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 Rearranging the dunnage in the canoe to make place for his unlooked-for passenger, he made Bran get in and lie down; and he took the precaution to throw a blanket over him. Then he stepped delicately into the stern, seated himself, picked up his broad-bladed paddle, and started off downstream with mighty strokes.

"Lay still an' keep quiet!" he commanded sharply. "I'm taking you where there ain't no sheep, an' where there ain't going to be no temptation to backsliding!"


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hot, honey-scented, murmurous dark of the bees' nest, deep-hidden in the bank beneath the wild-rose thicket, the burly young queen, Bomba of the bumblebees, was seized with a sudden inexplicable restlessness. When she had emerged, two days before, from her cocoon-cell weak on her legs, bedraggled, and dazed by the busy crowding stir of the nest, she had been tenderly fed with thin honey by the great Queen-Mother herself, and cleaned and caressed by two or three of her sturdy little bustling worker-sisters. But as soon as she was strong enough to look after herself, and had found her way to the well-supplied communal honey-pots, she was amiably ignored, as everyone in the nest was working at high pressure. She had dutifully fallen to with the rest, and found her time well occupied in feeding the ever-hungry larvæ in their cells. But now this task no longer contented her. For the moment she did not know what she wanted. She went blundering here and there over the combs, shouldering the little workers aside, and paying

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 no heed whatever to the tiny, insatiable mouths in the brood-cells. Then, suddenly, her desires took definite shape. It was change she wanted, and space, and a free wing, and the unknown air. With a deep buzz of decision she rushed to the big waxen honey-pot beside the entrance of the nest, sucked up enough of the thin honey to fill her crop with comfort, then hurriedly crawled along the narrow tunnel which led to the outer world. In her quest for the great adventure she was oblivious to the stream of workers which she passed on the way.

At the exit, half hidden by a tuft of grass, she stopped short, as the first full glare of daylight struck her in the face. For the moment she was half minded to turn back into the familiar dark. But her sturdy spirit forbade any such ignominy. She crept out into the warm grass. Warm scents and soft airs encouraged her. She spread her wings, and stretched them; and at last, lured by the dazzle of sunshine beyond the shadow of the bank, she sprang into the air and went winging off, with a deep droning hum of elation, into the mysterious spaces of green and sheen and bloom.

As she took wing she was accosted by three or four ardent young males of her race—square-built, burly, black-and-orange beaux, hardly half her size but full of energy and enterprise. At this moment, however, their eager wooing left her cold.


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 She was set on exploring the new and wonderful world which had just been revealed to her. Impatiently eluding her wooers she boomed away over the sun-steeped meadow, and pounced down upon a patch of late-flowering purple clover. Here she revelled for an hour or two among the honeyed blossoms, plunging her long tongue to the very bottom of the deep and narrow tubes where the nectar lay concealed, and disturbing a host of tiny foraging flies. From the meadow she flew over a tall green hedge, and swung down into the many-coloured tangle of an old-fashioned garden, where all the flowers of late summer were holding a riot of bloom. Over this profusion of riches she went quite wild for a time, sampling nectar of a dozen flavours and pollen of many varied hues, squeezing her broad, black-and-yellow head and shoulders into the foxgloves and the snapdragons, rollicking about in the wide radiant bowls of the hollyhock blossoms, rifling the pale blue campanulas, diving bodily into the Canterbury Bells, and giving voice to shrill, squeaking buzzes of excitement and impatience whenever she felt her quarters too restricted. Once a tall being, all in white, came moving slowly down the garden walk, pausing at times to examine or to sniff at a glowing blossom. Bomba circled around the stranger's head several times, in amiable curiosity, and then, attracted by a vivid gleam of scarlet, droned off


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 to the other side of the garden to investigate a row of tall poles draped to their tops with flowering runner-beans.

Late in the afternoon, when the shadows were lengthening across the garden and a strange chill, such as she had never dreamt of in the home nest, began to make the air seem less friendly, Bomba flew off to an ancient brick wall which faced westward and was still bathed in sunshine. This wall was clothed with rambler roses, pink, white, and deep crimson. The mass of bloom was humming with life,—with flies of innumerable kinds, with green and bronze beetles, honey-bees, slim, dapper wasps, and workers, drones and big queens of Bomba's own species. She ignored them all alike, happy in her care-free independence. But when the chill in the air grew fresher she forsook the revels, slipped in under the veil of blossom and leaves, and crept drowsily into a crevice in the sun-warmed bricks. Here she slept away the starlit night, and never emerged next day till the sun was high in the blue and the last of the dew was vanishing from the garden world.

As she crawled out upon a crimson rose, and stood basking in the sun, her broad velvet bands of black and gold richly aglow, she was aware of a curiously attractive perfume which was not of the flower. It was somehow more living and vital, and of more personal significance to herself.


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 It excited her strangely. Presently she became aware that it emanated from an attractive drone of her species, who was hovering close above her, humming persuasively. Of more compliant mood to-day than when first she left the nest, she rose into the air to meet this scented wooer; and the two soared away slowly together, on their mating flight, over the gay-hued patterns of the garden.

Her lover, however, and her interest in lovers, being very soon forgotten, Bomba passed the brief remnant of the summer in careless vagrancy. This was the one time of holiday that her life, predestined to toil, would ever afford. For the present she had nothing to do but feast through the hours of sun, and doze away the hours of dark or storm in the shelter of her cranny in the brick wall, and all the time, though she knew it not, she was laying up strength and substance to last her through her long winter's sleep beneath the snow.

As the honey-bearing blossoms passed away with the passing summer, Bomba began to realize that a sinister change was approaching, and the instinct inherited from a million generations of ancestors warned her that her cranny in the brick wall would soon be an insufficient shelter. Long and earnest search at last yielded her a site that seemed suitable for her winter's retreat. On a dry knoll of sandy loam stood a spreading beech


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 tree, and in the light soil beneath one of its roots she proceeded to dig her burrow. She did not, as might have been expected, choose the sunny side of the tree, but rather, in her prevision, the shadowed north, in order that the early, deceiving warmth of the following spring might not awaken her too soon and lure her forth to her doom in a world not yet ready for her.

Not being a very expert digger as compared with some of her remote cousins, she spent several arduous days in tunnelling a narrow tube about four inches in depth. The end of this tunnel she enlarged to a circular chamber wherein she could curl up comfortably. Here, for the next week or two, she spent the chill nights and the wet or lowering days, only coming forth when the noon sun tempted her. But when the few remaining late flowers were all rifled of their honey, and the dancing flies were all gone, and the bedraggled garden looked sorrowful and neglected, and even at high noon the air had a menacing nip in its caress, she felt an irresistible drowsiness creeping over her. Half asleep already, she crawled into her dry, warm burrow, and forthwith sank into a slumber too deep for dreams. The days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, frosts slew the final valiant blossoms, and at last the snow came, silently, and buried meadow, grove, and garden far from sight—almost, it would seem.


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 from memory. Wild storms swept over the white, enshrouded earth, and savage cold scourged the unsheltered fields; but Bomba, in her snug chamber beneath the beech-roots, slept untroubled through it all, carrying secure in her fertilized ovaries the heritage of the future of her race.

Not only was the snow all gone, but spring was firmly established in the land, before the growing warmth awakened Bomba, and she crept forth from her chamber to renew her acquaintance with the sun. Crocus and narcissus and polyanthus starred the brown garden beds; orange-gold dandelions made gay the young grass of the meadows, the willows along the meadow brook were all a cloud of creamy lemon catkins; and the grey old sugar-maple which overhung the garden wall had burst into a film of aerial rose.

It was, above all, the creamy fragrant willow blooms which attracted Bomba for the moment. She would revel among them in the glow, her heavy, booming note rising above the soft hum of the myriad lesser bees, and small wasps, and many-tinted flies which held riot in the scented pollen. But she was still drowsy; and every day, after gorging herself luxuriously, she would hurry back to her deep chamber under the


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 beech-roots, and sleep till the sun was once more nearing his height. But when spring forgot its caprices and melted into summer, she was seized with a new and imperious impulse, the impulse to found a colony and assume the sovereignty which she was born for. Her narrow cell grew distasteful to her, and she fell to searching the open, grassy slopes and bushy hillocks for more spacious quarters. After a long quest she found, in a steep and tangled fence-corner, just what she wanted. It was a forsaken burrow of the little, striped ground squirrel.

The burrow was roomy and dry, and the entrance to it was by a narrow tunnel about two feet long. The only fault Bomba could find with it was that it had a back door, another tunnel to afford its former occupants a means of exit in case of undesirable visitors. Bomba had no need of a back door, which meant draughts, so in cleaning up the nest she packed the litter into this entrance and pretty well stopped it up, intending to make it quite draught-proof later on, when she should find time to plaster it with leaf-bud gum and wax.

Meanwhile, in spite of her ceaseless activity, she was secreting thin morsels of wax from the scales of her under-body—a coarse, dark, yellowish wax, very unlike the delicate white secretion of the hive bees. This wax she presently scraped off and collected, kneaded it together, chewed it,


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 and tempered it with her saliva. Then, close beside the inner doorway of the nest she began to build what looked like a large, round, shallow cell, with extremely thin but amazingly tough walls. It was not an ordinary cell, however, but a honey pot, a temporary thing for holding day-by-day supplies; for Bomba knew that her business among the blossoms was liable to be interrupted at any moment by storm or rain, and she must have a store of food indoors, in order not to be delayed in her urgent task of home-building. Into this honey-pot, as soon as it was deep enough, she disgorged what was left of honey in her crop, and then bustled forth, impatient to begin her foraging for the new nest.

