The children wondered if he were going to be a singer, like his father. He was three months old before he really tried very hard to show them. Then what a golden voice had that golden yellow bird! At first he had been pale yellow, but the larger he grew, the yellower became his plumage. They named him Caruso.
Sometimes the children would let him out of his cage in the living room. How he loved the freedom of it! How he explored the plants in the south window, and the silver spoons on the table! He loved everything bright and shiny.
As he had never known what fear was (except the time the butcher bird came), he would ride about on the children’s shoulders and eat out of their hands.
They taught him to come when they called him, and it was a common sight to see the children doing their lessons around the lamp of an evening and Caruso perching on their fingers or picking at their pencil points.
Any sudden movement startled him, but until the other pets came, a more trustful little bird you never saw. That is why, unless Ring-tail and Fuzzy-Wuzz and Clickety-Clack were shut out of the room, he had always had to stay in his cage.
CHAPTER XXIV
“JEST AN ORNERY PUP”
SOMETIMES the Ranger took the children snow-shoeing through the winter woods. Their game was to find and name as many footprints as they could, of the many they saw criss-crossing the snow. Sometimes they could read a story in those footprints, like the time they followed the delicate mouse tracks till those of a fox told the end of the story.
They soon learned to know the difference between the pointed tracks of the deer and the manlike footprints of the mice and squirrels, raccoons and bears. Then there were the doglike prints of the foxes and coyotes, and the catlike marks of the wild cats,—those handsome gray striped Bay lynxes that looked so much like big house cats except for their tasseled ears and big feet, bobbed tails and the fur that hung down from their cheeks in points. Once they caught a glimpse of one crouched on the limb of a tree,—a beauty of a great, fierce cat with his round yellow eyes.
Once they even came across the giant catlike track of a mountain lion, and their father made them go back while he followed with his gun.