He knew also that he was leaving tracks, but he did not care. He had no intention of returning to the sycamore tonight and perhaps not for many nights, and coon tracks meant only that a coon had passed this way. Besides, tracks would disappear when the snow melted. Hair clinging to the sycamore's bark would not.
Old Joe went happily on.
Though he had eaten nothing in almost seven weeks, he was not especially hungry, and hunger alone never would have driven him from the den tree. There was something else: an irresistible urge that he could not have denied if he would. Old Joe was on the most important and compelling of all missions, a mission that had begun when time began and would endure until time ended. On this warm night, he must go out simply because he could not stay.
With little side excursions here and there, but always heading directly into the wind, he traveled almost due south. When a bristled dog fox barred his path, Old Joe did not swerve at all. The fox bared its fangs, snapped its jaws, and at the last second, yielded the right of way.
The Creeping Hills were Joe's beat and would remain his beat. He would go where he pleased, for he feared no other wild creature. Even his distant cousins, the black bears that shared the Creeping Hills with him, had never succeeded in keeping Old Joe from where he wished to venture. The bears were bigger and stronger than he, but they could not climb so fast nor swim so far, and they did not know all the hiding places that Old Joe had discovered before his second birthday.
Old Joe was a match for anything in the Creeping Hills except hunters with guns. Hunters were to be parried with wits rather than force, since force alone could never hope to prevail against firearms. But hunters gave spice to what, at times, might have been a monotonous existence. The chase was usually as welcome to Old Joe as it was to any hounds or hunters that had ever pursued him.
Three-quarters of a mile from the sycamore, Old Joe halted and gravely examined a new scene.
The slough at the base of the sycamore remained frozen. But Willow Brook, with its due proportion of still pools and snarling riffles, had overflowed the ice that covered it and had surged up on both banks. No more than two yards from the tip of Old Joe's nose, three forlorn willow trees seemed to shiver on a high knoll that was ordinarily dry, but that was now a lonely little island besieged by the overflow from Willow Brook.
Quivering with delight, Old Joe rippled forward. He belly-splashed into the water, swam across, and climbed the knoll. He rubbed himself against each of the willows, groaning with the luxury of such a massage. Then he jumped down the other side of the knoll, plunged into the swift water that flowed over Willow Brook's ice, and without yielding an inch to the current emerged on the far bank. There he halted.
The owl that had sat in the top branches of the sycamore and watched Old Joe come out of his den had known that he was part burglar, part devil, and part imp. The owl had not known that, depending on circumstances, Old Joe could be any of these three without regard to the other two. Reaching the far bank, he was all imp.