“Oh,” said the Boy. “And some hungry animal might catch them for its dinner!”
“I’m afraid so,” agreed the Farmer. “It is always the young animals that have lost their mothers that get caught.”
“Say, I’ve noticed a funny thing,” said the Boy, a few days later. “Clover Blossom has been giving more milk lately, and yet the fawns aren’t weaned.”
“You didn’t see what I saw last night,” said the Farmer, smiling. And he told the Boy where to watch.
Meantime what had become of Fleet Foot? First she leaped the fence, and took to the trail down which Clover Blossom had wandered—here over the smooth pine needles, there through the crackling oak leaves, and yonder over a fallen log. And as she went, she nibbled course after course of the dainties of the woodland.
How fit she felt, after her long imprisonment! How swift her slender hoofs, how strong her long hind legs that could send her over a hazel copse like steel springs! And how good it was to be alive in a world all sunshine and dancing butterflies and tinkling streams!
But where were her fawns? She searched and searched for some sign of the little fellows. But she searched in vain. And all the joy went out of life again.
Then, one evening, as she stood on a hill-top watching the Boy drive the cows home from pasture, she saw something that made her lonely heart beat high with hope. She couldn’t make out the little spotted coats so far away, but she did see their red-brown outlines, so tiny beside the cows, and the furtive way they shied along, as if they never could get used to coming right out in the open. And her anxious mother-heart assured her that they were worth a closer view.
So, the next night, before they turned off the lane to the pasture lot, the fawns heard the little stamp that had always been their mother’s signal. “Wait where you are—and hide!” she bade them with her whistled “Hiew!” “I will come to you.”
And they obeyed, thrilling with a great wave of homesick longing for the mother they had thought lost to them. The Boy, tip-toeing back to see what had become of his pets, found the doe in the pasture lot, nursing her fawns.