CHAPTER IX—THE OGRE OF THE AIR.
It was one of those breezy days when white wind clouds piled up against the sky, and patches of shadow traveled across the mountain-sides.
Fleet Foot had decided to take the fawns to Mountain Pond, in the pass between Mount Olaf and Old Bald-face, a peak that had been burned bare of trees by a forest fire, and now grew nothing much save blue-berries for the bears to feast on.
Fleet Foot wasn’t a bit afraid of bears at this time of year, knowing how greatly they prefer a vegetarian diet, though, at that, she didn’t intend to go too near. (After all, the steep gulch of Beaver Brook Bed lay between the two mountain-sides.)
They had a lovely time at the Pond, where they met several other does, with their fawns, and the youngsters played together while their mothers gossiped over their cuds. The cool breeze ruffled their fur delightfully, and they found enough shade in the patch of woods that huddled in the head of the gulch.
As the sun neared the tops of the purple peaks that faded away to the west, the little group started back down the trail to where there was more herbage to browse upon, Fleet Foot lingering along to allow the fawns plenty of time to pick out a sure footing. For it was their first trip over this particular trail.
Carefully they wound over a great over-hanging boulder, on the edge of which they paused to peer, with braced hoofs, over the precipice, which here dropped sheer to the rocks below. Just beyond, the first falls of Beaver Brook dashed green-white over the ledges.
Then Fleet Foot hurried on to the foot of the falls, where one might take a shower bath in the spray.
“Come on, children,” she whistled over her shoulder, her eyes on the path ahead. And the tinkle of the falling water filled her ears till she could not have heard their foot-steps following, had she tried.
But fawns will be fawns. And the youngsters stopped to watch a queer shadow that now danced across their path. Cloud shadows they had watched all day, but this one was different. In the first place, it was such a tiny thing,—for a cloud. And it danced about in the most amusing manner,—much faster than any cloud shadow they had seen before. In fact, it seemed to be going around and around them in big circles. And it looked exactly as if the little cloud had wings like a bird.
Alas for two such little helpless ones!—Had they but looked above their heads, instead of at the circling shadow, they would have discovered that it was a giant bird that made it. In short, it was Baldy the Eagle, the ogre of the air,—and an ogre that especially delighted in having fawn for supper!
An ugly fellow was Baldy, with his great curved beak and his great yellow claws. His body alone was bigger than that of the fawns, and his wings spread out like the wings of an aeroplane. He was mostly a muddy brown, with white head and fan-spread tail, and he smelled horribly fishy, for he isn’t a bit particular about what he eats, and frequently stuffs himself so full of the spoiled fish he finds on the shore that he can’t even fly.
The air hissed to his wings.
He waited now till he felt that Fleet Foot was surely too far away to come to their rescue, should he attack the fawns. For he knew from experience that with her sharp hoofs she could put up a fight he would rather not face.
For a while he wandered if he should just simply drop down upon one of the little fellows and pin his talons into his back, and fly away to his nest. But it would be awfully heavy to carry and of course it would kick and wriggle, ’till like enough he would be unable to manage his feathered aeroplane, and they would run into some jagged rock.
If the fawns had been orphans, he might have killed one right there, and no one would have interfered.
But they were not orphans, and their mother would come racing back and cut him to pieces with those knife-edged fore-hoofs.
Ha! An idea popped into his ugly old head.—He would scare one of the fawns off the edge of the precipice, and it would leap to its death on the rocks below; and then he could wait till Fleet Foot had gone, for his feast.
Swooping lower and lower, while still the foolish fawns stared innocently at the dancing shadow, he suddenly flapped his wings about the tinier fawn, startling him terribly, but not enough to make him back off the cliff.
Stronger measures must be tried,—and there was no time to waste; for at the fawn’s first bleat of terror, Fleet Foot heard and was now leaping like the wind, back the trail to his rescue.
Swooping again, Baldy began beating the little fellow with great heavy blows of his middle wing joints. It hurt dreadfully, and the frightened fawn turned first this way, then that, in his endeavor to get away. Nearer and nearer the edge of the precipice he crowded. Now one hind foot had actually slipped off the rock face, and he had to struggle to regain his balance.
Then the one thing happened that could have saved him. Fleet Foot reached the spot. Rearing furiously on her hind legs, she struck at Baldy’s head with her sharp hoofs, tearing great wounds in his scalp. Then, with a scream of rage and pain, he raised his wings and slanted swiftly upward, wings hissing, to his granite peak.
The fawn was not seriously hurt,—only terribly frightened. His back was bruised, but that would heal, and he would be none the worse for his experience.
But where was the other fawn?—They found him wedged in between the boulders,—the one place where he could ever have escaped the beat of those wings. Fleet Foot praised him mightily for having so much sense, and he felt quite cocky,—though of course his brother was the real hero of the day.
One other danger marred their summer.
Every now and again, as they were passing beneath some low-hanging branch, they would catch a glimpse of a tawny form flattened along the limb, watching them with pale yellow eyes that gleamed through narrowed lids.
Perhaps it would be in a deep, dark hemlock thicket, or a cedar swamp, that they would meet the giant cat.
He was a ferocious-looking fellow, was Old Man Lynx, with his great, square, whiskered face, and his ears with their black tassels and the black stripe down the middle of his back. And my, how his claws crunched the bark as he sharpened them! How his whiskers twitched and his mouth watered as the fawns passed beneath him! He seemed all teeth and claws.
Perhaps the little family would be drowsing peacefully in the shade of a long September afternoon when suddenly some spirit of their ancestors, (or was it some guardian angel of their antlered tribe?) would whisper “Danger!” and set their fur to rising along their spines in a cold shiver of nameless fear.
Had Old Man Lynx ever really put it to the test, he could have won out with Fleet Foot. But he knew the sharp drive of her little hoofs, and he was terribly afraid of pain. (Did he not wear a great scar in his side, due to an adventure of his rash young days, when a fat buck had given him a rip with his antlers?)
Perhaps that was why Fleet Foot always raced away in a wide curve that presently brought her back to where she could peer curiously at the invader of her solitude, without herself being seen.
She used to spy in the same way on Old Man Red Fox, and Frisky, his promising young hopeful.
In fact, what with Frisky spying on the fawns, and the fawns watching Frisky, these children of hostile tribes kept pretty close track of one another.
The summer passed on the whole, however, with no more adventure than the sound of the lonely “Hoo-woo-o-o-o” of a loon at twilight, or the sudden whirr of a startled pheasant’s wings, or a quarrel between some wicked red squirrel caught robbing a crow’s nest. (Or was it a crow that had robbed the squirrel’s little hoard, and was getting handsomely scolded for his villainy?).
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