But for all her impatience, Bomba's first care, on emerging from the darkness of her tunnel, was to locate herself. She had had trouble enough to find the new home site. She was not going to let herself lose it. With her head towards the almost invisible entrance she rose on the wing and hovered slowly about, in ever-widening circles, for several minutes. Not until she had her directions fixed securely and every landmark noted did she swing away on her great business of gathering supplies.

Unlike her far-off cousin, the hive bee, who is so specialized, so automatic in all her actions, that she seems unable ever to think of more than one


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 thing at a time, Bomba could think of everything at once and seized upon opportunity as it came up. She was no purist in method. When the hive bee goes out to gather pollen, she quite ignores honey, she even ignores every kind of pollen except the one which she has started to collect; and when she has her mind set on honey, the most alluring display of pollen leaves her utterly uninterested. Bomba, on the other hand, was out for all she could get. If one blossom offered her honey, she accepted it eagerly, sucking it up and storing it in her honey sac. If the next flower had been already rifled of its nectar, but was rich in pollen, she would seize upon that with equal zest, and stuff it into the capacious pollen baskets on her thighs. Nor did she care what particular brand of pollen it might be. Red, orange, yellow, or creamy buff, it was all the same to her; so that her thighs were soon decorated with vivid, streaky protuberances of the precious spoil. As soon as she felt herself freighted, within and without, to her full capacity, she flew straight back to the nest, circled about the entrance to make sure of it, and then hurried in to unload. Her honey she disgorged into the honey-pot by the door; the pollen she stripped from her thighs and deposited on a smooth spot in the centre of the nest, treating it, as she did so, with a minute proportion of something of the nature of formic acid


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 from her own glands to keep it sweet. Then she hastened forth again for another load, and this fragrant toil engrossed her till nearly sunset, for she was intent on getting in as big a store as possible while daylight lasted.

But the fall of dusk, the coming out of the evening star—a sudden gleam of silver in the pure green-violet sky—meant no relaxation to the impatient Bomba. The poet sings to Hesperus as:

but it brought not Bomba home to rest, by any means. Of rest and sleep she had had enough already; and, to the work on which she was now feverishly bent, darkness was no hindrance. In the depth of the nest it was always dark; but all her senses were so subtly acute that this mattered not at all.

And now, kneading up a stiff paste of pollen moistened with honey, she proceeded to build a low, circular platform, or pedestal, of the mixture, in the centre of the floor. On this savoury foundation she modelled a spacious cell of wax. Inthe bottom of this cell she laid her first eggs, a baker's dozen of them, and then, sealing the top with a thin waxen film, she began to brood them, solicitously as a mother thrush. For four days she stuck to her task, only leaving it for brief intervals to


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 snatch a mouthful of honey; and then the eggs hatched out into a bunch of hungry grubs, which fell straightway to satisfying their hunger by devouring the pollen-paste floor on which they squirmed. Now Bomba's duties grew more exacting. She had to rush the work of gathering honey and pollen; for the little grubs in the cell grew swiftly and their appetites with them. She opened the waxen covering of the cell and pumped in continual rations of the nourishing paste. And between whiles she continued to brood the little family, that the warmth of her great velvety body might hasten their development. Soon they grew so big that the cell was crowded and they all had to stand up on their tails in ordertto find room, and in this position Bomba had to feed them individually, thrusting the food into each little greedy mouth in turn. In about seven days, however, they had reached full growth, and then their appetites all ceased simultaneously. Each spun itself a tough, perpendicular, silken-paper, yellowbrown cocoon, independent, but firmly attached to those of its neighbours—shut itself up in it, and went to sleep to await the great final change.

The group of cocoons, all stiffly erect and knitted together, now needing no longer their waxen envelope, Bomba stripped it off and used the precious wax to build other and smaller cells


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 encircling the base of the cocoon bundle. In each of these, as she completed it, at intervals of two and three days, she laid five or six more eggs and sealed them up to hatch. She also had to collect more and more honey, more and more pollen, and to build higher the walls of the great honey-pot beside the door as the nectared store increased. When not at any of these tasks she spent her time, not less arduously, in brooding the cocoons, stretching her furry black-and-yellow body to warm them all, like a sitting hen who has been given a bigger clutch than she can properly cover.

Within the nest these days were just one round of uneventful toil; but outside, upon her foraging expeditions among the flowers of field and garden, Bomba's life was not without its risks and its adventures. On account of her great size and strength, and the power of her long (though not very venomous) sting, she had fewer foes to dread than most of her lesser cousins; but, having the sole responsibility of the home, for the present, on her shoulders, she was bound to be careful, though by nature unsuspicious. The biggest and fiercest of northern spiders were of no concern to her, for none would venture within range of that darting flame, her sting, and she could wreck their toughest webs without an effort. But some of the bigger insect-eating birds were a peril against


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 which she had to be vigilant. And some of the hunting mice and shrews that infested the meadow were very dangerous, because they knew how to pounce upon her and seize her by the broad back, in such a way that her sting could not reach them. For the most part, however, the insecthunters were inclined to leave her alone, respecting her almost as much as they did that most vicious and venomous fighter, the great black hornet.

On one of these mornings, while Bomba's first brood were yet in their cocoons, and Bomba was out on one of her hurried foragings, a prowling shrew-mouse stumbled upon the entrance of the nest. He was hungry, and the smell that came from the burrow was appetizing. He knew enough about the wild bee, however, to dampen any tendency to rashness. He stood motionless, and listened intently. Keen as were his ears, he could not detect a sound from within. There was no rustle of wings—no bustle of busy feet over the combs—no warning hum. He judged, rightly enough, that the colony was just being started, and that its queen and foundress was out gathering supplies. He decided to slip in, snatch a few mouthfuls of rich and satisfying brood-comb, and get away before the owner's return.

But he had miscalculated. Just as his tawny hind-quarters were disappearing into the burrow.


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 Bomba returned. Swooping downward like a flash of flame, she sank her long sting deep into the tender flesh between the marauder's thighs. The terrible weapon seared like fire. With a squeal of anguish the shrew doubled back convulsively, then sprang at his assailant. But Bomba wag already out of reach, circling over him with a deep, angry hum, and obviously ready to strike again.

The shrew was courageous, but his courage failed him now. The pain of his wound was intolerable. He darted away in a panic, to hide himself under the grass and lick—his wound till the anguish should be eased. And Bomba, never vindictive, was satisfied with her victory. She crept into the burrow in anxious haste to assure herself her treasure had not been tampered with.

On the eleventh day from the commencement of their chrysalis sleep the perfect workers began to break the tops of their cocoons and crawl forth, very frail, damp, and dishevelled. Bomba guided them all, by ones and twos, to the great honey-pot, where they slaked their hunger, then gathered them back to her cocoon couch to be warmed by her body and helped with their first, much needed toilets. For the next day or so she mothered them tenderly in the intervals of her other duties,—and the duty of keeping the honey-pot supplied, needless to say, was a heavy one. But by the end


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 of that time the youngsters had reached their full strength, and all her care was rewarded. She had now a dozen sturdy, sprightly, glossy young workers, less than half her size, but keen and diligent to share with her the swiftly multiplying labours of the nest. The youngsters eagerly buzzed forth to collect honey and pollen, and fell to mixing bee-bread, feeding the new batch of larvæ, constructing fresh brood-cells, and replenishing the big communal honey-pot, with the instinctive skill which was their heritage of a million generations. They also reinforced the tops of their old cocoons with wax, and turned these into storage cells that no precious space or labour should be wasted.

The colony being now fairly established, it grew with amazing speed. Every two or three days a new batch of eggs hatched out into hungry larvæ, a new detachment of velvety, black-and-yellow little workers emerged from their cocoons to swell the happy industry of the nest. To them all Bomba was both queen and mother. Her rule was absolute, unquestioned; but for all her royalty she, unlike the sequestered queen of the hive bees, took full share in all the tasks of the community, besides performing her own peculiar duty of


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 laying eggs. Now, however, she began to leave more of the dangerous outdoor work, the gathering of supplies, to her subjects, and spent more of her time in the homework of the nest. But she could not forget the lure of the sunshine or the riot of bloom which now clothed garden and meadow with colour. Once or twice a day she would go booming forth to levy toll of her favourite flowers.

One day, when she had her head buried deep in the fragrant calyx of a honeysuckle, the Lady of the Garden stood close by and watched her at her work. Presently the Lady put forth a slender finger and, very cautiously and delicately, stroked the black-and-gold velvet of Bomba's back. The touch was light as dandelion down, and conveyed no menace to Bomba's sensitive nerves. She gave a shrill little squeak of protest, and went on sucking up the honey with redoubled speed, probably thinking that the intruder was after a share of it. The Lady laughed, and drew back a step or two, still watching and wondering if the great bee was going to resent the liberty which had been taken with her. Nothing was further from Bomba's thought. She withdrew her head, having drained all the honey, and hummed over to the next blossom.

