CHAPTER VIII.--STEEP TRAILS.
These hot days in August, when the trout took to the very deepest,coldest pools they could find, and hid themselves all day under theover-hanging rocks, and every creature that couldn't take to the waterlonged for rain, Fleet Foot used to lead her little family up the steeptrails to the top of Mount Olaf or some near-by mountain-top, where thewind blew cool night and day.
These trips were full of much joy for the fawns, for there was all thespice of adventure in following a winding hoof-path that led--they knewnot where. For one never knew what might be just around the next turn.
How their hearts thumped when they came suddenly to the edge of aprecipice, where they could look down at Beaver Brook tumbling over therocks away, 'way down below I Or perhaps they could get just a glimpseof Lone Lake lying gleaming in the hollow of the hills.
Not that there was any trail in the real sense of the word.
Left to themselves, they could not have told one rock from another, savehere and there where a bit of mica gleamed silver against the gray, or ascraggly pine leaned too far out over a ledge to look safe.
But to their mother their trail was as plain as the nose on your face.It was just a matter of turning and twisting, here to pass between thosetwo queer-shaped boulders, and there to go around that flat rock whichteetered alarmingly beneath one's feet. She had been over it all so manytimes that she had learned the look of each new turn of the pathway. Hadso much as one pinnacle been out of place, she would have known,--andwondered why.
One still, sunshiny morning, after they had drunk their fill at a coolgreen pool of Beaver Brook, they started up the mountain-side for a dayunder the shade of the last fringe of evergreens before one came to thebare, rocky ridges, where it got too cold for anything to grow, exceptin sheltered crevices.
The fawns danced and capered to the music of the bird song that filledthe woods, while Fleet Foot cropped all sorts of delicioustid-bits,--now a clump of oyster mushrooms growing shelf-like on afallen log, and now a bunch of blue-berries, plump and juicy andsun-sweet. Life was one long holiday.
One misty morning, as Fleet Foot was leading them in great boundsthrough the tall meadow grass, the fawns came to a sudden stand-still,their eyes popping with surprise. For they had just barely escapedstepping on the writhing coils of a great long snake.
Their bleat of fear brought Fleet Foot instantly.
"Pouf! That's only a garter snake," she reassured them, with one glanceat the length-wise stripes (yellow and dark gray). "That's nothing to beafraid of. The only kind you want to look out for is the kind withcross-wisp stripes. I don't believe there is more than one snake in allthe North Woods that is poisonous,--and there are at least a dozen thatare perfectly harmless."
"What is the poisonous one?" bleated the trembling fawns.
"The rattler. But you won't see one of those in a year's time,--not inthese woods, where it gets so cold in winter. They love it hot and dry,and so of course they live mostly out West, though you do find a fewsometimes among the rocks on the warm south side of a mountain."
"Oo! What if we'd meet a rattler?" shivered the fawns.
"Well, he'd warn you before you went too near."
"Warn us?--How?"
"He'd rattle, of course. He has a little set of bones on his tail thathe can rattle, and when you hear that, you need to look out, and getaway quickly."
"Are the others really harmless, Mother?"
"Harmless to fawns. That is, they have no poison bite. Snakes do a lotof good, eating pests."
"But I don't like snakes," insisted the tinier fawn.
"Well, neither does Mother. But it's so silly, children, to be afraid.Where is that garter snake? Gone, to be sure! And even the rattler onlystrikes because he thinks you are going to kill him."
The fawns were very thoughtful after that. "Mother," they finallybleated, "Seems as if even the meanest creatures in the woods had _some_use."
"That's right," their mother answered them.
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