Chapter III: Part 3

But quails can not count, it seems. For when the little brown mother tripped daintily away into the deep greenery of the fern brake with her brood at her heels, we heard a tiny, piping cry so small as to be only a dot of sound. Following it, we came upon the place where Mrs. Quail’s children had hidden themselves, and there we found a baby quail whose tiny legs had been caught in a twin-flower vine, and who was trying to wrench himself free with all his little might. It was but the work of an instant to release the little dark brown puffball, and as I held him in my hands he peeped shrilly and mournfully.

We could not bear the thought of leaving him there in the woods on the chance that his mother would hear him and come to him. Perhaps our doubt of her was unjust, but at any rate I carried him down the Hill Trail, through the orchard, and to the little log cabin. Cupped warmly in my hands, he went to sleep, and when he woke up, he forgot that he had been frightened, for he was a very tiny quail, and his life had been so brief that he had not had time to learn the great fear which all too soon becomes a part of every woods creature’s life.

That night we put him in a little box with warm flannel covers over him, which we hoped would take the place of his mother’s feathers, and the next morning we thought to give him into the keeping of some philanthropic hen to rear with her own children.

O’Henry, the Quail Baby, did not know that he was not a chicken; but the hens knew the difference, and there was not one lady among them, I am sorry to say, who would stretch her maternal spirit to include him in her family. We tried him on Sironda, the black Minorca hen, who had obligingly hatched out and mothered everything, from Barred Plymouth Rock chicks to white Pekin ducklings, and who had even reared a family of lanky young turkeys. But although Sironda was fussily attentive to her own brood of three-day-old chicks, she clucked sharply when we shoved O’Henry in under her spreading wings, and tried to scalp him with a vigorous peck.

Nor would Liberty, the bantam hen, accept him as a foster child. She squawked as if he were some vicious animal, and only prompt attention on our part saved him from a terrible death.

So we brought up O’Henry by hand and built for him a wire pen where he could spend his days. We dared not let him loose in the poultry yard, for it seemed that every hen, matron and maiden lady alike, resented the presence of the little woods stranger and would have rejoiced in scalping him.

Brother and I lightened O’Henry’s captivity as much as we could. We taught him to come to us when we whistled his family call, and we would carry him about on our shoulders, balancing there like a tight-rope performer. We took him with us when we rowed in our little boat on the bay, and he would perch on the bow, keeping himself upright with fluttering wings and tail, cocking his tiny head on one side when the sea-gulls flew over, and uttering at times a faint and thoughtful note.

However, it was really due to Clarence, the gray gander, that O’Henry’s life became a happy one at the cove. Clarence was full of years and dignity, and a born philanthropist. If he had been a man, he would have endowed orphanages and given newsboy dinners. As it was, he had a passion for fathering the young things of the poultry yard, much to the dismay of the various mothers.

There was never a queerer sight than Clarence, the huge gander, going the rounds of the hen-coops of a morning, making coaxing noises to lure the young chicks out from under their mothers’ wings. The mother hens were imprisoned to prevent their scratching in the garden, and Clarence would shovel at the ground with his broad flat bill and pretend to drop a worm or bug in front of the coop, with the result that half of the lady hen’s brood would be at his heels ready to follow where he led. His charges were always well fed, for Clarence was an excellent provider, but the wear and tear on the feelings of the mothers must have been terrific.

It was inevitable that sooner or later the gray gander should discover O’Henry and make him one of his family. We found Clarence in the yard one morning, a dozen odd-sized chickens at his webbed heels. There were two Minorca chicks that belonged to Sironda, half a dozen white Leghorn children, a tiny cockerel with budding wings and tail who was Liberty’s son, and a lanky young Plymouth Rock rooster, all run to legs.

We were minded to see what Clarence would think of our pet, and we let O’Henry out of his pen. The gray gander waddled over toward the tiny brown bird, his feathered tail wiggling from side to side, and made some hospitable noises in his throat. Then he pulled up a tuft of grass and dropped it before the Quail Baby by way of getting acquainted. The chicks set upon it noisily, while O’Henry watched them, his little head upraised, his tiny black eyes fixed on Clarence’s friendly bulk.

We had no idea of letting him go gipsying with Clarence, for he had become a well-loved playmate, and we could not be sure of his safety when away from us. Brother stooped to pick him up, but with a long-drawn hiss Clarence was upon him in a fury of flapping wings and snapping bill. He did not suffer his charges to be molested while in his care; that was clear.

So we allowed O’Henry to go jaunting with Clarence and his feathered crew. Daily the gray gander would come into the yard with his motley family in tow, and having gathered up O’Henry, they would be off through the meadow, up into the orchard, not to return until the setting of the sun. They would come straggling back in sleepy Indian file, the gray gander at the head of the line, the chicks cheeping fretfully and glad to nestle under the feathers of their distracted mothers. We would watch for O’Henry and whistle the call he knew. He would come to us with his quick, darting run and we would take him into the house for the night. His crop was always crammed disgracefully, and his eyes were heavy with sleep.