At this moment a hungry shrike,—a bird fitly known as "the butcher-bird,"—who had his


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 nest in a tree beyond the garden wall, swooped down and made a dash at the unsuspecting Bomba, just as she sank her head into the calyx. It was the moment of fate for her,—and consequently, for the little community at home in the burrow as well. But the Lady, quicker than thought, gave a sharp cry and struck at the audacious bird with her hand. The shrike, startled, missed his aim, merely brushed the blossom roughly with a wing tip, and flew up into the nearest tree. The Lady, indignantly hurled a handful of gravel at him,—which, strangely enough, almost hit him,—and drove him from the garden. She hated him heartily, ever since she had discovered the thorn bush on whose spikes he impaled the butterflies, grasshoppers, and little birds who were his victims, when he had captured more than he could eat. As for Bomba, somewhat flustered by her narrow escape, she darted straight away to the safe shelter of the nest, without waiting to complete her honeyed load. For the nest was indeed a safe shelter now—with a hundred ready and fiery stings to guard it from all intruders.

By the time the hay was gathered in and the hot noons were growing drowsily shrill with the noise of the grasshoppers and cicadas, Bomba's swarm had grown powerful and her little citadel in the burrow nearly filled its earthen hiding-place. Though built apparently at haphazard, it was


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 now an elaborate structure, tier upon tier of coarse, irregular comb all centred about the original bunch of cocoons. Throughout it was traversed by galleries so spacious that even Bomba's bulky form could reach every cell comfortably,—the little workers building not only for their own puny stature but for hers. As to the character and contents of the cells there was rather a lack of system, but in general there was a tendency to keep the brood cells near the centre, surrounded by the pollen cells, for storing thick honey, and a few scattered honey-pots for thin, watery day-today supplies, towards the circumference. The great communal honey-pot beside the entrance had long ago been abandoned, and its waxen walls used up in new construction.

About this time, when the rich, heavy days were shortening and the ripeness of later summer had come upon the lazy air, Bomba, at the height of her prosperity, began to take thought for the future of her race. She, and she alone, had premonition of the bitter season that was to come. She began to lay two new kinds of eggs, one kind, in ordinary worker cells, to produce males or drones instead of workers, the other kind, laid in large cells, destined to hatch into big larye which should ultimately be transformed into great and splendid queens like herself.

With this change in her activities Bomba sud-


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 denly found herself strictly confined to the nest for a time. She was confronted by an entirely new and inexplicable anxiety. As soon as she began laying the drone and queen eggs some of the workers,—who were themselves all imperfectly developed females, and not without certain feminine instincts,—were seized with a strange fratricidal jealousy. From time to time they would make murderous raids upon these new kinds of eggs, seeking to tear them to pieces. Bomba angrily beat off all these attacks, but she dared not leave the nest even for the briefest turn in the sunshine. She had to be ceaselessly on guard, night and day. But as soon as the eggs were hatched the mothering instincts of the workers triumphed over their jealousy, and they began tending the new larvæ with all care. A few, their thwarted sex-instincts partially aroused, even began to emulate Bomba and laid some eggs for themselves. These eggs, however, never having been fertilized by a mating, were incapable of producing either workers or queens. All that hatched from them, for some inscrutable reason known only to Mother Nature herself, were small drones. These disappointed little females were doing their best in producing mates for others, though at no possible profit to themselves.

All these drones of Bomba's tribe, though scarcely larger than the workers, were fine, inde-


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 pendent, capable fellows, far superior to those greedy and lazy spongers the drones of the hive-bee. As soon as they were grown up they promptly left the nest, to forage for themselves and to seek amorous adventure through the last bright weeks of the fleeting summer. They were quite capable of looking after themselves, and it was not for them to loaf about at home and eat up the stores which others had collected.

Bomba's care was now all for her young queens,—who took much longer than the workers or the drones to reach maturity. Each as it came forth from its big cocoon she tended lovingly, and saw it at length fly forth, loaded with honey, never to return. By the time the last young queen had left the nest Bomba was visibly growing old. Worn with her labours, she was weary and bedraggled, and her velvety garb had a somewhat moth-eaten look. She laid a few more worker eggs; and then stopped, as there was no need of raising fresh young bees just to be killed by the autumn frosts. The colony now dwindled apace. Many of the workers, having no more young to tend at home, forsook the nest and revelled away their closing days among the late asters and zinnias and dahlias of the garden. Others, more indolent or more toil-worn, fell to eating up the stored honey in the cells, to crawl forth finally for a last, listless flight, and fall into the grass


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 when the worn-out little engine of their being came to a stop.

To Bomba the now almost deserted nest grew suddenly hateful. It was all the creation of her own tremendous energy and life-force, but she had no more use for it. The old fire flickered up again, though feebly, in her nerves. Once more, after all her toils, she would roam free. She crawled out into the glow of the afternoon sun and soared briskly over the garden wall,—turning her back upon the nest forever.

Drawn by the blaze of a bed of flame-coloured late nasturtiums she quite lost her head for half an hour or so, dipping into one gorgeous bloom after another, as if to make the most of the fleeting joy. But presently her elation flagged. She felt heavy with sleep, and clung to the blossom she was on as if she were dazed. Soon she lost her hold, and went fluttering to the ground. The air had suddenly turned cold. Too drowsy to fly she crawled in among the pale-green stalks, and nestled down there till she was almost hidden. It was an inadequate shelter, but to her it seemed sufficient for the moment. She would hunt up a better one when she again felt ready to fly. Soon she dropped to sleep. The sleep passed into a deep coma. The sun went down, and with twilight an invisible shroud of damp cold settled upon the garden. At its touch the last faint spark of


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 Bomba's life flickered out, painlessly. But she had lived to the full; and she left behind her a score of royal and fertile daughters, to carry on, when spring should come again, the ancient, fine traditions of her race.


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tide was out, and the miles on miles of naked red mud flats shone like burnished copper beneath the flaming sunset. Along high-water mark, as far as the eye could see, ran an interminable line of dyke, fencing from the fury of the spring tides the vast pallid expanse of the marshes just filming with the light green of early spring. At one point the rampart of the dyke, following a crook in the low coastline, thrust the blunt apex of a spacious angle far out into the sheen of the mud-flats. In this corner, partly hidden by a tangle of dry brown mullein stalks, crouched a man with a gun, peering out across the flats and scanning the sky towards the southwest. Behind him, dotting the well-drained marsh with patches of shimmering light, stretched a chain of shallow, sedgy meres. In the centre of the nearest one a tall blue heron, motionless as if painted on a Japanese screen, stood watching and waiting to spear some unwary frog.

Steve Barron, owner of the little farm on the uplands half a mile back, and of the section of


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 marsh between his farm and the dyke, was lying in wait for the evening flight of the sea-ducks, who were accustomed to feed far out on the tides by day and fly in to rest at night on the sedgy meres. He was also not without hope of bagging a brant or a goose. For this was the season of the Northward Flight. That most noble and splendid of game-birds, the great Canada goose, was now winging up from his winter feeding grounds in the rank subtropical lagoons around the Gulf of Mexico to his desolate nesting-places among the uncharted, swampy lakes of the lone north. Last night, lying awake in his bed, Steve Barron had listened, with the thrill which that mysterious sound never failed to give him, to the faint, sonorous, pulsing voices, as flock after flock winnowed high overhead through the dark. In his imagination, in

he pictured them, in slender V-shaped array, driving their sure way straight north on tireless wings, high up in the vaulted night. Far off he would catch, first, a scarcely audible sound,—honka-honk wavering and dying away; then swiftly growing louder on the stillness, till passing overhead it became a loud and hollow, indescribably musical, throbbing of honka-honka-honka-honka-honka,


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 each swift throb a wing-beat,—and in swift diminuendo died away again into the viewless distance, leaving a silence strangely poignant until, after a waiting that stretched the ear, the approach of another flock was heralded.

Steve Barron's heart went out to those highjourneying voices, and journeyed with them. But being a lover of all the wild kindreds and an ardent student of their ways, he knew that not always did those migrant flocks do their travelling by night. Each flock, he knew, was guided and ruled by the wise old gander who cleft the air at the apex of the V. Sometimes, to break the long, long voyage and to rest the weaker members of the flock, he would decree a halt of a day and a night, or longer if advisable, at some secluded water on the way. Steve Barron knew that occasionally a flock had been known to stoop to that chain of sedgy pools that lay behind the angles of the dyke, out in the naked solitude of the marshes. Being woodsman and hunter as well as farmer, he had the quaint inconsistency of many of the finest hunters, who love the creatures whom they love to kill. He was eager to shoot one of these beautiful and wary travellers.

On this particular evening, whilst the sunset was flaring red across the coppery gleam of the flats, earth, sky and the far-off sea looked all equally empty of life. Not even the lightest breeze


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 stirred the brown mullein-tops about Steve Barron's hiding-place.

There being no immediate need of caution, Steve Barron stretched his legs, filled his pipe, and settled himself for a smoke. But soon, as the sun sank below the horizon, and the blaze of rose and orange faded down, the spacious solitude began to come to life. Far up in the paling zenith a solitary duck winged inland. A little lower two foraging night-hawks swooped, with a long musical, twanging note as of a smitten harpstring. A flock of tiny sandpipers flickered up the mud-flats, whirled, with a sudden flash of white breasts, as they approached the dyke, and settled into invisibility a couple of hundred yards away. Steve Barron reluctantly put away his pipe and drew closer into his screen.

Then five slim "yellow-legs," who had been feeding on the mud along the lip of the receding tide, came flying homeward. They flew low, rose at the dyke, and passed straight over Barron's head, but never noticed him because he lay so still. Had he moved so much as a finger their keen bright eyes would have detected him, and they would have whirled off in alarm. But they sailed down close to the surface of one of the pools, dropped their long legs which had been stretched out behind them, hung poised for a second on arched, motionless wings, and alighted where the


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 water was about an inch or so deep. Here they ran about, and piped to one another mellowly, happy and secure. Steve Barron was well content to leave them so. He was after bigger game than yellow-legs. And he knew that the sight of these wary birds feeding undisturbed would be a sign to all other eyes that there was no danger near.

