here--one--two--three--the third a buck--a three-year old,"
she said, sinking her voice by instinct. "Yonder a tree-cat dug for a
wood-mouse; your lynx is ever hanging about a drumming-log."

I laid my hand on her arm and pointed to a fresh, green maple leaf lying
beside the trail.

"Ay," she murmured, "but it fell naturally, cousin. See; here it parted
from the stalk, clean as a poplar twig, leaving the shiny cup unbruised.
And nothing has passed here--this spider's web tells that, with a dead
moth dangling from it, dead these three days, from its brittle shell."

"I hear water," I said, and presently we came to it, where it hurried
darkling across the trail.

There were no human signs there; here a woodcock had peppered the mud
with little holes, probing for worms; there a raccoon had picked his
way; yonder a lynx had left the great padded mark of its foot, doubtless
watching for yonder mink nosing us from the bank of the still
pool below.

Silently we mounted and rode out of the still Mohawk country; and I was
not sorry to leave, for it seemed to me that there was something
unfriendly in the intense stillness--something baleful in the silence;
and I was glad presently to see an open road and a great tree marked
with Sir Lupus's mark, the sun shining on the white triangle and the
painted V.

Entering a slashing where the logging-road passed, we moved on, side by
side, talking in low tones. And my cousin taught me how to know these
Northern trees by bark and leaf; how to know the shrubs new to me, like
that strange plant whose root is like a human body and which the Chinese
value at its weight in gold; and the aromatic root used in beer, and the
bark of the sweet-birch whose twigs are golden-black.

Now, though the birds and many of the beasts and trees were familiar to
me in this Northern forest, yet I was constantly at fault, as I have
said. Plumage and leaf and fur puzzled me; our gray rice-bird here wore
a velvet livery of black and white and sang divinely, though with us he
is mute as a mullet; many squirrels were striped with black and white;
no rosy lichen glimmered on the tree-trunks; no pink-stemmed pines
softened sombre forest depths; no great tiger-striped butterflies told
me that the wild orange was growing near at hand; no whirring,
olive-tinted moth signalled the hidden presence of the oleander. But I
saw everywhere unfamiliar winged things, I heard unfamiliar bird-notes;
new colors perplexed me,