Sometimes O’Henry heard the call of the wild, and we wondered when he would obey it. He had grown from a baby bird to a beautiful brown gentleman quail, with white stripes running from his throat down over his breast like a vest. He had a tiny topknot that lifted in moments of excitement, and a clear “Bobwhite” whistle that Brother and I imitated, much to his annoyance.

We would hide from him behind the rose-bush and whistle. He would come running, his head stretched out in front of him, and on seeing us would hunch his head in between his shoulders and blink at us reproachfully.

When summer passed and autumn came to the cove, O’Henry was the only one of Clarence’s family who still remained with the gray gander. The chicks and ducklings had gradually grown to adulthood and forgotten the kindly gander who had fathered them. But O’Henry still joined Clarence in his daily excursions to the orchard or the meadow.

Then one day, late in the fall, O’Henry went back to the woods. We grieved for him, because we loved him and because he had chosen the hardest time of the year in which to return to wild life he knew only by instinct. We went along the Hill Trail whistling “Oh, _Hen-ry_!” But if he heard the call he disregarded it. He never came to us.

Clarence was inconsolable. Day after day he would waddle into the back-yard where O’Henry’s empty pen still stood, walk around it, peer through the wire mesh, and make seductive noises of invitation. Brother and I tried to explain to him that our baby quail had grown up and had gone back to his kindred of the woods, but Clarence only hissed at us and regarded us balefully. I think he suspected us of having made away with his little comrade.

One day the snow came, early for the Sound country, and Brother and I, climbing the trail to the top of the hill, saw the familiar three-line imprints of the quail track. We thought of O’Henry, our lost friend; we hoped he was warm and that his crop was full of food.

Then one morning we heard the familiar “quit quit” of the quail very near at hand. The sound came from an empty hen-house, and when we approached it silently and peered through a crack, what should we see there but a bevy of twenty quail—and O’Henry in their midst! He had not forgotten us after all! He had brought his friends and relatives back to the place of his childhood, where he was sure of a welcome for them.

Our hands filled with cracked wheat and mixed grain, we came to the door of the shed, softly whistling, “Oh, _Hen_-ry!” He came, as in former days, running to us with his head stuck out in front of him, and with a soft whir of wings was upon my shoulder, pecking contentedly at the wheat I offered him, and wiping his bill on my cheek.

All through the weeks of snow and cold we fed O’Henry’s clan, and they learned that we were not to be feared. They surrounded us like chickens whenever we came into the shed, for O’Henry’s trust in us had inspired their confidence. Not only did they become accustomed to us, but to Clarence as well. For the lonely gray gander caught sight of O’Henry one morning, and waddled over to him, wiggling his excuse of a tail, shoveling the ground with his flat, yellow bill, and expressing his delight in husky quacks. The other quail at first took alarm, and there was much whirring of wings and scurrying of tiny feet. But the gray gander soon proved to them that his intentions were of the best. He merely wished to provide for them. So all those weeks when we fed our “boarders,” as we called them, Clarence stayed in the shed with the quail family, grubbing busily at the bare ground, finding little, but making up for the scarcity of food in kindly endeavor.

When the snow melted, O’Henry’s tribe went back to the woods—and with them went Clarence. One day we saw O’Henry and his brown cousins scurrying up the hill, darting under ferns and bushes, calling to each other happily—and in their wake was Clarence, the fatherly gander, flattered into thinking that he was leading the way.

It was a quaint sight, and we did not try to bring him back because we thought he would return at sunset. But he did not. He disappeared into the woods with the quail family, and we never saw him again. Long afterward, hunters told us of seeing a gray gander with a flock of quail—and they had forborne to shoot.

So we lost two friends at once, but we tried to believe that they were happy together. How Clarence accustomed himself to the ways of the wild, I do not know. But I do believe that somewhere the gray gander still lives with O’Henry, and I can think of no better protector for the quail baby and his family.

_Part Eight_
THE TALE OF TIMOTHY

_Timothy clung to the bottle habit._
]

_Part Eight_
TIMOTHY, THE DIRTY BEAR

Perhaps it is unjust to the memory of our friend Timothy that we should think of him as “the Dirty Bear.” I wouldn’t prejudice you against him for the world. “Dirty” has such a reprehensible sound. But Timothy was dirty in a perfectly legitimate way. He had a primitive soul that found delight in grubbing in rotten stumps for maggots and in burrowing into the soft earth for Indian potato roots. You can see that under such circumstances he could not keep his face and paws scrupulously clean, any more than a child can who makes mud pies. He hated water—but then, so did we, unless we could take our baths in the Bay—and he had an almost fanatical fear of soap. Brother, who was then reading “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” thought Timothy might have been a reincarnation of some eccentric hermit who had vowed never to wash himself for the rest of his life.