Next there came into view two big ducks,—"whistlers," as Barron's practical eyes made them out to be,—flying high and straight and at tremendous speed. These were worthy game; and Steve slipped the gun to his shoulder, stealthily. The ducks were heading to pass over a little to the left to his hiding-place,—a fair shot, though a long one. He was just about to fire when his finger stiffened ere it pressed the trigger. His keen ears had caught, faint and elusive on the still evening air that far-off honka-honka-honka of the great geese. A loud, urgent whistling of sturdy wings thrilled him for a moment, and the two ducks sped by, unsuspecting, and settled, with a sharp splash, on one of the farther and deeper pools.

Steve Barron drew a breath of relief because he had checked himself in time. A moment later the geese came into view,—a thin, black V, one leg as long again as the other, heading straight for the point of the dyke. They were flying high;


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 but presently they started downwards on a long slant and with a throb of exaltation he realized that they were planning to alight on one of the deep pools half a mile behind him. His chance had come, and his nerves steadied. The wild pulsing music of that honka-honka-honka-honka-honka swept near and grew louder with the swiftness of a lightning express. The muzzle of Barron's long duck-gun covered the apex of the V and followed it up, as he waited for the flock to come within range.

But much as Barron knew of the wild creatures, he did not know the expert wariness, the amazing keenness of vision, of the experienced gander who led that flock and had guided it through many perils. That wise bird was not unduly impressed by the sight of the bunch of yellow-legs feeding placidly in the shallows. He distrusted all sagacity but his own. He had his eye on that patch of dead mullein stalks, as something that might conceal a foe. And presently he detected the almost imperceptible movement of Barron's gun. A sharp note of warning came into his cry, and he slanted upwards again abruptly, at the same time swerving off to the right with a leap into redoubled speed. And the whole V swung with him in instant response, each bird stretching its long neck to a bar of steel under the sudden fierce urge.


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 Barron snapped an oath of disappointment and, though the range was hopeless, discharged both barrels in swiftest succession. He had not allowed for the sudden change of speed in his quarry; and so it was more by good luck than good shooting that one heavy pellet found its mark. It caught the hindermost bird of the flock, a young, unmated gander, in the wing. He shot far forwards with tremendous impetus of his flight, turned over and over, and pitched, with a mighty splash, into the centre of the nearest pool. The yellow-legs scattered off with shrill pipings of alarm; and the two ducks on the pool half a mile away, flapped up, squawking indignantly, and flew off to safer waters.

With a whoop of triumph Steve Barron dropped his gun and dashed into the pool to secure his prize. This pool was nowhere more than a foot deep,—in most parts not more than two or three inches. The wounded bird could not escape by diving. Only here and there could he swim; and at running he was no adept in any case. Overtaken in half a minute he turned valiantly at bay. With harsh, vicious hissing, and savage dartings of his long snaky neck, he jabbed at his adver sary's legs,—and his iron-hard bill brought blood, even through the thick homespun trousers, at every twisting snap. At the same time he pounded heavily with his one uninjured wing. But Barron


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 was too elated to care for his bitten legs. This was better luck than he had ever dared to hope for,—a prize indeed to adorn his barn-yard. The more fiercely the splendid bird fought, the better Barron loved him. He grabbed the buffeting wing and held it helpless. He caught the darting neck in a firm but tender grip, just behind the head. He lugged the unsubdued, still struggling captive ashore, held him down between his knees; and, after much difficulty, with both hands bleeding from savage bites, managed to get him securely bundled up in his coat, knotting the bundle with the coat sleeves and with the stout string which a woodsman always carries in his pocket. Then, having picked up his gun, he tucked the precious bundle under his arm, tail foremost, and set off exultant on the long tramp back to his farm. He had a good reason for carrying his prize tail foremost. He had, of course, been unable to truss up his captive's head; and the outraged bird, undaunted by the ignominious position in which it found itself, was biting vindictively wherever it could reach. But the seat of Steve Barron's trousers was of double thickness, for the sake of durability, and proof against the utmost that furious darting, twisting bill could do. At each indignant assault Barron chuckled appreciatively, thinking how his indomitable captive would lord it over the barn-yard.


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At first, until his wing was healed, the great gander was kept solitary in a lighted shed, where he could see none of the other denizens of the farm-yard. He was a magnificent specimen of his noble breed, the aristocrats of their race. Taller and of far more graceful lines than other geese, he had a glossy black neck that was swanlike in its length and slenderness. The jet black of his head and bill was set off vividly by a crescent-shaped half collar of pure white under the throat, extending from eye to eye. His back and wings were of a warm greyish brown, each feather edged with a lighter shade. His breast was grey, fading softly into white on the belly and thighs; while his tail and his strong webbed feet, again, were inky black.

The stately captive soon grew tame enough under his master's feeding and gentle handling, but kept always a severe and dignified aloofness, as far removed from fear as from familiarity. He learned to recognize his name of "Michael," and would condescend to feed from his master's hand; but any attempt to caress him was always rebuffed with a warning hiss, and a flash of his dark, brilliant eyes. At length Steve Barron clipped the long flight-feathers of the wounded wing, turned him out into the barn-yard, and watched with boy-


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 ish curiosity to see how he would conduct himself.

The moment he realized he was free, Michael spread his wings, took a long run, and flapped mightily, striving to rise into the air, while the ducks quacked and the hens squawked and cackled at the strange intruder upon their peace. But instead of flying, as he expected to do, Michael merely sprang into the air about three feet, and fell over heavily upon his side. It was a blow to both his hopes and his dignity. Swift to learn his lesson he made no second attempt, but stood for a moment staring about him, and then moved slowly towards the puddle of water beside the horse-trough, where the ducks were congregated. The ducks, gabbling excitedly, made way for him with great respect; but the farm-yard cock, a big, pugnacious cross-bred wyandotte, resenting his lofty air, dashed at him furiously. This attack was met with a hiss so loud and strident, so full of menace, that the cock was startled out of his arrogance. He checked his rush abruptly, eyed his intended victim with keen appraisal, and stalked off to tell his flock that the stranger was not worth bothering about. He flew up on the woodpile, crowed a shrill challenge, and then, seeing that the challenge went unanswered, flew down again and fell to scratching in the litter. Thenceforth he ignored the stranger as completely as


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 the stranger ignored him, and felt quite assured that his honour was satisfied. This little by-play amused Barron, to whom all the creatures on the farm were individuals, and individually interesting.

After guttering in the puddle for a few seconds with his strong black bill Michael stretched himself to his full height, scanned the sky overhead, and gave a long, resonant call of honka-honka-honka-honka-honka-honka-honk. Then he listened intently, as if expecting an answer out of the blue.

In a second or two an answer came; but not such a one as he expected, and neither did it come from the sky. From behind the cow-shed at the further end of the farm-yard, waddling hurriedly, appeared a big white gander, followed by three geese, two of whom were pied grey-and-white, while the third was clear grey, and somewhat slenderer in build than her companions. In that long call of Michael's, for all its strangeness and its wildness, the white gander had recognized something of kinship, and at the same time something of challenge to his supremacy. When he saw the tall, dark form of the stranger, erect and watchful beside the watering-trough, he gave vent to a harsh scream of defiance and rushed forwards, with uplifted wings and with open bill, to chase the intruder from his premises.

Recognizing the white gander as, in a way, one of his own kind, Michael eyed him, for a second


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 or two, with an interest that was inclined to be friendly. Then, seeing that the gander was anything but friendly, anger surged up in his lonely heart. Lowering his long, black, snake-like neck, stretching it out parallel with the ground, and waving it from side to side with a peculiarly menacing movement, he hissed like a whole nestful of copperheads and advanced to meet the unprovoked attack.

The two great birds came together with a thud, amid a storm of wild hissings and a desperate buffeting of wings. The white gander had somewhat the advantage in more weight, but he had none of Michael's lightning swiftness, and his strength was no match for the corded and seasoned muscles opposed to him. In a duel with one of his own tribe Michael would have fought warily, sparring for an advantage before coming to grips. But in this encounter he had been rushed, and the fight was at close quarters on the instant. Before he had time to realize his mistake the white gander was hopelessly beaten. Seizing him by the upper wing-joint Michael shook him off his balance, bore him over on his back, trod him down and smothered him with wing-strokes, and then grabbed him, like a bulldog, by the throat, to settle the matter once for all.

But at this moment just in time to save the white gander's life, Steve Barron sprang to the rescue.


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 He dragged the furious Michael off,—getting well bitten in the process,—and hurled him aside. Then he snatched up the bedraggled and choking gander, and deposited him in the shed from which his conqueror had so lately been released. Michael shook himself vigorously, gave utterance to a single ringing honka-honk of triumph, and proceeded calmly to preen his feathers, which had been ruffled less by the fight than by Steve Barron's rude interference.

What specially concerned Barron now was the attitude which the victorious Michael would take towards the three geese. He had heard, or read, somewhere, that the wild goose, unlike his domesticated cousin, was rigidly monogamous. He hoped it was not so, for he wanted to establish Michael in the dethroned white gander's place, as lord of the harem, and rear a new breed of geese that should eclipse anything in all the country-side. But he must wait and learn Michael's intentions before sending the white gander into exile.

