not in him
yesterday, and he did not slink on his belly when he came to the edge
of the cup between the broken ridge, but stood up boldly on his crooked
legs and looked ahead of him. At the far edge of the cup, under the
western shoulder of the ridge, was a thick scattering of tall cedars and
green poplars and white birch, and in the shelter of these was a cabin
built of logs. A lovelier spot could not have been chosen for the home
of man. The hollow, from where Peter stood, was a velvety carpet of
green, thickly strewn with flowers and ferns, sweet with the scent
of violets and wild honey-suckle, and filled with the song of birds.
Through the middle of it purled a tiny creek which disappeared between
the ragged shoulders of rock, and close to this creek stood the cabin,
its log walls smothered under a luxuriant growth of wood-vine. But
Peter's quizzical little eyes were not measuring the beauty of the
place, nor were his ears listening t