CHAPTER XIII.--THE QUEER FEATHERS.
Frisky, the Red Fox Pup, had learned many lessons since the day he sonearly hanged himself in the wild grape-vines.
There was the day of the first snow, for instance.
Awakening one morning, cramped and chilled because he had not lined hisbed deeply enough with leaves to keep off the cold, he peered from hislittle den on the hillside with wide eyes.
The air seemed filled, as far as he could see, with tiny white feathers,and the ground was covered with them.
He peered this way and that, wondering what kind of birds they could bewhose plumage was being shed so freely. It must be a flock large enoughto cover the whole sky, he decided, mystified.
He crept stealthily from the den, afraid, because he did not understand.
The instant his black feet touched the cold stuff, he leaped high intothe air, with a yip of fright and amazement. But when he opened hismouth he got a taste of the falling flakes.
"Ha!" he said to himself, "that accounts for it. It is just rain turnedwhite."
Still, he crept warily down to Pollywog Pond for his breakfast, steppinghigh, because he hated wet feet.
Arrived at the pond he stopped for a drink, when his lapping tongue cameplump against a film of something hard and shining that seemed to coverthe water. What could it be, he asked himself, lapping up a mouthful ofthe snow-flakes to ease his thirst. (He wisely held them in his mouthtill they had melted, for fear of chilling his stomach.)
It was certainly very queer. Now the very trees were beginning to beoutlined in white. It made the world look quite a different place.
As for the deer, they took to a thicket of poplar, birch and spruce, onwhich they could feed when the snow lay deep.
There was one other to whom winter brought a change and that was Old ManLynx.
Now it is very, very seldom that good luck falls right at one's feetundeserved.
So Old Man Lynx warned himself when he came upon the muskrat in thetrap.
Of course the giant cat did not know it was a trap, as he circled aroundand around the struggling rat. His green eyes gleamed hungrily in histawny face, and he crouched so close to the snow crust that his whiskersdragged on the ground. His tasseled ears twitched nervously, his stubbytail thrashed the earth and his claws were bared in a fringe across thegreat awkward paws, as he crept nearer and nearer the struggling bait.
To the nostrils of the cat tribe the musky smell of the water-rat ismost tempting, and his mouth watered till he licked his jaws at thoughtof the feast within such easy reach.
And yet--and yet--some spirit of the wild--some instinct of the dumbbrute who must fight to live--seemed to warn him that where man hadbeen, there would be trouble for him. And he circled his prey withoutquite daring to close in upon it and end its squeaking protest.
Now the Hired Man at the Valley Farm had not meant the trap for Old ManLynx. He had placed it there on the bare chance of there being a wolf atlarge in the forest around Mount Olaf.
As the midwinter dawn deepened from salmon to rose, and the snow beganto glitter in the sun's first rays, Old Man Lynx decided that the thingwas altogether too mysterious to be wholesome. Instead, he trotted downto Lone Lake, where muskrats were supposed to be. And he promisedhimself that even were it too late in the day to catch a rat, he couldat least afford the pleasure of sniffing at the chimneys to their roundhouses,--those air-holes in the top, where their musky breath steamedout, while the rats themselves lay snug and warm within.
Then, suddenly, just as Old Man Lynx was passing a snow-laden clump ofspruces, he caught a little movement in their lower branches. Circlingtill he had the ribbon of the wind in his nostrils, he discovered thatit was a covey of grouse.
Grouse! How infinitely more delicious than muskrat--more tender eventhan rabbit! Now indeed he was glad he had saved his appetite.
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