Presently the two pied geese, regarding the dark and stately conqueror with high approval, came waddling up to make his acquaintance and tell him how wonderful he was. This they did by ducking their heads with a queer little jerky movement, unmistakably conciliatory. The grey goose followed them with head erect, curious but indifferent. She had been the favourite of the white


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 gander, and though she certainly admired his vanquisher she had a high opinion of her own value.

As the geese approached, Michael drew himself to his full height and regarded them intently. They did not please him at all. They were too much like his late antagonist. But they were females, so his breeding forbade him to attack them. He turned, and stalked away haughtily. The two pied geese followed, still ducking their heads and gabbling softly in their throats. The grey, on the other hand, stopped abruptly, and cocked her head to examine the sky, as if interested in nothing but the weather prospects. Then she strolled across to the other side of the farm-yard and fell to feeding on a patch of tender young grass.

Half around the yard moved, slowly and solemnly, the procession of Michael and the two pied geese,—Michael with lofty head in air, pointedly unconscious of the pursuit, his enamoured followers waddling and bobbing hopefully a couple of yards behind his arrogant tail. They passed close by Steve Barron, who stifled his laughter lest he should disturb the drama. They passed the grey goose, who went on feeding with apparent unconcern,—and who, perhaps on that very account, attracted a piercing glance of interest from Michael's haughty eye. Then the two wooers, gaining confidence, closed up. His patience and his


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 politeness alike exhausted, Michael turned sharply and ran at them with a hiss of indignant protest. His unwelcome pursuers, suddenly alarmed, scurried away; and Michael found himself beside the grey goose, who ignored him and went on feeding. But Barron noticed that she merely went through the form of feeding, biting at the grass and letting it drop from her bill.

Now the wanderer from the south was unmated, and very lonely. The grey goose, though so unlike the females of his own race, was graceful and attractive. He desired her. Ducking his proud head he stepped close to her side, murmuring musically in his throat, and pretended to pick a morsel of the grass just where she was biting at it. The grey goose was flattered. She had noted with complaisance the rebuff of her two sisters. Her heart went out to the stately stranger. Her aloofness melted, and she lightly brushed his arched black neck with her bill. For a few moments the two gabbled together in intimate undertones, and then, having come to an understanding, went off side by side towards the goose-pond, in the meadow behind the barn, the grey goose obviously guiding her new lover.

The two pied geese, seeing that their sister had broken down the splendid stranger's reserve, took heart again and waddled excitedly in pursuit, never doubting that they would be allowed to


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 share his favour. But they were speedily disillu: sioned. Michael turned upon them with a warning hiss which they could not misunderstand. They wandered back disconsolately towards the horse-trough and lifted their voices in an appeal for their vanquished lord. The white gander answered from his prison. Then Steve Barron let them in to share his safe captivity for the night, that the situation might have time to settle down in its new adjustment. When he let them out, the following morning, the white gander, his spirits quite revived, led off at once to the familiar goose-pond. But when he caught sight of Michael and the grey goose, contentedly preening their feathers at the edge of the pond, he accepted the new order with resignation. He conducted his diminished harem to another pond, a couple of hundred yards away. And Steve Barron concluded,—as the event proved rightly,—that there would be no more fighting.

Thenceforth the two establishments kept widely apart. Michael was not aggressive, so long as he was allowed to mind his own business; and as for the white gander, he had learned his lesson well. He would run no risk of a second humiliation. But the grey goose found herself obliged to learn a number of things. Michael


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 was a most devoted and tender lover, but a jealous one; and he insisted on her living up to his ideals. There was no more loafing about the barn-yard for her. Michael chose a little rushy point, jutting out into the goose-pond, for their abode; and observing this, Steve Barron gave them a feed-trough close to the water's edge. As a protection against skunks, foxes and other night marauders, the geese were always shut up in a pen in the yard at night; but Barron surmised that any prowler who interfered with Michael's establishment would get a rude surprise.

The domestic geese had a slack habit of dropping their first eggs of the season wherever they happened to be at the critical moment,—whether in the middle of the barn-yard, out in the meadow, or even in the mud of the pond. As their laying time was early morning, Barron saved the eggs by not letting the careless mothers out till after breakfast. But the grey goose was not allowed any such slackness. As soon as Michael perceived that she would presently begin to lay, he persuaded her to arrange a rude nest, of dead rushes and dry grass, in the centre of the reedy point. He helped her to construct it; and he insisted on her laying her first egg in it. After that he had no more trouble with her, for she became as interested in her domestic duties as he was himself. Instincts of her remote wild ancestry awakened within her, and she grew almost as fierce as


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 Michael himself when Steve Barron came, as he did daily, to see how the home on the rushy point was getting on. At first he never got away from his inspection without bitten legs and buffeted knees. But at length Michael, with his high intelligence, came to recognize that the tall being whom he could neither hurt nor terrify was altogether friendly, however unwelcome, and ceased to greet him with anything worse than a monitory hiss.

When there were six big white eggs in the nest (a mate of Michael's own kind would have laid only four, or possibly five, and these would have been of a creamy buff in colour), the happy grey goose began to sit. Now Michael grew more savage in his guardianship; and Steve Barron, well content, refrained from tormenting the pair with his attentions, only visiting the pond each morning to put fresh feed in the trough. On one of these morning visits he found near the edge of the pond the drowned body of a big weasel. The weasel had made the mistake of thinking the guardian of the nest an ordinary gander. Michael had caught him by the hack of the neck, with the tenacity of a bulldog, and held him under water till his many murderous crimes were expiated. Barron sometimes wondered how a fox would fare in a fight with his redoubtable favourite. But, perhaps fortunately for Michael, the foxes of that neighbourhood were too wary to venture so near the farm-yard. They had no mind to invite the


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 vengeance of that omnipotent being, the Man with a Gun.

After about a month of devoted brooding the grey goose led down into the water six particularly sturdy and lively goslings. They were darker in colour than ordinary goslings, and had black bills and feet like their splendid sire. But as they grew up, and their baby down gave place to grown-up feathers, they were more like their mother than their father, except that their tail, heads and faces were greyish black. They all lacked the broad conspicuous crescent of pure white across the throat which added so much to the distinction of Michael's appearance. Their backs and wings were of a solid dark grey, with none of the rich chocolate colouring of their father. Moreover they all proved to be most sociable and domesticated in their tastes, with a distinct inclination to fraternize with the youngsters of the white gander's rival flock. So it came about that before the end of the summer, when they were nearly full-grown, Michael and the grey goose, quite satisfied with each other's society, chased them away altogether and once more had the goose-pond to themselves. Absorbed in each other, they were not at all troubled that the white gander now led their own offspring in his train. All they demanded was that the garrulous flock should give a wide berth to the goose-pond.

At last came autumn, and the time of the


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 Southward Flight. With the autumn moult, of course, Michael renewed the flight feathers of his clipped wing. Steve Barron purposely refrained from clipping them again, because, being a naturalist at heart, he wanted to find out what Michael would do. Which would triumph in that wild heart, the call of his kind and the migratory urge, or his devotion to his mate?

When the days grew short and grey, and bleak—winds swept the little upland farm, and ice, in the crisp mornings, fringed the muddy edges of the goose-pond, and far away across the faded marshes the stormy tides of autumn roared and pounded at the dyke-barrier, then in Michael's heart stirred memories of the warm blue lagoons and sun-steeped reed-beds of the south. When the first southward-bound flock of his kindred passed high overhead, and their hollow honking throbbed downward to his ears, Michael stretched himself erect, with waving wings, and answered the alluring voices with a long cry of honka-honka-honka-honka, repeating it at brief intervals till the journeying V was out of sight and hearing. The grey goose, not understanding at all, but vaguely apprehensive, cocked her eyes skyward, and then added her own shrill clamour to her mate's sonorous appeal.

When all was quiet again Michael gabbled to her anxiously, striving to fire her blood with his


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 own restlessness. But in vain. The grey goose would do anything in her power to please him, but she could not help being content with her well-loved home. In her heart she felt no urge to wandering, in her unpractised wings no power of prolonged flight. But she did her best to be sympathetic, flapping her wings and clamouring to the skies whenever Michael indulged in that incomprehensible exercise. And from this Michael, not unnaturally, concluded that she, too, was longing for the south and ready to go with him. He could not conceive of any obstacle to the fulfillment of his dreams. They would spend a care-free winter on the palm-fringed lagoons and wild-rice beds and then, of course,—since all the geese, wild and tame alike, are home-lovers,—return with spring to their old nest beside the goose-pond.

It was not, however, until after several days of this restlessness and longing that the flight-fever in Michael's veins reached the point when it could no longer be resisted. It was a bright, sharp morning, with that edge to the air which spurs the spirit to adventure. Over the wooded ridge behind the farm appeared a long V of migrants, flying rather low and filling the sky with their poignant music. Michael sent forth one joyous honka-honka, to tell them he was coming, took a sharp run with wings flapping violently, sprang into the air, and went beating upwards on a long


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 slant calculated to join the flock at a point perhaps half a mile or more away, far out over the marshes. He never doubted that his faithful mate would follow him.

This, indeed, after a moment of agonized hesitation, she did, but only by a desperate effort. Michael, glancing back to assure himself, saw her flapping valiantly about thirty yards behind him, and sped onward and upward, his heart throbbing with exultation.

