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CHAPTER VIII.—STEEP TRAILS.
These hot days in August, when the trout took to the very deepest, coldest pools they could find, and hid themselves all day under the over-hanging rocks, and every creature that couldn’t take to the water longed for rain, Fleet Foot used to lead her little family up the steep trails to the top of Mount Olaf or some near-by mountain-top, where the wind blew cool night and day.
These trips were full of much joy for the fawns, for there was all the spice of adventure in following a winding hoof-path that led—they knew not where. For one never knew what might be just around the next turn.
How their hearts thumped when they came suddenly to the edge of a precipice, where they could look down at Beaver Brook tumbling over the rocks away, ’way down below I Or perhaps they could get just a glimpse of Lone Lake lying gleaming in the hollow of the hills.
Not that there was any trail in the real sense of the word.
Left to themselves, they could not have told one rock from another, save here and there where a bit of mica gleamed silver against the gray, or a scraggly pine leaned too far out over a ledge to look safe.
But to their mother their trail was as plain as the nose on your face. It was just a matter of turning and twisting, here to pass between those two queer-shaped boulders, and there to go around that flat rock which teetered alarmingly beneath one’s feet. She had been over it all so many times that she had learned the look of each new turn of the pathway. Had so much as one pinnacle been out of place, she would have known,—and wondered why.
One still, sunshiny morning, after they had drunk their fill at a cool green pool of Beaver Brook, they started up the mountain-side for a day under the shade of the last fringe of evergreens before one came to the bare, rocky ridges, where it got too cold for anything to grow, except in sheltered crevices.