We knew Timothy long before he knew us. We did not know him by name, but we knew where he lived, and we had what you might call a speaking acquaintance with his mother. It happened thus:

One day, in our explorations along the creek bed at the end of the Hill Trail, we came suddenly upon a hole in the bank. It was almost covered by long, overhanging ferns, and had not a puff of wind stirred the fronds just as we were passing, we should never have known about the hole at all. It was on the opposite side of the creek, but we found a place where a fallen log bridged the little stream, and the next moment we were standing on the opposite side at the foot of the embankment, pushing the ferns aside and peering into the depths of a black and wonderfully inviting hole.

Had we thought to look, we might have seen in the sandy slope that led up to the hidden entrance the imprints of a foot almost human in shape, although not nearly so large. Footprints that turned in toward each other—and we should have known. But our minds were filled with the fascinating possibilities of the miniature cave we had discovered. Perhaps it was a pirate den; perhaps gnomes lived there; or perhaps we were on the track of buried treasure.

On hands and knees I led the way into the inky blackness with Brother close behind me. The daylight behind was blotted out. For several yards the passageway went straight ahead, then it turned suddenly to the right; and I, turning with it, stopped so abruptly that Brother coming behind bumped into me. A curious, powerful odor enveloped us, as of darkness made odorous by furry bodies and warm by living things. Then from ahead of me not more than two yards away flashed the savage gleam of two blue-green eyes.

There was a menacing growl which set our spines to tingling, and at the same instant came the sound of whines and a movement as of baby things disturbed in their sleep. I was conscious of a sickish, fainting feeling, for I realized suddenly that we were in the house of a mother bear.

Brother needed no urging to make his exit. He was backing out on hands and knees far more quickly than he had come in, and I was prodding him along, followed by those menacing, hair-raising growls.

Why the lady bear did not attack us is more than I can tell. The brown bears of the northwestern woods are harmless and even friendly little persons, but the mother when protecting her young is more ferocious than a wildcat or a mountain lion. Perhaps Mrs. Timothy knew that our visit was unintentional and that we meditated no harm toward her or her children. At any rate we gained the entrance of the cave untouched and unharmed, but we were breathing heavily and our knees were wobbling sadly.

Perhaps you think we should have stayed away from the house of the lady bear; but we did not. We were interested, you see, in knowing how much of a family she had, and we never went along the creek bed without leaving some offering in the shape of food at the mouth of the hole.

Sometimes it was an apple or a leaf of lettuce, and if nothing else availed, we broke off licorice root or fern and placed it there for her. It was our method of apologizing for our intrusion and of expressing our interest in the family.

One day we saw the mother bear with her children, and that is how we came to name Timothy. She was at the mouth of the cave, half asleep in the warm sunshine, and four cubs were rolling over each other like gridiron heroes in a football scrimmage. They were squealing like young pigs, and from time to time she remonstrated against their noise by a sleepy grunt. Then, as we watched, the bear cub at the bottom of the furry pile squeezed out and stood on his hind legs. His face was covered with brown, sandy loam, and his squinty black eyes peered out as through a mask. I knew a boy who lived at the head of the Bay whose face always looked so. His name was Timothy, and that was why on the spot we so christened the bear baby.

Our next meeting with Timothy was in the nature of a near-tragedy. We were hunting for trilliums in Trillium Gulch, a hidden valley to which we ourselves had cut a path from the Hill Trail. The white, lily-like flowers starred the hillside there in the spring, and it was our fond belief that no one came there but ourselves. Hunters and trappers go everywhere, however, violating even such a woodland paradise as ours. As we went down the narrow trail, pushing aside the light branches of the alders and the firtrees, we heard a plaintive, whining cry almost human in its poignancy. We stopped for an instant, listening, wondering. Then we slipped softly down the path, thrust aside the interlacing ferns, and found ourselves beside the little stream which ran like a silver ribbon through Trillium Gulch. The sounds came from the left, and following their lead we rounded a boulder in the trail and came upon a sight which filled us with gasping indignation. A little brown bear with a fleck of white on his furry throat was tugging frantically and futilely at the jaws of a steel trap which held his two front paws in a cruel, biting grip. There was blood upon the jagged clamps, and the face which the little fellow turned to us was piteous in its baby misery, a little brown face covered with loam. It was Timothy, the Dirty Bear.

I do not like even now to think of the half-hour which followed. So strong was the steel trap that the combined efforts of Brother and myself could only pry the cruel jaws apart the fraction of an inch. We were hampered, too, in our work of mercy by poor little Timothy, who, not realizing that we were trying to help him, shrieked and bit at us and scratched with his hind feet. Our hands were soon covered with blood, and there was a long, jagged line of red on Brother’s face where the baby bear had clawed him. But we did not pause in our efforts. Finally, by the aid of a stout stick, we managed to open the jaws of the vicious trap, and the poor little fellow, his front paws cruelly torn and bleeding, whimpering like a baby, sat down on his haunches and began to lick his wounded paws, stopping at intervals to hold them out in front of him like a child whose finger is hurt and wants it made well by a kiss.

Strangely enough, he was not afraid of us now, and when I took him in my arms his plaintive whimpering gradually ceased, and he licked at his paws solicitously.

