But their troubles were not ended. For one thing, they were hungry. Besides, what was Fleet Foot to do, helpless there where a real bear might find her?
Just then they heard a cowbell.
Clover Blossom, the soft-eyed Jersey at the Valley Farm, must have found a broken place in the pasture fence, and wandered into the woods again. She loved to go exploring.
This time she gave the Boy a chase. Here it was, nearly dark! Straining his ears to catch the sound, he decided he must creep very softly upon her, or she would never let him catch her.
The Boy, however, was not the only one to hear the tinkle of the cowbell. Though Clover Blossom grazed quite unaware that she was being watched, as an actual fact she had quite an audience of wood folk around her, peering and sniffing and studying the situation. Softly, silently, creeping through the hazel copse, came Frisky, the fox pup, as curious as his nose was long. Then came Bobby, Madame Lynx’s kitten, to whose nostrils the odor was most tempting, though he did not dare attack an animal so large. Crouched flat along a low-hanging branch, he peered and peered with his narrow gold-green eyes, his claws working nervously into the bark.
Came also Unk-Wunk, the Porcupine, rattling his slow way up a beech tree from whose top he could see all that was going on. He, too, watched curiously as the Jersey wandered from one huckleberry bush to another, lowing faintly now and then as she realized that she needed to be milked.
But the two who were most interested as she came their way were the hungry fawns. They had waited hours for the familiar stamp of their mother’s foot that should call them to her, and for the warm milk that had never failed them when they needed it, and their little stomachs ached worse and worse.
The hot sun had crept across the sky, and the birds who had chirped and warbled over their breakfast had come out again for the cool of the late afternoon to chatter over their worms. Then the sun had grown large and red in the west, and the crickets had begun to chirp, and the white-footed deer mice to scuttle through the leaves in search of beetles. Finally the shadows had grown long and black, and the woods full of a breathing silence, and still they waited for their mother to come and feed them.
Then, at last, they crept to where Clover Blossom mooed her invitation for some one to relieve her udders of their creamy burden. And when the Boy finally peered through the bushes beyond which she stood, he stopped amazed. For there on either side of her a tiny fawn stood nursing!
“Something must have happened to their mother,” he told himself. “I wonder if I could coax them to go home with Clover Blossom?”