“Reckon I just blowed him over,” responded the woodsman. “But now ye know where they hang out, ye kin ketch one alive in a cage-trap, if ye want to git to know somethin’ of his manners an’ customs—eh, what? When ye’ve killed one of these wild critters, after all, to my mind he ain’t no more interestin’ than a lady’s fur boa.”
As the two man creatures disappeared down the confusing vistas of the forest, the soft dark eyes of the flying-squirrel, disproportionately large and prominent, with a vagueness of depth which made them seem all pupil, stared after them mildly from the refuge of a high crotched branch. Unhurt, even unbewildered by his dizzy plunge, he had bounced aside with a motion too swift for his enemies’ eyes to follow, and placed a tree-trunk between himself and peril. Darting up the trunk like a fleeting brown streak, he had been safely hidden before his enemies reached the tree.
In his high retreat, the flying-squirrel did not crouch as a red squirrel would have done, but lay stretched and spread out as if flattened by violence upon the bark. His color, of an obscure warm brown, faintly smudged with a darker tone, blended so perfectly with the hue of the bark that, if the eye once looked away, it could with difficulty detect him again. A member of a little-known branch of the flying-squirrel family,—the flying-squirrel of Eastern Canada,—he was nearly a foot in length, some two inches longer than the common flying-squirrel, from whom he differed also very sharply in color, his retiring brown and gray being in marked contrast to the buff and drab and pure white of his lesser but more famous cousin. Buff and white would have been so conspicuous a livery in the brown Canadian forests that his ancestors would never have survived to produce him had they not managed to change that livery in time to baffle their foes.
The flying-squirrel, unlike the impudent and irrepressible red squirrel, had a great capacity for patience, as well as for prudence. Moreover, he had no great liking for activity as long as the sun was up, his enormous eyes adapting him for the dim life of the night. For some minutes after the sound of footsteps had died away in the distance, he lay unstirring on his branch, his ears alert to the tiniest forest whisper, his nostrils quivering as they interrogated every subtlest forest scent. All at once his wide eyes grew even wider, and a sort of spasm of apprehension flitted across their liquid depths. What was that faint, dry, rustling sound—the mere ghost of a whisper—on the bark of the trunk behind him? Nervously he turned his head. There was nothing in sight, but the ghostly sound continued, so slight, so thin, that even his fine ear could hardly be sure of its reality.
The little watcher remained moveless as a knot on the bark. The creeping whisper softly mounted the tree. Then at last a flat, brownish-black, vicious head came into view around the trunk, and arrested itself, swaying softly, just over the base of the branch. It was the head of a large black snake.
The snake’s eyes, dull yet deadly, met those of the squirrel and held them. For a moment the black head was rigid. Then it began to sway again, with a slow hypnotizing motion. The eyes—shallow, opaque, venomous—seemed to draw closer together as they concentrated their energy upon the mildly glowing orbs of their intended victim. At last the waving head began to draw near, the black body undulating stealthily into view behind it. Nearer, nearer it came, the flat hard eyes never shifting, till it seemed that one lightning lunge would have enabled it to fix its fangs in the fascinated victim’s neck. But at this moment the little aeronaut whisked half round, flirted his broad fluff of a tail straight out behind him, and sailed quietly from his perch on a long gradual swoop, which brought him back to the base of the tree from which he had originally started. The hypnotizing experiment of the black snake had been, in this instance, an unqualified failure. Angry and disappointed, the snake withdrew to hunt mice or other easier game. The flying-squirrel ran cheerfully up the tree, slipped back into the hole, and curled himself up complacently to sleep away the rest of the daylight. Of his companions, two had already stealthily returned, and the others crept in soon afterwards quite unruffled.
That night moonrise came to the forest close on the vanishing trail of the sunset. A long white ray, flooding in through the tree-tops, lit up the hole beneath the branch of the blasted trunk. Without haste the flying-squirrels came one after another to their high doorway and launched themselves upon the still air. One might have thought that their first purpose would have been to forage for a meal; but, instead of that, they seemed like children just let out of school, bent on nothing so much as relieving their pent-up spirits. Probably they were not hungry. It was the season of abundance, and they had, perhaps, ample store of green nuts and tender young pine-cones within their hollow tree. In any case, they knew the forest was full of good provender for them, the forest-floor covered with berries for when they should choose to descend and gather them. There was no hurry. It was good to amuse themselves in their high and dim-lit world.
Their favorite game seemed to be to criss-cross each other, as it were, in their long gliding flights, which, beginning near the top of one tree would end generally near the foot of another, as far away as the impetus of their start and their descent would allow. Thence they would dart nimbly to the top again, sometimes with a restrained chirr of mirth, to repeat the gay adventure. Sometimes, when their descent was steep, they would rise again toward the end of it, by altering, probably, the angle of their membranes or side-planes. As they flashed spectrally past each other, touched suddenly by some white finger of moonlight, their play was like an aerial game of tag. But they never actually “tagged” each other. Most likely they took good care to avoid any approach to contact in mid flight, which might have meant a fall to the dangerous forest-floor, the haunt of prowling foxes, skunks, and weasels.
But though their chief dread seemed to be of the far dark ground and its perils, there were perils, too, for the little aeronauts even in their leafy heights. In the midst of their leaping, gliding, and sailing, there came a hollow cry across the tree-tops. It was a melancholy sound but full of menace—a whoo-hoo-hoo-oo-oo—repeated at long, uncertain, nerve-racking intervals. It sounded remote enough from the hollow tree, but at its first note the game of the furry aeroplanists came to a stop. One would have said that there were no such things as flying-squirrels in the Quah-Davic woods.
After some fifteen or twenty minutes of sepulchral summons and answer, the calling of the owls ceased. In perhaps fifteen minutes more, the flying-squirrels seemed to make up their minds that the danger had removed to some other part of the forest. Then, at first timorously, but soon with all their former merriment and zest, the tree-top aeronauts resumed their game.