No doubt we should have taken Timothy back to his mother and trusted to nature to heal his grievous hurts. But nature would take too long, and in the meantime he would suffer cruelly. He was such a little bear, you know, and had not yet achieved the stoicism which makes the older woods creatures almost indifferent to pain. So even at the cost of causing his mother a great deal of worry at his prolonged absence, we took him down the hill with us to the log cabin to receive first aid treatment for his wounds.

That is how Timothy, the Dirty Bear, became a friend of ours. Fate in the form of a hunter prevented us from taking him back to his home in the creek bank. The poor lady bear was shot the next day. One of her cubs was captured and the other two children escaped to the woods to live as best they could. So Timothy belonged to us, and he was the merriest of playmates.

When we rescued him from the trap he was a very tiny bear, being no larger than Tinker, our black and tan rat terrier. He slept in a clothes-basket on the back porch, sometimes having for a bedfellow Three-Spot, the mottled black and white cat. Three-Spot at first had been greatly alarmed by Timothy’s rough and sportive overtures of friendship. But when she found that by boxing his ears she could correct his manners and set him to yelping with fright, she took to imposing upon his good nature by making him serve at night for a mattress. In the morning we would find the two of them curled up together, Timothy snoring gently and Three-Spot digging her paws into his soft, thick fur with a purr that was a monotone of content.

Brother and I did not know whether Timothy’s mother had weaned him from a milk diet, but we felt that we would be safeguarding his digestion if we brought him up on liquid food for a time at least, so we rowed into town especially to purchase a bottle with a strong rubber nipple attached. The druggist asked if there was a baby at our house, and we told him yes—what kind of baby, we did not state.

Whether or not we were following the same system of dietetics that Mrs. Bear would have employed in bringing up her child, Timothy really did thrive on his liquid menu. Even after he outgrew the necessity for milk, he clung to the bottle habit and would sample the contents of any bottle he found. We used to bring him ginger ale from town and soda pop of all flavors. If nothing else was handy, we filled a battered old canteen with sweetened water, and he would tilt back on his hind legs, hold the canteen perpendicularly aloft, close his eyes, and drink it slowly, making funny little rumbling noises deep in his throat which, Brother maintained, were imitations of Three-Spot’s purring. Once he got hold of a bottle of kerosene and had closed his eyes in anticipatory ecstasy before the taste of the first terrible mouthful reached his throat. I shall never forget the look of pained disillusion on Timothy’s face. He threw the bottle from him, coughed and sputtered, gagged once or twice as if deathly sick, and then waddled off to the spring, walking pigeon-toed, and with uncomprehending anguish in the very tilt of his furry hind quarters. That should have cured him of his liking for promiscuous bottles, but it did not—as you shall see.

We worried a little at first as to what else we should give him besides milk, but we need not have concerned ourselves. Timothy’s appetite was without limits, and he could eat anything—bread, meat scraps, griddle cakes, or cold potatoes. On top of the civilized food we fed him he hunted on his own account for certain roots he liked, clawed the bark from fallen logs to get the white grubs underneath, and buried his head at the foot of hollow stumps where the red ants had made their hills. After an hour or two of such foraging, he would return to us, his face and paws besmeared with loam and covered with cobwebs, his furry coat rusty with sand and tagged by twigs and strands of blackberry vine. He would blink at us questioningly, a trifle shamefacedly, running his small red tongue along the sides of his mouth, and we would shake our heads and say mournfully, “Oh, Timothy, you dirty, dirty bear!”

After such excursions we always gave him a bath in the big washtub, and though he knew there was no escaping it, he always squealed and struggled while we lathered him and only ceased his whining when we had rinsed him and put him in the sun to dry, giving him the canteen filled with sugared water to keep him quiet.

He was the merriest playfellow we ever had. He went with us everywhere—up the Hill Trail, into the orchard, and out on the bay when we sailed our little boat and played that we were pirates. Timothy never objected to anything except a bath. We dressed him in outlandish costumes, sometimes with a red bandanna tied around his head, a shawl looped about his fat and furry body, and a wooden knife stuck in his belt. He was always ready to wrestle with us, to climb hills with us, or to be a pillow for our heads as Brother and I lay through the long, drowsy, summer afternoons and read fairy-tales aloud to each other, or described the shapes we saw in the clouds.

When the late fall came, Timothy remembered he was a bear long enough to have a desire to go to bed for the winter, but what chance had a tired bear for a seasonal sleep when living in the same house with Tinker, Three-Spot, Brother, and myself? We would drag him from his clothes-basket while he whimpered with half-closed eyes, and Tinker would badger him into wakefulness and a game of tag. Then the four of us would go through the orchard up to the Hill Trail, pushing each other into the drifts of dead leaves and playing hide and seek around the stumps and logs.

