tly and efficiently its weapons of offence and defence,
all complete in its fires and shelters and industries and domestic
animals. On the other, formidable, mysterious, vast, were slowly
crystallising, without disturbance, without display, the mighty opposing
forces. In the clarified air of the first autumn frosts this antagonism
seemed fairly to saturate the stately moving days. It was as yet only
potential, but the potentialities were swelling, ever swelling toward
the break of an actual conflict.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Now the leaves ripened and fell, and the frost crisped them. Suddenly
the forest was still. The great, brooding silence, composed of a
thousand lesser woods voices, flowed away like a vapour to be succeeded
by a fragile, deathly suspension of sound. Dead leaves depended
motionless from the trees. The air hung inert. A soft sunlight lay
enervated across the world.

In the silence had been a vast, holy mystery of greater purpose and
life; in the stillness was a menace. It became the instant of poise
before the break of something gigantic.

And always across it were rising strange rustlings that might mean great
things or little, but whose significance was always in doubt. Suddenly
the man watching by the runway would hear a mighty scurrying of dead
leaves, a scampering, a tumult of hurrying noises, the abruptness of
whose inception tightened his nerves and set galloping his heart. Then,
with equal abruptness, they ceased. The delicate and fragile stillness
settled down.

In all the forest thus diverse affairs seemed to be carried
on--fearfully, in sudden, noisy dashes, as a man under fire would dodge
from one cover to another. Every creature advertised in the leaves his
presence. Danger lurked to this, its advantage. Even the man, taking his
necessary footsteps, was abashed at the disproportionate and unusual
effects of his movements. It was as though a retiring nature were to be
accompanied at every step through a crowded drawing-room by the jingling
of bells. Always the instinct was to pause in order that the row might
die away, that the man might shrink to his accustomed unobtrusiveness.
And instantaneously, without the grace of even a little transitional
echo, the stillness fell, crowding so closely on the heels of the man's
presence that almost he could feel the breath of whatever it
represented.

Occasionally two red squirrels would descend from the spruce-trees to
chase each other madl