II
In the heart of the cedar swamp the silence was thick, brooding, and imperishable. One felt that if ever any wandering sound, any lost bird-cry or call of wayfaring beast, should drop into it, the intruding voice would be straightway engulfed, smothered, and forgotten.
The ground beneath the stiff branches and between the gray, ragged, twisted trunks was grotesquely humped with moss-grown roots and pitted with pools of black water. Here and there amid the heavy moss fat fungoid growths thrust up their heads, dead white, or cold red, or pink, or spotted orange. The few scattered herbs that flourished among the humped and dangerous pools were solitary in habit, broad of leaf, tall and succulent of stalk. Not one of them bore any gay or perfumed blossom, to lure into the swamp the brightness of a butterfly or the homely humming of wild bees.
The only bird that habitually endured the stillness and the gloom of the cedar swamp was a shadowy, silent, elusive little nuthatch, which spent its time slipping up and down the ragged trunks, uttering at wide intervals its faint, brief note. So furtive a being, and so shy and rare a voice, only made the silence more impressive, the solitude more profound.
A great black bulk, moving noiselessly as a shadow hither and thither among the shadows, seemed the spirit of the swamp made palpable. The old bear, having learned that certain of the big toadstools growing in the swamp were very good to eat, had taken to haunting the silence of the glooms in the season when the fungoids flourished. The solitude and the stillness suited his morose temper; and for all his seeming awkwardness he moved as delicately as a cat. His great sharp-clawed feet seemed shod with velvet, and never a twig snapped under his stealthy tread. It was not through fear that he went thus softly, for he feared no creature of the wilderness. But the heavy silence was attuned to his mood; and besides, he never knew when he might surprise some mouse, water-rat, or mink that would furnish variety to his toadstool diet.
"FOR ALL HIS SEEMING AWKWARDNESS HE MOVED AS DELICATELY AS A CAT."
Such a fortunate surprise, however, could befall him but seldom in the empty solitude of the swamp. So it happened that, one day when he tired of the fat, insipid fungoids, his thought turned to the lake, on whose shores he had sometimes found dead fish. He remembered, with watering chops, that he had even once or twice been able to catch live fish, close in shore, by lying in wait for them with exhaustless patience and scooping them up at last with a lightning sweep of the paw.
Ignoring the toadstools, he turned straight south, and made his way toward the lake. He travelled swiftly, winding this way and that between the green, humped roots, the gray trunks, and the black water-pits. But swiftly as he went, his movement left no trail of sound behind it. A shadow could not have moved more noiselessly. It was as if the age-old silence simply seized and folded away for ever the impact of his great footfalls on the moss. When at length he caught the flash of the bright water ahead of him through the trees, he moved even more cautiously, so extreme was his circumspection. Reaching the edge of the cedar growth, he slipped unseen into a thicket of red willows which afforded a convenient ambush, and peered out warily to assure himself as to what might be going on around the shores. For a long while he crouched there as moveless as a stone, that if by mischance his coming had given alarm to any of the wilderness folk, suspicion might have time to die away.