Of course Timothy could not stay with us always; that was too much to expect. He belonged to the woods, and sooner or later he must obey their call. He had belonged to us for almost a year, and it was only right that the out-of-doors should at last claim her child. But when the call of the wild did come, we were sorry in spite of ourselves, and when Timothy’s absences came more and more frequently and the intervals of time he spent with us lessened, we missed him sorely. We knew that soon our playmate would be with us no more, that he would go back to the forest whence he came, and take up the serious business of finding a wife and of locating a tree or a hole in which to spend the next winter.

The manner of his departure was dramatic, even as was his advent into our lives. We were up on the Hill Trail, Brother and I, and we had, as we supposed, left Timothy on the back porch sleeping in his clothes-basket, for which he was now much too big, but to which he had become attached through habit. On the open trail with its sound-deadening mat of hard, brown earth we did not hear the soft, padding feet that followed us and were not aware that our friend was near at hand until we met a hunter, brown-faced and with a gun in hand, near the bend in the path that we called “U-Chu-Ka’s Corner,” in memory of our little rabbit friend.

The man had a red band around his hat, I remember, and a canteen was slung at his side. He had put it to his lips to drink when he caught sight of us, and suddenly his eyes widened, and the hand that held the canteen became rigid.

“Run, you kids!” he gasped out, “there’s a bear behind you!”

We turned to confront Timothy, who was standing pigeon-toed in the middle of the trail, his face covered with loam from a rotten stump where he had been digging for ants, his eyes blinking at us sleepily and a trifle reproachfully for having gone off without him. But before we could explain to the hunter that the bear behind us was a friend of ours, the man had raised his gun and leveled it at our playfellow. I screamed aloud and Brother, heedless of the danger flung himself in front of the rifle.

Now Timothy knew nothing of guns, but he had long and satisfactory acquaintance with bottles and canteens. He had seen the man drink. There was something contained therein that he, Timothy, would like. The man would not mind sharing it—I’m sure he reasoned thus to himself—and in that instant when the gun was pointed straight at him, he rose on his hind feet, his furry arms outstretched, and started toward the hunter.

The man with the gun forgot to pull the trigger; he forgot everything except that a dark brown body with gleaming black eyes was advancing upon him. He gave a little squeal of terror, and the rifle dropped from his hands. He turned and fled down the trail with Timothy galloping on all fours close at his heels. In spite of our breathless calls he would not return to us, and though we ran and called and laughed at the same time, he soon outdistanced us. When last we saw the hunter he was disappearing over the crest of a little hillock in the trail with the canteen bobbing behind him, and the hat with the red band made a dot of scarlet against the underbrush where it had fallen.

We heard afterward that the man had not stopped running until he reached the little town. Timothy by that time was nowhere in sight, having given up the pursuit of the canteen in disgust.

But we never saw him again. Perhaps returning home he met a comely lady bear and they decided to set up housekeeping together. Perhaps she even won his heart by telling him that she knew where there was a nice bottle full of sweetened water.

Long afterward we found one day by the creek bed a ginger ale bottle dropped there by some picknickers. It was empty, and on the gravel near by we saw footprints almost human in shape, only smaller and toeing in toward each other.

We knew somehow that Timothy had been there. It was almost as if he had known we would pass that way, and had left the bottle and his footprints where we would see them to tell us that we were not forgotten, nor were the things we had taught him.

_Part Nine_
THE BANDIT BIRD

_Part Nine_
_The_
BANDIT BIRD

I hope the fact that Hector was a chicken hawk will not prejudice you against him unduly. There are brigands, you know, who have gentlemanly instincts, and I am sure that if Hector had been a bandit chief, he would have spared women and children and given part of his plunderings to charity. After all, he was not to blame for being a hawk or for having a natural liking for live poultry. There was at times a mournful dignity about him, as if he resented the unfair workings of a fate which had made him a robber bird, a trespasser on the lives of other creatures, and at enmity with every living thing.

_Sometimes the bandit birds swooped down_
]

He was a beautiful hawk with gray-brown plumage, wing tips that turned slightly upward when he flew, and a fierce and royal beak curved like a scimitar. His eyes were very black, very bright, and very knowing. Most of the time they were superbly disdainful. But Brother and I have seen them when they actually seemed to smile.

It was Brother who named him, for the alliterative privilege, I suspect, of calling him “Hector, the Horrible Hawk.” But that was only in fun. For he was not horrible at all when we got to know him. Lazarus thinks otherwise, very probably. But then his experience with Hector was a trying one, and to this day—if he still lives—he carries the marks of his eventful meeting with our friend, the robber chief.

Lazarus was a pet chicken, son of Sironda, the black minorca hen. We gave him his curious name because he had a talent for venturing very near death’s door, and the fact that we always saved him lent appropriateness to his name. Once when very young, no more than five days out of his shell, he was all but scalped by a rival mother hen, and when we answered his frantic baby peeps for help his head was bleeding profusely, and his eyes were closed as if in death. We sprinkled water on his tiny bill and salved his lacerated head. And he, having a strong constitution, came back from the tomb, as it were, and lived a long and eventful life. In order to care for him better, we kept him in the back-yard, tucking him at night into a small box under flannel coverings. He thrived and grew from chickhood very sturdily, and the only ill effect that remained from his early mishap was that he was quite bald. No feathers ever came on the spot where the lady hen had scalped him, and we could have distinguished him from every cockerel of his size and color in the world by that little bare place on the top of his head.

