Up and down through the forest trails they galloped,—down to Lone Lake, then back to Pollywog Pond and along the familiar trails on the slopes of Mt. Olaf. Summer was even riper and lovelier than when they had been taken to the Valley Farm,—and to the fawns, remember, it was their first taste of mid-summer in the Maine woods.
These tiny fellows leaped and gamboled hide-and-seek, till you would have thought they would have broken their fragile legs among the boulders and fallen tree-trunks. But their mother knew her training had been thorough, and they would know just how to leap and land with safety.
“Hello, there!—Chick-a-dee-dee, Chick-a-dee-dee,” a little gray bird in a black cap kept calling, as he followed from tree to tree.
When at last they had had their dinner of warm milk, and Fleet Foot had cropped her fill of the tender green things that lay like a banquet table everywhere about them, she led them to a little rocky ledge that over-looked Lone Lake, where they could lie under the partial shade of a clump of yellow birch trees and rest, while she chewed her cud. The black fly season was well past, and there was nothing to disturb them save a passing swarm of midges that couldn’t begin to bite through their thick fur.
(They little dreamed that Frisky, the Red Fox Pup, was peering down on them from a higher crag, where he, too, crouched on the red-brown soil that proved such a perfect cam-ou-flage.)
No one save a fox could have seen the fawns, so long as they lay still, their tawny orange-brown coats blended so perfectly with the ground. And if anyone had noticed the white spots on their sides, he would have taken them for a glint of the creamy birch-bark.
At first the 'two youngsters watched a yellow-jacketed bumble-bee, who bumbled and tumbled among the perfumed spikes of the Solomon’s seals. Then their ears pricked to a new voice.
“Greetings, my friends!” called a cheery red-brown coated bird who had been rustling about among the dead leaves just behind them.
He was as large as a robin, with even longer beak and tail, and his creamy breast was streaked with darker brown.
“Hello, Thrush,” bleated the fawns in shy friendliness.