ng 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 heart Peter let out a little yip. It was
a great satisfaction, just at a moment when his nerves were getting
unsteady, to discover that a monster like this one in the moonlight
was anxious to run away from him. And Peter went on, a bit of pride and
jauntiness in his step, his bony tail a little higher.

A mile farther on, in another yellow pool of the moon, lay the partly
devoured carcass of a fawn. A wolf had killed it, and had fed, and now
two giant owls were rending and tearing in the flesh and bowels of what
the wolf had left. They were Gargantuans of their kind, one a male, the
other a female. Their talons warm in blood, their beaks red, their slow
brains drunk with a ravenous g