Now, when Lazarus lost his first baby down and was in that shorn and untidy condition which always precedes the growth of real feathers, he suddenly became lonesome for the other members of the poultry yard. He would run the length of the wire fence, poking his head through the small meshes, and more than once he nearly strangled to death by getting it caught. We always rescued him just in time to save his life. So finally we allowed him to go into the barnyard with the rest of his kindred. It was then that Lazarus had the big adventure of his already crowded career. His meeting with Hector lifted him to dizzy heights—and I am not speaking figuratively. It really did. At that, it wasn’t so much a meeting as an abduction. At least Hector intended it to be such.

We were constantly on guard to keep hawks away from the ranch. They waged merciless warfare on our chickens, pigeons, and guinea-pigs, and there was always a loaded, double-barreled shotgun behind the kitchen door ready for action in case of an air raid. When we heard the frightened flapping of the pigeons as they flew in aimless circles around the cabin and barn, we knew a hawk was somewhere overhead, hovering with curved-up wings and cruel, bright eyes, seeking his prey, choosing it calmly, waiting patiently the proper moment to swoop down upon it.

The chickens, too, always told us when such danger was near. Prince, the great white Plymouth Rock rooster, would set up a long-drawn cry of warning, and the hens would burst into frenzied cackling. The whole poultry yard would cock its head on one side to get a better view of the air robber, then would scoot to cover of the barn or hen-houses, every neck ruff distended. Sometimes it was a false alarm. A crow would be flying peaceably on his business, or a sea-gull would have swerved inland a bit. Prince took no chances. It was his duty to guard the poultry yard, and he believed firmly in the policy of safety first.

But many times the warning was one of real danger. A hawk would indeed be circling slowly above the barnyard, his bright eyes fixed calculatingly on the scurrying fowls below. Then one of the grown-ups would snatch the double-barreled shotgun from behind the kitchen door and fire at the winged plunderer. The shot, though it did not usually kill, always frightened the air robber away, and we would watch him fly lazily, almost contemptuously, off toward the hill and the thick woods, his powerful wings moving steadily and easily.

Sometimes, though, the bandit birds came and swooped down on their prey—a small chick or a baby guinea-pig—before we could prevent it. And often a bloody bunch of feathers near the rookery would testify to the murderous skill of a hawk and the sad fate of a hapless pigeon.

It was on a day when the grown-ups had gone to town. The Old Fisherman was mending his nets down on the float in front of the cabin. It was a lazy summer day, and Brother and I were sitting on the porch steps reading—the steps that were made of roughly-hewn logs.

All at once we heard the familiar danger signal of Prince, the white rooster, and then the hens began to cackle in a very panic of fear. We dropped our books, but before we could even start for the back-yard, we heard another sound which seemed so impossible and so out of place that we listened paralyzed with astonishment. It was the shrill and frenzied peeping of a half-grown chicken in terrible distress—_and the sound came from above us_!

The next instant, as we stood staring, hardly crediting what our eyes told us, we saw a large chicken hawk fly slowly past the cabin, no higher than the roof of the porch. He flew so slowly and at such a short distance from the earth because he was weighted down with a live and struggling young cockerel, which he held grimly in his sharp talons! There was a shout that came from our throats simultaneously, “_Lazarus!_”

For the struggling, shrilly-peeping victim was no other than our bald-headed friend whom we had saved from death half a dozen times before. His bare, gangling legs hung limply beneath him; his neck jerked spasmodically with his frantic appeals for help. His wings, with their absurd tufts of feathers, stuck out at right angles from his body, for the hawk’s talons were buried in the flesh beneath them.

At the time, you may be sure, we did not wait to make any remarks on all these observations. With one thought Brother and I plunged through the front door, back into the kitchen, and bumped into each other in our eagerness to get the gun. It was Brother who seized it first, and through the two rooms we dashed again and out into the front yard. The hawk was flying slowly and with evident difficulty—for Lazarus was a healthy, heavy youngster—across the open space that lay between the yard of the cabin and the old brickyard shed which adjoined it.

Brother, bent back almost double by the weight of the heavy weapon, pressed it against his shoulder, took careful aim, and fired. I screamed, for there were three falls. Brother tumbled backward from the kick of the shotgun. Lazarus hurtled to earth in a sprawl of legs and wings and lay there, uttering feeble, choking sounds. The hawk rocketed down, a flutter of gray-brown feathers; there was blood upon the grass where he dropped.

The Old Fisherman, hearing the commotion, came running up the float, the wooden shuttle with which he mended nets still grasped tightly in his hand.

Brother scrambled to his feet, blinking dazedly at the result of his marksmanship. Our first thought was that Lazarus was killed at last. But he was apparently only severely shaken by his fall, for presently he walked off a little dizzily, his tender skin bleeding where the hawk’s talons had sunk in.