The grey goose had never flown more than two or three hundred yards, at the utmost. She had never been more than twenty feet above her familiar green earth. Now, after a few seconds' frantic pursuit of her lord, she found herself winging high above the tops of the tallest fir-trees. She was terrified. But she forgot that terror in a greater one, when she saw that Michael was leaving her far behind. Giving up the vain attempt to mount to his height, she flapped on desperately below him, in a level flight, driving her poor wings, more by will and nerve than muscular strength, to an effort which they were never intended for. She tried to call, hoping that Michael would relent and come back to her. But no sound came from her gaping bill and gasping throat. She was by this time well out over the marshes. At last, her overtaxed muscles would no longer obey her will. Still flapping, but ever


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 more and more feebly, she sank lower and lower, and came down with a loud splash in the shallows of a marshy pool. For perhaps half a dozen seconds she sat there dazed. Then, finding her voice again, she screamed beneath the loved form that flew so far and high above her.

Michael was by this time very near the flock. But through the whistling of his wings that scream reached his ear. He looked back. His strong flight slackened as he saw that his mate was not following him. He looked down, far down,—and descried her staggering and flapping painfully over the harsh stubble of the marsh. Just for two or three wing-beats he hesitated, staring wistfully after the flock. Then, with their joyous music ringing through every fibre, he turned aside, and sank down in wide spirals from his free heights and coloured dreams to rejoin his earthbound mate. As he observed her pitiful exhaustion the realization came to him that the power of flight was not hers, but that she had done her desperate best to follow him. Rather than forsake her he would forget the blue lagoons and the golden-green reed-beds.

Very slowly and painfully, but with happiness in her heart, the grey goose led him back, across the rough marsh and up the rocky hill, to the dear, familiar pond behind Steve Barron's barn.


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a sharp ledge of grey and black rock, swept naked by the winds, the drifted snow fell away in a steep slope, and then rounded off into the aching whiteness of the levels. The pale sun glared icily from the whitish sky, calling forth here and there a thin and steel-sharp glint of bitter radiance upon the dead-white immensity of the snow. The wind, which for weeks had scourged the frozen world, had fallen to the stillness of death; and now, in the grip of the immeasurable cold, the gaunt, solitary fir-trees, towering darkly at wide intervals above the waste, cracked like rifle-shots under the fierce tension of their fibres.

But in the cave beneath the ledge it was not cold. Through the curtain of drifted snow, seven or eight feet in thickness, which covered the narrow entrance, the bitterness of the frost could not penetrate. The snow-curtain was supported by the feathery branches of a young fir sapling, which kept the snow firmly in place yet so light and full of air-spaces that its soft shield was a


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 more potent barrier than turf or stone against the savagery of the outer cold.

In the faintly glimmering darkness of the cave there was a musky, vital odour, with vague wafts of warmish air as if some great animal were breathing very slowly in its sleep. Now and again there would be a little drowsy whimper, as of deep content, or an almost imperceptible sound of furry snuggling and suckling unutterably comfortable; and in response there would come a faint stir, with two or three loud breaths from mighty lungs half minded to wake up. The air of the cave would be warmer for a moment, and the vital smell more pungent. Then all would sink again into sleep and silence—but a sleep and silence how unlike that stillness of death that reigned in the Great Frost outside the cave!

If Bob McLaggan had not had a will of tempered steel, if his heart had not been as stout as his muscles were enduring, he would, hours back, have given up the hopeless struggle and sunk down into the snow to his final sleep. And in the following summer, perhaps, some migrant Indian or trapper would have come upon his bones, picked clean by minks and foxes. Not born to the backwoods, and presuming too far upon his


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 strength and his acquired woodcraft, he had needlessly challenged the Wilderness in its most implacable mood, and the challenge had been vindictively accepted. Just at that time when the northern winter is often at its deadliest, before yielding to the approach of spring, he had set out from Gilson's Camp, on his snow-shoes, to cut across the Height of Land to Burnt Brook Settlement. This, at best, was a ten hours' tramp; but he was an expert on the snow-shoes, and well seasoned to cold and fatigue. Moreover, having hunted all through that region the previous autumn, he flattered himself that he knew the way as well as any native.

McLaggan journeyed light. He carried with him his sporting rifle, a .303, which suited him for any game from a partridge to a bull-moose. At his belt was slung a little tin kettle, that he might melt snow and refresh himself with hot tea on his journey. And in the haversack on his back, along with a change of raiment, went a loaf of camp bread and a generous "chunk" of cold boiled pork. The rest of his belongings at the camp he left behind him, to be carried by the first team which should be sent in to the settlement.

McLaggan set out in high spirits eager for a taste of civilization after months of the Wilderness winter. He thought of the homely houses of the little, straggling backwoods settlement, of the


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 leisurely train which would come hooting and pounding along, the following day, to pick him up at the bleak station and carry him back to the city. As he swung, with the long, loose shambling strides of the skilled snow-shoer, over the well-packed surface of the snow, his head was filled with visions of theatre and dance and smiling, white-armed girls. At this so long perspective, all women looked wonderful to him. In spite of the intense cold—unheeded degrees below zero—he was all aglow with vigour and anticipation, and the swift red blood raced in his veins under the stimulus of the keen and biting air.

He had started from the camp before dawn. The sunrise, pale and iridescent like mother-of-pearl, had found him at the foot of the long, gradual slope which led up to the Height of Land. All morning he had breasted the rise with gay resolution. Toward noon, assured that more than half of his journey lay well behind him, he halted in a little open space surrounded by dense, snow-sheathed fir-trees, and built himself a fire in the snow. Being a good woodsman, he built a small, handy, intimate fire that was convenient for the boiling of his tea-kettle and comfortable to sit by while he smoked and rested after his lunch. He allowed himself a full hour for this noon halt, and enjoyed every minute of it, outstretched luxuriously upon an armful of scattered


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 spruce-branches. Then he buried the fire in snow, slipped his moccasined feet into the moose-hide thongs of his snow-shoes, and blithely resumed his march.

By this time he had come out upon the high and comparatively level, though broken, plateau which crowned the Height of Land. There was now no more ascent to climb, and the snow had been packed harder by the winds, so he travelled more swiftly. But two or three times in the course of the afternoon he felt a momentary hesitation as to his path. Such scanty landmarks as had been familiar to him in the autumn were now hardly recognizable under their deep mufflings of snow. The sky had thickened till the sun was no more visible as a guide, and the soft, pearly, diffused light made all things look alike to him. But he felt so sure of his general direction, so confident in his woods-instinct, that it never occurred to him to verify his course.

And then, when the pearly light was just beginning to take on a greyer, more forbidding tinge, when he was just beginning to expect the levels to fall away before him and open up a view of the wide Valley of Burnt Brook, he got a shock which brought him up in the middle of his eager stride. He ran upon a solitary snow-shoe track!

It was his own! He knew, beyond a question,


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 the pattern of it. His snow-shoes were of a shape used only by an Indian tribe of the far Northwest.

McLaggan was startled and humiliated. His woodcraft had failed him grossly. He took out his pipe, filled and lit it defiantly, and then studied his surroundings. Yes, he remembered those three tall spruces on the right, too gaunt to carry any cloak of snow. He had passed them about the middle of the afternoon. He was good and lost. "A pretty damn fool!" he laughed bitterly. Of course, he could retrace his tracks back to the camp—the only sensible thing to do! But then, the shame of it! The mockery that would greet him! And the night would be dark, for there was no moon, and the sky was overcast. There would be only the misleading, ghostly glimmer of the—snow to find his way by. Further, in his confidence he had indulged his cheery appetite and consumed every scrap of his supplies for lunch. And in that devouring cold he was already fiercely hungry. There was nothing for it but to make camp for the night, keep up a good fire, and console himself with his pipe. With the first of the morning light he would strike onward again for the settlement; and this time he would be more careful of his direction.

Having no cutting implement with him but his heavy hunting knife, McLaggan's first care was


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 a supply of firewood, chiefly dead branches, before the daylight should fail him; and with the knife he hacked down a few birch saplings, to mix with the dry wood and make his fire last longer. Then, using one of his snow-shoes as a shovel, he dug in the snow a trench about four feet deep, three feet wide, and seven or eight feet long. In one end of this trench he deposited an armful of green spruce branches to rest upon. At the other end he started his frugal fire.

In spite of the cold, which by now, with nightfall, had sunk down upon the voiceless world with redoubled intensity, there in the narrow depths of his trench McLaggan was almost warm. But hungry and exhausted as he was, he did not dare to lie down and sleep, lest in his sleep the fire should go out, the awful cold creep in upon him unawares, and his sleep change into death. Hunched over the fire he smoked and endlessly smoked, and in his mind retraced the steps of his journey, trying to decide at what point he had gone astray. At times he would turn his attention to cutting up the green birch sticks into handy lengths for his fire. Or he would vary the programme and cheat his craving appetite by melting some snow in his little kettle and making himself a weak but faintly aromatic tea of the birch twigs. And once in a while, when the deathly stillness seemed to close in too overwhelmingly upon his


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 lonely refuge, he suddenly set up a rollicking song. But this would presently come to seem as if it were stirring some slow, vast, implacable resentment in the heart of the terrible solitude; and he would stop abruptly, feeling as if he ought to apologize, and stir his little fire to a livelier blaze. The fire—it was his one friend; and they two were alone together in an infinite loneliness.

And so the long night wore itself away.

With the first of dawn McLaggan sprang up, shook himself, and tightened his belt. He drank some more of his insipid—but at least hot—birch tea. Then piling the last of the wood on the fire, he proceeded to warm himself systematically through and through. But he had to acknowledge to himself, ruefully, that though food could give warmth, warmth was a poor substitute for breakfast. A few minutes later he was under way, and heading, not back toward camp, but, in his obstinacy, for the settlement.

