ing-place
under the branches, he crept around the rock and surveyed him stealthily
from the other side. Finding no enlightenment, or immediate prospect of
it, he again drew back, and made a careful investigation of the
stranger's tracks, which were quite unlike the tracks of any creature he
knew. Finally he made up his mind that he must confine his hunting to
the immediate neighbourhood, keeping the stranger under surveillance
till he could find out more about him.

Soon after the fox's going a tuft-eared lynx came out on the top of the
rock, and with round, bright, cruel eyes glared down upon the grassy
point, half-hoping to see some rabbits playing there. Instead, she saw
the dim white bulk of the sleeping stallion. In her astonishment at this
unheard-of apparition, her eyes grew wider and whiter than before, her
hair stood up along her back, her absurd little stub of a tail fluffed
out to a fussy pompon, and she uttered a hasty, spitting growl as she
drew back into the shelter of the hemlocks. In the dreaming ears of the
sleeper this angry sound was only a growl of the seas which had for days
been clamouring about the gloom of his stall on the ship. It disturbed
him not at all.

At about two o'clock in the morning, at that mystic hour when Nature
seems to send a message to all her animate children, preparing them for
the advent of dawn, the white stallion got up, shook himself, stepped
softly down to the brook's edge for a drink, and then fell to cropping
the grass wherever it remained green. The forest, though to a careless
ear it might have seemed as silent as before, had in reality stirred to
a sudden, ephemeral life. Far off, from some high rock, a she-fox barked
sharply. Faint, muffled chirps from the thick bushes told of junkos and
chickadees waking up to see if all was well with the world. The mice set
up a scurrying in the grass. And presently a high-antlered buck stepped
out of the shadows and started across the open toward the brook.

The dark buck, himself a moving shadow, saw the stallion first, and
stopped with a loud snort of astonishment and defiance. The stallion
wheeled about, eyed the intruder for a moment doubtfully, then trotted
up with a whinny of pleased interrogation. He had no dread of the
antlered visitor, but rather a hope of companionship in the vast and
overpowering loneliness of the alien night.

The buck, however, was in anything but a friendly mood. His veins aflame
with the arrogan