The hawk was our next consideration. Now that we had wounded him—I say “we,” because I felt that the responsibility was half mine—we were sorry for his plight. He was thrashing about helplessly on the grass, one wing dragging at his side. He was trying desperately to fly, but could not so much as lift himself above the ground. His fierce, dark eyes blazed at us, and his powerful, curved beak snapped menacingly when we approached him. But at last his strength failed him, the bleeding wing spread itself out in a fan, and he sank over on one side, his talons jerking spasmodically. As we came nearer he regarded us with eyes that were unafraid. They even seemed dull with apathy, as if he knew that the end had come and that he, like the robber aristocrat that he was, must accept it philosophically.

The Old Fisherman was for ending his life then and there. But Brother and I could not bear to have him killed, for he was at our mercy, hurt and helpless. For the first time in our lives we had deliberately wounded something that lived and had feelings even as we. The knowledge that we had fired upon him to save our friend’s life was not sufficient excuse for us to allow the Old Fisherman to kill him.

So together we caught him, tied his fierce beak so he could not snap at us, bound his powerful legs so that his talons should not tear our hands, then the Old Fisherman, grumblingly, but gently, bathed and salved the injured wing. In time it would be as good as new, he told us, but he didn’t know what our folks would say to our saving the life of a “pesterin’, low-lived hawk.”

As he anticipated, the grown-ups were not at all pleased when they returned from town and found Hector—he had been named by that time—tied by one leg to a stake in the back-yard, his right wing sadly out of focus and smeared with a clot of blood. But it was not in their kindly hearts to kill in cold blood, so they let the hawk live.

For the first few days that Hector was in our midst he did little except to tug at the chain which bound him to the stake, slowly and automatically, like a man taking morning exercises with rubber ropes. He hated us and repulsed our attentions fiercely and scornfully. He refused to eat the tempting bits of raw meat that we spread before him; he sulked all day with his curved beak hidden in the ruffled feathers of his breast. He was indeed like a robber chieftain in captivity. We were patient, however, for we knew that according to Hector’s viewpoint we had injured him without reason. He had been in search of his dinner—a perfectly legitimate occupation for any one—and as he was carrying it off we had not only robbed him of it, but wounded him grievously. You can see that he had a great deal of logic on his side.

But little by little his haughty antagonism melted before our daily overtures. He no longer snapped at us when we came near, and began to take an active interest in the food we brought him. There came a day when he allowed me to put my hand on the soft, smooth feathers of his head and back, and when I gently massaged his wounded wing with vaseline he opened his beak as if to bite my hand but closed it without doing me harm.

Then, wonder of wonders, Hector began to like us. When he saw us coming into the back-yard he would set up a sort of dancing, jumping up and down stiff-legged, spreading out his dark wings, and straining at the chain. His beak would snap open and shut, and his bright, black eyes seemed actually to have a smile in them. He would allow me to salve his injury with only the faintest suggestion of nervousness in his half-open beak, and on the day when we unchained his leg from the stake he sat on my hand with all the dignity of an emperor receiving his court after a long illness.

From that time on we gave Hector his liberty for a few hours each day. And always, before releasing him, we would take the precaution to feed him well. We did not intend to have any fatalities among the poultry if we could help it. But even with a full stomach, he worried the barnyard into a daily spasm of fear. For as he regained the use of his wing, he would fly slowly, majestically, over the poultry pens, turning his head from side to side as hawks do when they are picking their prey and calculating the time for the swoop to earth. Brother and I believed firmly that Hector had no intention of snatching up a chick or a pigeon, that his daily flight was merely by way of exercise and for the dramatic satisfaction it gave him to see the feathered crew below him so disturbed.

At any rate, he never once attempted to harm any of our live stock. Perhaps it was because we fed him so well, but Brother and I preferred to think it was because he was a gentleman, and that he would not betray our confidence when we trusted him to do the right thing.

This daily flight of Hector’s was most annoying to the grown-ups, however. In the first place, the hens were not laying so well as they had. They were frightened out of all nesting desire by Hector’s calm aërial promenades, and were in a continual state of nervous excitement. Then, too, when Prince gave the danger signal and all the hens ran for cover with their chicks, the grown-ups would dash out of the house each time ready to fire upon a strange marauder, only to be confronted with Hector making peaceable spirals above the hen-houses. He would come to us when we whistled shrilly, and would sit quietly on my wrist to nibble at a piece of cooky as if he had never had a carnivorous thought in his life.

I should like to tell you that he and Lazarus became friends after the hawk had become partially domesticated, but such was never the case. Lazarus used to come stalking into the back-yard, his legs much too long for the rest of him, and a tiny, serrated, red comb sticking up from the bald spot on his head. His body was still almost bare, though a generous tuft of feathers on his tail showed where he might in time expect some real plumage. He still carried the scars of his aërial adventure under his wings. He would approach Hector cautiously, craning his neck in and out with a curious rubberized effect, and would stop at a safe distance, turning his head on one side, giving Hector a timorous inspection from the broadside of one amber eye. And Hector would return the look scornfully, his curved beak giving him a morose, sneering expression. His whole attitude seemed to say, “Never mind, I’ll get you next time!”