During the night, in thinking over the lay of the land, he had decided just where he had gone wrong. For about an hour he followed his trail of the preceding afternoon. By this time he had reached a space of broken ground, covered with rounded humps, which his old trail skirted on the left. He had taken these humps for thick clumps of bush buried in snow. He now realized that they were a colony of scattered boulders. He re-


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 membered them from the autumn, and knew at once where he was. Burnt Brook Valley was not more than a dozen miles ahead. His heart jumped with relief and exultation. He skirted the broken ground on the right, instead of the left, and broke into the long, loose, shambling trot of the Indian snow-shoe runner. He would be at the settlement before noon—and he thought no more of girls and dances, but of buckwheat cakes and bacon.

In this mood he hurried forward for perhaps a half hour; and then, without warning, the jealous Powers of the Wilderness, coldly mocking his over-confidence, touched him, and tripped him up. What looked like a firm level of the snow was but the mask of a pit between two rocks, a pit half filled with juniper bushes and débris and old logs. The spreading tops of the juniper held up the snow, like a roof. The moment McLaggan planted a foot upon it, it gave way, and through he went—head and shoulders and one foot first, while the other foot, in its snow-shoe, kicked ignominiously on top of the hole.

Scratched, torn, and wrenched though he was by the headlong plunge, McLaggan's predominant feeling was that of being choked and smothered. Blindly fumbling, he released his foot from the thongs of the snow-shoe. Then he crawled forth, drew a deep breath, brushed the snow and broken


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 twigs from his eyes and mouth, and stretched his arms and legs to assure himself that there were no bones broken. In his relief at finding himself uninjured—for a few bruises and scratches were nothing—he laughed aloud. But as his eyes fell upon his snow-shoes, half buried in the snow, the laughter died on his lips. The wooden framework of one shoe was smashed hopelessly.

The realization of what that meant to him went through his heart with a stab. Without snow-shoes to carry him over the soft surface, the seven or eight miles of five-foot-deep snow which separated him from safety would be for him, without food and in that overwhelming cold, a barrier not to be passed unless by a miracle. That cold was eating up his reserves of vital warmth and strength with the greed of a wolf-pack. Already he felt it creeping into his bones. A wave of exhaustion swept over him. He shook it off savagely, and picked up the broken snow-shoe. His whole weight had come down upon it in the fall, jamming it through some interstice between the logs at the bottom of the hole, and buckling the framework both length-wise and across. The wreck was complete, and under the circumstances final. In the warmth of the camp, with plenty of stout cord and strips of strong wood, he could have mended it in a few hours. But here, and in this temperature! What was the use of thinking about it?


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 Already he felt the cold benumbing his wits, so he took his bearings and set out once more. He would, at least, keep going to the last gasp. His knapsack he threw away, a now useless burden in the struggle for life. But the snow-shoes he clung to, with a fleeting notion that he might yet do something with them. A mere feather-weight, he slung them on his back in place of the discarded knapsack. But his rifle, carefully cleared of snow, he carried ready for use. It might provide the miracle that was needed to pull him through. For it was food, and food alone, that could save him.

The snow, except in scant patches where it had drifted thin, lay everywhere from four to five feet deep. At every step McLaggan sank, sometimes only to the knee, more often to the thigh, to the waist. He did not walk, he floundered. At first he could keep straight on for several hundred yards before he would have to pause for breath. The exertion, calling into play every muscle of his body, soon warmed him, but he knew this inner warmth, with nothing to feed it, was only the more quickly exhausting him. He prudently moderated his exertions. He half closed his eyes; he banished all thoughts; he concentrated his will upon economizing every ounce of energy in muscle, nerve, or brain—in brain above all, for there, he knew, lay the springs of his will and his vitality. Nevertheless, within less than an hour he found


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 that his enforced halts for rest were growing more and more frequent. A deadly exhaustion was beginning to clutch at him. If only he could get a mouthful of food he could keep it at bay. At every halt he opened his eyes wide and peered eagerly about him, in the hope of glimpsing some winter prowler whom he could shoot. But the wilderness was lifeless. Not even a rabbit-track could he see anywhere upon the stainless levels of the snow. And if there were no rabbits abroad, there was small likelihood of any others of the wild kindred, all hunters of rabbits, crossing his desperate path.

For another hour McLaggan laboured on, his progress growing ever slower and slower. Then he began to lose count and care of time. He would allow himself to think only of keeping his direction and conserving his vital force. Through his half-closed lids he began to see curious coloured lights, and the scattered fir trees under their loads of snow would from time to time seem to stagger grotesquely, then recover themselves and stand erect again with the rigid air of a drunken man who protests he is not drunk. McLaggan found himself laughing foolishly at the action of the trees, and assuring himself that if they had really staggered they must have shed their snow. Then his watchful will prodded his brain sharply to attention; and, thoroughly startled to observe how


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 his wits had wandered, he pulled himself together with renewed resolution. A critical glance at his back tracks, however, showed him that it was his wits only, and not his feet, that had wavered. He gathered a handful of bud-tips from a birch sapling, chewed them vigorously, and floundered forward with the feeling of having made a fresh start.

In response to the spur of his will McLaggan kept going for another hour. But now, under the persistent sapping of his energy by the intense cold, the violence of his exertion was no longer keeping up his internal warmth. He began to persuade himself that it would be best to find a sheltered spot, build a fire, warm himself, and rest. His saner self, however, reminded him angrily that as he had nothing to eat he would only grow weaker and weaker beside his fire till he could no longer gather wood for it, and would then lie down to death beside its ashes. Time, as well as all else in the world, he told himself bitterly, was against him. Well, he would not yield. He would not meet Fate lying down. He would fall fighting, if fall he must.

At this point McLaggan hardly had life enough left to see where he was going. He found himself suddenly confronted by a high ledge of grey and black rock, its steep front shrouded to half its height with snow. Again he had lost his way.


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 The shock revived him for a moment. His eyes opened wide. He braced back his shoulders. He would climb the ledge; and perhaps from that post of vantage he might find himself nearer to his destination than he had dared to think. After all, he had been travelling many hours since last night's camp.

A little to the right the ledge offered a chance of easy ascent. Close past the face of it McLaggan went floundering desperately, hugging his new hope and refusing to admit to himself for an instant how piteously frail a one it was. His first steps went deeper than he expected. They found no bottom. With a startled cry he threw himself backwards, but too late to extricate himself. His face blinded in the smother of snow, he shot down feet foremost, landed softly, pitched aside sharply to the left into empty space, and fell in a heap, his exhausted muscles refusing to make any further effort whatsoever.

Lying there with his eyes shut, McLaggan's first dim thought was: "That settles it! Better here than out there in the damned snow!" He just wanted to go to sleep. But once more that indomitable will of his got busy, and prodded his brain awake. It prodded his senses awake. This


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 faint warmth enwrapping and reviving him! It was not the fatal illusion of those who are freezing to death. It was something outside himself. He savoured it as he drew in his breath. Then his woods-wise nostrils, long benumbed, suddenly regained their sensitiveness. They sniffed with enlightenment. There was no mistaking that pungent smell! McLaggan realized that he had fallen into the cave of a hibernating bear.

This meant food, strength, salvation! McLaggan's stiff fingers assured themselves that they still clutched his rifle. Stealthily he felt for his knife. It was in his belt. But it was no time for haste or blundering. He stifled the sudden rage of his hunger, silenced his harsh breathing, and listened. He remembered that by this time of year a bear would be nearing the end of its winter sleep and beginning to shake off its torpor. Perhaps this one was awake, and if so, a terrible antagonist at such close quarters! His ears strained intently. He caught a sound of suckling, a faint, small, sleepy whimper of content, a low, slow sound of deep-lunged breathing. The situation was clear to him on the instant. Certainly the owner of the cave was sleeping soundly, not to have been disturbed by his rude invasion of her fond home. McLaggan turned his head towards the direction of the sounds, and presently his eyes managed to distinguish their source.


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 McLaggan thought swiftly. He knew bears. He knew that, as a rule, it is only the females heavy with young that "hole up" in this way for the winter. He knew that they frequently gave birth to their cubs before the end of their winter sleep. And he had been told by a wise old Indian guide that under such conditions a bear, unless aroused by violence, was quite stupidly gentle and tractable. He thought of his own present weakness. Well, he would take no risks. He must see to it that one shot would settle the matter instantaneously. For already his last spurt of strength and decision was dying down, and he felt a deadly exhaustion stealing over him.

With rifle ready McLaggan crawled close up to that large, obscure form, put out a cautious naked hand, and touched it. It was the silken, furry head of the suckling cub that he touched. The cub gave a little whimper of content at the touch, mistaking it for the mother's caress. The warmth, the softness, a ridiculous sense of security and shieldedness in contrast to the bitter loneliness of death outside the cave, produced an amazing effect on McLaggan in his weakness. He wanted to hug the warm cub to his heart, and maudlin tears welled to his eyes. But fortunately at the same moment another impulse, not only stronger but saner, seized him. He realized that the cub was swallowing warm milk. With a gasp


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 of greed he thrust his face down into the mother's fur, beside the youngster's head. His eager lips found and closed upon the object of their quest, and in a second more he was drawing warm life into his shrunken veins.

At this stage it was beyond McLaggan's power, or wish, to think. The reaction was too exquisite. He drank, and drank, snuggled against the cub. He was warm at last. He was comfortable beyond the utmost dream of comfort. One foolish hand moved up confidingly like a baby's and clutched into the deep fur on the mother's flank. McLaggan, there between the bear's great paws, was dozing off to sleep.

