Wood Folk at School | Page 6

her heedless
little one to follow. She is thinking only of him; and now you see her
feet free to take care of themselves. As she rises over the big windfall,
they hang from the ankle joints, limp as a glove out of which the hand
has been drawn, yet seeming to wait and watch. One hoof touches a
twig; like lightning it spreads and drops, after running for the smallest
fraction of a second along the obstacle to know whether to relax or
stiffen, or rise or fall to meet it. Just before she strikes the ground on
the down plunge, see the wonderful hind hoofs sweep themselves
forward, surveying the ground by touch, and bracing themselves, in a
fraction of time so small that the eye cannot follow, for the shock of
what lies beneath them, whether rock or rotten wood or yielding moss.
The fore feet have followed the quick eyes above, and shoot straight
and sure to their landing; but the hind hoofs must find the spot for
themselves as they come down and, almost ere they find it, brace
themselves again for the push of the mighty muscles above.
Once only I found where a fawn with untrained feet had broken its leg;
and once I heard of a wounded buck, driven to death by dogs, that had
fallen in the same way never to rise again. Those were rare cases. The
marvel is that it does not happen to every deer that fear drives through
the wilderness.
And that is another reason why the fawns must learn to obey a wiser

head than their own. Till their little feet are educated, the mother must
choose the way for them; and a wise fawn will jump squarely in her
tracks. That explains also why deer, even after they are full grown, will
often walk in single file, a half-dozen of them sometimes following a
wise leader, stepping in his tracks and leaving but a single trail. It is
partly, perhaps, to fool their old enemy, the wolf, and their new enemy,
the man, by hiding the weakling's trail in the stride and hoof mark of a
big buck; but it shows also the old habit, and the training which begins
when the fawns first learn to follow the flag.
After that second discovery I used to go in the afternoon to a point on
the lake nearest the fawns' hiding place, and wait in my canoe for the
mother to come out and show me where she had left her little ones. As
they grew, and the drain upon her increased from their feeding, she
seemed always half starved. Waiting in my canoe I would hear the
crackle of brush, as she trotted straight down to the lake almost
heedlessly, and see her plunge through the fringe of bushes that
bordered the water. With scarcely a look or a sniff to be sure the coast
was clear, she would jump for the lily pads. Sometimes the canoe was
in plain sight; but she gave no heed as she tore up the juicy buds and
stems, and swallowed them with the appetite of a famished wolf. Then
I would paddle away and, taking my direction from her trail as she
came, hunt diligently for the fawns until I found them.
This last happened only two or three times. The little ones were already
wild; they had forgotten all about our first meeting, and when I showed
myself, or cracked a twig too near them, they would promptly bolt into
the brush. One always ran straight away, his white flag flying to show
that he remembered his lesson; the other went off zigzag, stopping at
every angle of his run to look back and question me with his eyes and
ears.
There was only one way in which such disobedience could end. I saw it
plainly enough one afternoon, when, had I been one of the fierce
prowlers of the wilderness, the little fellow's history would have
stopped short under the paw of Upweekis, the shadowy lynx of the
burned lands. It was late afternoon when I came over a ridge, following

a deer path on my way to the lake, and looked down into a long narrow
valley filled with berry bushes, and with a few fire-blasted trees
standing here and there to point out the perfect loneliness and
desolation of the place.
Just below me a deer was feeding hungrily, only her hind quarters
showing out of the underbrush. I watched her awhile, then dropped on
all fours and began to creep towards her, to see how near I could get
and what new trait I might discover. But at the first motion (I had stood
at first like an old stump on the ridge) a fawn