The fawns danced and capered to the music of the bird song that filled the woods, while Fleet Foot cropped all sorts of delicious tid-bits,—now a clump of oyster mushrooms growing shelf-like on a fallen log, and now a bunch of blue-berries, plump and juicy and sun-sweet. Life was one long holiday.
One misty morning, as Fleet Foot was leading them in great bounds through the tall meadow grass, the fawns came to a sudden stand-still, their eyes popping with surprise. For they had just barely escaped stepping on the writhing coils of a great long snake.
Their bleat of fear brought Fleet Foot instantly.
“Pouf! That’s only a garter snake,” she reassured them, with one glance at the length-wise stripes (yellow and dark gray). “That’s nothing to be afraid of. The only kind you want to look out for is the kind with cross-wisp stripes. I don’t believe there is more than one snake in all the North Woods that is poisonous,—and there are at least a dozen that are perfectly harmless.”
“What is the poisonous one?” bleated the trembling fawns.
“The rattler. But you won’t see one of those in a year’s time,—not in these woods, where it gets so cold in winter. They love it hot and dry, and so of course they live mostly out West, though you do find a few sometimes among the rocks on the warm south side of a mountain.”
“Oo! What if we’d meet a rattler?” shivered the fawns.
“Well, he’d warn you before you went too near.”
“Warn us?—How?”
“He’d rattle, of course. He has a little set of bones on his tail that he can rattle, and when you hear that, you need to look out, and get away quickly.”