Presently the mother stirred. This unwonted drain upon her resources began to reach her consciousness with its tidings of something out of the ordinary. She lifted her head in a drowsy fashion, craned it about, and sniffed inquiringly at the cub. It was nursing, and whimpered a contented response to her caress. Plainly it was all right. Her great muzzle passed it over, and came in contact with McLaggan's face, glued to one of her teats.

She drew back her muzzle. This was so surprising that she almost woke up. But the hibernating drowsiness was still thick in her veins, clouding her brain. She sniffed at McLaggan again. She did not quite like the smell of him. But on


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 the other hand she liked well what he was doing. It seemed at once to establish a claim upon her. She was a very big and healthy bear, who in her previous essays in maternity had always achieved twins; and now this one rather puny offspring of hers was not fully absorbing her superabundant milk. McLaggan's greedy demands were comfortable to her. And he was so obviously harmless and friendly. She adopted him complacently. She licked the back of his head for a few seconds, so vigorously that she pushed his cap off; and McLaggan, waking just sufficiently to think he was in a propitious but preposterous dream, clutched her fur more securely and renewed his blessed meal.

Still dimly puzzled, but too drowsy to consider the matter further, the bear gave a satisfied woof and settled back to sleep again.

When McLaggan, after hours of deep slumber, woke up again, his first conscious thought was that he felt quite well and strong, but somewhat wearied by dreams. By this time it was night in the world, and the darkness of the cave was absolute. At first McLaggan thought he was in his bunk at the camp. Feeling his face and hands buried in warm, breathing fur, he decided that he was still dreaming, and he lay very quiet, with his eyes shut, striving to keep his hold upon such a curious and interesting dream that he might remember


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 it in all details. But under this effort his brain flashed clear; and with a jump of his heart he realized exactly where he was. The trained prudence of the woodsman, however, saved that jump of the heart from translating itself to the muscle. For a moment he felt a chill of fear. Very softly he felt for his rifle. Yes, there it was, close at his side, where he had let go of it in order to feed more greedily. He relinquished it again at once, with a curious qualm as if he had been caught in an act of treachery. At least, there was no need of doing anything detestable for the moment. The furry pillow beneath his head was heaving so slowly that he knew the bear was sound asleep. The cub, too, no longer nursing, was asleep. He touched it, and its little paws were folded over its nose. Then he noticed a slight chilly feeling on the back of his head and neck. He felt the place with his hand, and realized that the bear had recently been licking him. She had licked the hair firmly in the wrong direction, and left it moist. At this evidence of the great beast's complacency towards his intruding helplessness, when she might so easily—and justly—have crunched his neck with one lazy snap of her jaws, a wave of gratitude surged up in his heart, followed by a spasm of disgust as he thought of the hateful deed to which he should probably be driven. Every fibre of him now shrank from such a deed. Perhaps


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 if he could have a smoke some way of escape from it might be revealed to him!

But the lighting of a match, the pungent smell of the pipe! There would be risk of rousing his strange hostess, to a too discriminating wakefulness! However, his confidence grew as he thought of how assiduously she had licked the back of his head. That, he reflected, was nothing short of adoption. He had been accepted and admitted to full cub-ship. He allowed himself to stroke the old bear's head and scratch it softly around the ears; and he was rewarded by a sleepy woof of satisfaction.

He sat up, and, leaning back luxuriously against the bear's stomach, proceeded to fill his pipe, feeling very safe and comfortable. Then, rising carefully to his feet without disturbing the cub which had been nestled against him, he groped his way to the exit, which he discovered by plunging his hand into the snow. Here, with his back to the bear, and concealing the flame of the match beneath his coat, he lit the pipe, and stood there blowing every mouthful of the smoke carefully forth through the snow. But here by the opening of the cave he was sharply reminded of the terrors of the outer cold. By the time he had finished his pipe he was chilled to the bone. Gratefully he turned back to his warm retreat and snuggled down again between the old bear's paws. The


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 cub had resumed its nursing. He promptly followed its example; and having made a good meal he dozed off to sleep again, telling himself it would be time enough in the morning to face decisions. His first need, surely, was to recover his strength!

This time, being deeply at ease in his mind, McLaggan slept long. He woke up very hungry, and at once, by prompt instinct, applied himself thirstily to the copious source of nourishment which had already served him so well. Then, opening his eyes, he found that the cave was full of a faint, glimmering, bluish light, and he realized how long he must have slept. His watch had stopped long ago, forgotten, but it must be well past noon, and a brilliant day in the icy world, to send so much light into his refuge. He looked at the sleeping, shaggy bear. He looked at the sleek little cub, suckling, and snuffling, and kneading its mother's breast with its baby paws. He thought of the ancient story of the viper, which stung the man who had warmed it to life in his bosom. "Not for me, thank you!" he muttered. "I'll fill my skin right up to the neck with your good milk, old girl, and see if I can't make Burnt Brook on that. It can't be far now, and thanks to your hearty hospitality I feel quite fit."

Having swallowed all the milk that he could hold, McLaggan was again filling his pipe, when through the curtain of snow he caught a faint


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 sound of human voices. Instantly jamming on his cap, and snatching up his rifle and snow-shoes, he dived through the snow, crashed through the branches of the bush, and struggled, spluttering and blowing, to the top of the hole. Before he could get the snow out of his eyes, his ears were greeted with a cry of "Well, I'll be damned! Here he is!"

Two of the "hands" from the camp, Long Jackson and Baldy Davis, grinning broadly with relief through the icicles on their moustaches, and steaming from their nostrils like locomotives, stood before him.

"What's been the matter, Mac?" demanded Baldy Davis.

"Got lost, like a damn fool," answered McLaggan. "Fell in a hole. Broke my snow-shoes. Thank God you've come. But what fetched you along this way?"

"The Boss wanted you to see to something or other for him at the settlement, and phoned in to Curtis's last night. When they said you hadn't turned up, he knowed something was wrong. So he sent Long Jackson an' me out on yer trail afore daylight this mornin', in a hurry; an' you bet we've done some travellin'."

"Thought we'd find you stiff," broke in Jackson. "But you don't look dead. What you been doin'?"


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 "Hugging up to a sleepy-old bear, to keep warm, bless her," explained McLaggan. "Got any grub with you? I want a square feed, and a tin of tea."

"A bear?" cried Davis eagerly, snatching at his gun and starting to slip off his snow-shoes. "Where is he? In that hole?"

"No, you don't, Baldy," snapped McLaggan, sharp as a whip-lash, grabbing Davis savagely by the wrist. "No, you don't! See?"

Then, noticing Davis's astonishment, he continued more mildly: "You see, Baldy, that old bear's my pal. She adopted me, that she did, when I was just all in. Why, she's licked my back hair all the wrong way, so hard I don't know as I'll ever get it to lay straight again."

"My mistake. I apologize," responded Davis good-humouredly.

Long Jackson, a woodsman and trapper of experience who had been wont to study the wild kindreds even more intently than he hunted them, divined all McLaggan's experience in a flash.

"I see," said he, nodding his head. "An old she-bear, an' cubs, eh? Too sleepy to know the difference, eh? An' I'll bet you stole the cubs' rations, eh, Mac?"

"Only one cub—and me!" laughed McLaggam "There was plenty for the two of us. But right now I'd like something solider than warm milk."

"We'll move round yonder into the sun, an'


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 build a fire, an' have a feed," said Jackson. "Baldy an' me's needing it most as much as you. Here's an extra pair o' snow-shoes we brought along, case of an accident. We're not more'n two hours from the settlement now."

Snug beside the deeply trenched fire, with bread and bacon between his ribs and a tin of scalding tea in his hand, McLaggan unfolded his adventures.

"So now, you see," he concluded, "I'm a bear by adoption and grace. Do you wonder I've got a soft spot in my heart for the old girl?"

"I guess," said Baldy Davis, chewing thoughtfully on his pipe-stem, "ye'd better not say anything at all about it, not to nobody, Mac. There's all kind of folks in at the settlement; an' like as not there'd be some skunk stinkin' mean enough to come right out here after that bear's pelt."

"Baldy's right," grunted Jackson.

McLaggan meditated, scowling darkly. Then he got up, took a snow-shoe, and carefully shovelled back the snow into the hole till there was no sign to distinguish it.

"That's a damn good notion of yours, Baldy," said he. "Mum's the word, till the snow's off. If I got wind of any blasted sinner messing round after that there bear, before she's out an' around and able to take care of herself, I'd break his neck for him, that I would."


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across the wide, wooded valley of the lone Tin Kettle, borne clearly on the frosty and sparkling air, came the sharp sounds of axe-strokes biting rhythmically into solid timber.

The great moose bull, who had been drowsing in the dusky depths of the fir thicket, beside his hump-shouldered cow and her two long-muzzled, leggy calves, shot his big ears forwards like an apprehensive rabbit, lifted his huge, ungainly head, distended his moist nostrils, and sniffed anxiously. They were so super-sensitive, those expert nostrils, and the wilderness air was so clean, that even across the wide expanse he could detect the acrid tang of wood-smoke. Heaving up his black bulk with no more noise than if he had been a shadow, he parted the branches cautiously with his long muzzle and peered forth.

It took him but very few moments to realize what had happened. The lumbermen had come back to the old, long-deserted camp across the valley. All winter through, the valley would ring with rough voices, with the sharp percussion of the axe