As Hector grew stronger and could fly better, the grown-ups gave the ultimatum that we must dispose of him in some way. It was too dangerous, they said, to have a chicken hawk around the ranch. In vain we argued that Hector was a gentleman, that he would not bother any of our poultry. But to our sorrow, they said that he should be taken to the city and presented to the zoölogical gardens there.

Brother and I told Hector what was going to happen to him, and that it was not in our power to prevent his going, and it seemed to us that he was very thoughtful afterward. We shall always believe that what happened was the direct result of the grown-ups’ decision to send him into captivity, although, you understand, we could not blame them. They had been more than kind to our somewhat dangerous guest.

The next day when we released our robber chieftain from his stake, he flew up over the cabin roof, circled once around it, then flew northward along the beach and was soon out of sight. When night came Hector did not return. And though Brother and I stood in the yard whistling until we were breathless, there was no sudden swoop of a gray-brown bird from the air, no Hector to curve sharp talons gently around my wrist.

The next morning, when we went for milk at the neighboring ranch, we knew why our friend had not come back to us. On the fence outside the barn, hung limply over the pickets just as he had fallen, was a draggled bunch of gray-brown feathers that had once been our beautiful Hector, the Robber Chief. The wide wings were powerless now, the body was riddled with fine shot, the once proud head with its curved beak drooped pitifully. The fierce dark eyes were closed. Never again would Hector perform his dance of joy at our coming, never again would he stare appraisingly at Lazarus, or frighten the hens and pigeons with his lazy circles above their heads.

The rancher told us he had shot the hawk the day before. And he could not understand why we wept over the blood-stained bunch of feathers. He did not know that Hector was a friend of ours—and a gentleman.

Brother and I always thought that Hector deliberately courted death rather than spend his life in yearning captivity. And I, for one, am glad he did. For no one else would have understood him and loved him as we did.

_Her nostrils dilated at the hated human scent._
]

_Part Ten_
MY FRIEND THE PRINCESS

This is not my story, except incidentally. It is the story of a Bengal tigress named Princess, with a coat of dull gold striped with ebony. A restless, sullen tigress, padding the length of her narrow cage, with amber eyes staring out at some vision beyond the iron bars, with tawny lips half drawn back from white, pointed fangs. A tigress with something high and noble in her steady pacing, her air of absolute detachment from everything around her. When I met her I was no longer a child living near Puget Sound, but had quite grown up and moved to California, and to city life far from my woodland friends of earlier and sweeter years.

Princess lives in a motion-picture studio’s menagerie now, but there was a time when she knew the hot, marshy smell of the Bengal jungles, when she crouched, tense in every muscle, to spring upon a fat bullock, when she padded through narrow jungle trails to drink at the hidden pool which only the forest creatures knew.

She was caught in a tiger pit, they told me, when little more than a cub. She had been purchased first by a circus, and then by the motion-picture company which owns her now. They told me she was fierce and utterly without affection. And indeed she looked so, pacing back and forth in her iron-barred cage, her breath coming in a hissing snarl as she noted our presence, her amber eyes widening ever so little as she caught our scent.

Still I could not think Princess was so terrible. I could not find it in my heart to be afraid of her. I pitied her. There was something unbearably pathetic in her constant pacing. It seemed to me that I could actually feel the longing of her caged heart to be out in the open again, to lope down jungle trails, to lie stretched out on rocks warm with Indian sunshine. There was no enmity in the look she turned on us, only indifference, and—was it pleading?

It was my first visit to the studio. And I carried away with me that picture of Princess in her cramped cage, pacing, pausing, sniffing at the air heavy with human scent, her amber eyes seeing something afar off, something we could not understand—

Then I discovered that the keeper of the menagerie was an old friend of mine. “Pudgy” he was nicknamed. He was short and rotund, and trained animals with kindness instead of whips. I had known him in the Puget Sound country when Brother and I were children. A woodsman he had been then, and with a tiny little cabin near Green Point. We had visited him often, for he shared our love for the things of the open. He had had a tame deer whose name was Nellie, and he had nursed back to health a bobcat that he had rescued from a trap in the High Sierras. It was not strange that with his love of animals Pudgy should finally come into a position as keeper of a motion-picture menagerie. Many years had passed since we had seen each other, but when we met by chance—I was of the press—we renewed old acquaintance, and found pleasure in talking of Puget Sound and of the woods creatures we had loved.

Through him I came to know personally the animals in the menagerie. I was introduced to the Russian wolves, to the lions, to the bears, and to Princess the tigress. I think he liked her best of all the wild things there, and I am sure I did. There was something about her cheated strength, her restrained power, that made my heart go out to her. I never failed to visit her when I went to the studio, and I liked to think that she knew me and recognized me as a friend.