“Help yourself,” suggested old Dave, not stirring, however, from where he stood.
At the voices the black weasel sprang up like a flash. With one paw on the dead lynx and another on the marten, he faced the two men in absolute silence. The eyes under the mild forehead flamed red and horrible and the dripping body quivered for another throat-hold.
“Seems like Mr. Blackcat wants ’em both,” murmured the old man, discreetly withdrawing from the farther side of the copse. Jim gazed into the flaming eyes a moment longer and then followed his uncle.
“He don’t look so blame innocent after all,” he observed.
[VIII]
LITTLE DEATH
For three long months the blue-white snow had lain over the gold-white sand among the dark-green pitch pines standing like trees from a Noah’s Ark. To-day the woods were a vast sea of green, lapping at the white sand-land that had been thrust up, a wedge from the South, into the very heart of the North. A crooked stream had cut its course deep through the forest. On its high bank the ghost-like glory of a mountain laurel overhung the dark water. Close to the water’s edge were clumps of the hollow, crimson-streaked leaves of the pitcher plant, lined with thousands of tiny teeth all pointing downward, traps for unwary insects. All the winter these pitchers had been filled with clear cone-shaped lumps of ice; but to-day, above the fatal leaves, on long stems, swung great blossoms, wine-red, crimson, aquamarine, pearl-white, and pale gold.
From overhead came the trilling song of the pine warbler, like a chipping sparrow lost in the woods; and here and there could be caught glimpses of his pale yellow breast and white wing-bars. Below, among the tangled scrub oaks, flitted the brilliant yellow-and-black prairie warbler, while everywhere the chewinks called “Drink your tea,” and the Maryland yellow-throat sang “Witchery, witchery, witchery,” while jays squalled in the distance, and crimson-crested cardinals whistled from the thickets. In the sky, like grim black aeroplanes, wheeled the turkey buzzards, sailing in circles without ever a wing stroke. Gray pine-swifts, with brilliant blue patches on their sides, scurried up and down tree trunks and along fallen logs, and brown cottontail rabbits hopped across the paths, showing their white powder puffs at each jump. A huge, umber-brown-and-white pine snake, with a strange pointed head, crawled slowly through the brush while rows of painted turtles dotted the snags which thrust out here and there above the stream.
Earth, air, and water, all swarmed with life at this dawn of the year. The underground folk were awake, too. Down below the surface, the industrious mole, with his plush fur and spade-like hands, dug incessantly his hunting-tunnels for earthworms. Above him, in wet places, his cousin, the star-nosed mole, whose nose has twenty-two little fingers, drove passages through the lowest part of the moss beds and the soft upper mould.