However, when the open season actually came round with November, Ethan decided that he was “too busy” to take a day off in the woods, which Stella’s fancy had peopled for him with stealthy shadows, and friendly wreaths of blue smoke from well-hidden wigwams. It was Thanksgiving before they all met again at Uncle Si’s place, and found him “as mad as a hatter.”
“Spent more’n half o’ that week patrolin’ the woods with a shotgun, and givin’ fools that couldn’t read plain English a piece o’ my mind,” he explained, grimly. “Howsomever, the blamed racket scared my deer so’t I’ve never seen ’em since, and most likely I sha’n’t agin.”
“What a shame!” cried Sin, and poor Stella looked too much distressed to speak. She had tried not to think of the timid creatures harried and wounded, of antlered heads laid low, of the blood-drops on the leaves.
“Have you ever noticed this big rock in the middle of the pasture?—noticed it very specially, I mean,” she suggested, as they made their way around the giant boulder, towering high above their heads like a rude altar. “I always think, what if it was right here the Indians used to make their prayers and offerings! Great-grandfather Inyan—that’s what we Dakotas call a rock like that. And there must have been water-spirits—what you call fairies—about uncle’s ever-flowing spring. Oh, Cynthia and Doris! I should think you girls would care more about the old America. You’re proud of being Americans; and there may be prettier stories belonging to these very hills than those we read in school about the Roman nymphs and the old Norse thunder-gods.”
“But where would we find them?” asked Doris, much impressed.
“Try the Historical Society,” Ethan suggested.
“I’m going straight to the library,” proclaimed Cynthia, “and next time we come for a day in the woods, we’ll each of us tell an ‘Old America’ story. What do you say, girls?”
An hour later, they had scattered in search of princess-pine and Christmas ferns, squaw-berries and moss, and Stella, at some little distance from the others, was carefully lifting a clump of hepaticas for Miss Sophia’s fernery, when she suddenly thought she heard a faint, whimpering noise.
The blood fairly crinkled in her veins. Dropping basket and trowel, she set herself to follow up the cry which came again and yet again, a plaintive, muffled, half-human sound that was almost like a baby’s smothered wail. At last her quick eye detected a misplaced leaf. The faint trail led straight to a dense thicket of laurel where a small creature lay motionless, so near the color of the dead leaves in which it nestled that to most eyes it would have been invisible.
With one quick spring she was upon it, and had flung both arms around the neck of a half-grown fawn, which had been wounded in the side, and was too weak to struggle much. Then she raised her voice in a loud cry.