Raw Stanfield with the lantern, Butt Johnson with a torch for shining treed coons and a .22 rifle for plinking them out of the trees, Mun with his coon-hunting axe, Melinda with serene self-assurance, and Harky with a miserable feeling that it couldn't be very long now before the whole world went to pot, they set off through the night.

Misery was Harky's only feeling. If he had another, he told himself sourly, he wouldn't dare put stock in it. When girls horned in on coon hunts anything could happen and it probably would.

Harky comforted himself with thoughts of what can happen on coon hunts. He had a soul-satisfying vision of a cold, wet, mud-spattered, and hungry Melinda wandering through the night pleading for Harky to come to her succor. Harky heard, but he let her wander until the last possible second. Then, just as she was about to sink into mud from which she would never rise had it not been for valiant Harky, he lifted her to her feet, took her home, and scuffed scornful feet on Mellie Garson's threshold.

"There!" he heard himself saying. "Let that teach you that girls ought never horn in on coon hunts!"

Harky breathed a doleful sigh. Delightful as this mental image was, in no way did it erase the fact that a girl had horned in on a coon hunt. Harky sought solace by tearing his thoughts away from Melinda and fastening them on something pleasant. He considered the four hounds.

Queenie was a slow and methodical worker who'd never been known to lose a trail she started. Of course they did not get every coon Queenie started; some went to earth in rock-bound burrows and some escaped by devious means. Queenie, who tongued on a trail, was one of the few hounds who'd followed Old Joe to his magic sycamore.

Glory, as yet untried, might and might not adopt her mother's hunting style. Duckfoot—neither Harky nor anyone else had any reason to believe that he'd already tracked Old Joe to his sycamore—was another unknown quantity insofar as his own special way of hunting was concerned. But Harky had no doubt that, after adequate training, Duckfoot would shine, and Glory would do well enough.

Thunder, next to Precious Sue the best coon hound ever to run the Creeping Hills, couldn't be doubted. Big, long-legged, and powerful, Thunder was another hound who'd distinguished himself by tracking Old Joe to the big sycamore. A silent trailer but a tree barker who did credit to his name, Thunder was so fast that he often caught coons on the ground. With six years of hunting experience behind him, he was probably the best of the four hounds on this current hunt.

They were, Harky thought, a pack fit to run in any company. With Thunder to run ahead and jump the coon, Queenie to work out the trail at her own pace and at regular intervals to announce the direction Thunder had gone, and quality pups like Duckfoot and Glory, any coon they struck tonight, with the probable exception of Old Joe, would find his stretched pelt on the barn door tomorrow. Maybe even Old Joe would have a hard time with this pack.

Thinking of coons, Harky was pleasantly diverted for a few minutes more.

Creatures of the season, coons availed themselves of the most of the best of whatever was handy. When they emerged from their dens at winter's end, they liked to fill empty stomachs with buds and tender grass and flower shoots. As the season advanced, coons conformed. They never spurned vegetation if it was to their liking, but as soon as the spring freshet subsided, they did a great deal of fishing and frog, crawfish, and mussel hunting. When gardens started to bear, the coons varied their diet with green vegetables. As they ripened, both wild and domestic fruits received the attention of properly brought up coons. They were always ready to raid poultry.

At this time of year, with frogs already gone into hibernation, fish inclined to linger in deep pools where even Old Joe couldn't catch them, the crawfish and mussel crop well picked over, and vegetation withered, coons concentrated on fields of shocked corn, such fruit as might cling to branches, and beech and oak groves, where they foraged for fallen beechnuts and acorns.

It was to a beech grove that Raw Stanfield led them.

The black thunderheads that had been surging through Harky's brain changed suddenly to a sky of dazzling blue. Rubber boots were not unknown among coon hunters of the Creeping Hills, but except by a few eccentrics, they were unused. A man trying to make time to a tree-barking hound did not care to be slowed by boots.

Harky licked his lips. God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but ice water felt like ice water even to a coon hunter and the grove toward which Raw headed was on the far side of Willow Brook. The water was autumn-low with plenty of exposed stones, but jumping them by daylight and jumping them under lantern light were different matters. Harky wasn't sure that even he could cross at night without getting wet.

It looked as though ladies' night at coon hunts would terminate abruptly and soon. Harky hoped so, and it would be a nice touch indeed if Melinda scraped her shins when she fell in.

Willow Brook glinted in the light as Raw Stanfield held his lantern high to see whether they were approaching a pool or riffle. It was a riffle that purled lazily, and coldly, around exposed stones. Harky grinned in the darkness. It looked easy, but there was a trick to it.

Once you started jumping there was no turning back and the stones were unevenly spaced. You had to adjust your jumps accordingly, so that it took a really experienced stone jumper to cross in reasonably dry condition.

Contemplating the joys of watching Melinda come reasonably near drowning, Harky made a shocking discovery.

Thunder, Queenie, and Glory still trailed at the heels of the hunters, but Duckfoot was no longer present. Harky gulped, then used the thumb of his left hand to trace a circle on the palm of his right. Less than half a shake ago, Duckfoot had pushed his cold nose into that dangling palm and the circle Harky made there would certainly close him in and bring him back from wherever he had gone. At any rate, it should.

It didn't. Chills never born of the frosty night chased each other up and down Harky's spine. Mun claimed Duckfoot was half duck, Miss Cathby said that couldn't be, and Harky wavered between the two. He looked again, but only three hounds waded into the riffle to join the hunters gathering on the other side. Harky jumped.

If he had his mind on his work, he'd have crossed in perfect safety. But just as he made ready to strike a humpbacked boulder with the sole of his left foot, he miscalculated and struck with the heel. That broke his stride to such an extent that the next jump was six inches short, and instead of landing on a flat-topped rock where he could have balanced, he came down in ten inches of ice water.

Only vast experience as a rock jumper prevented an allover bath; Harky threw himself forward to support his upper body on the flat rock. Then, since it was impossible to get his feet any wetter than they were, he waded the remaining distance.

"Really, Harold," said Melinda, who was dry as a shingle under the July sun, "you did that rather clumsily."

Harky made a mental note. It was easy to work the pith out of an elderberry stick. Small stones were plentiful. One of the latter, placed in the mouth and blown through the former, was never forgotten by anyone with whom it collided. The next time Harky attended Miss Cathby's school, Melinda was in for an unforgettable experience.

For the moment, since he could do nothing else about her, he could imagine she wasn't along. Harky turned his back on Melinda and addressed Mun:

"Duckfoot's gone."

"Danged if he ain't," said Mun, who noticed for the first time that they had only three of the four hounds with which they'd started. "When'd you note it?"

"Other side of the brook," Harky said in a hushed voice. "One minute his nose was in my hand, the next it wasn't. Do you figure he took wings and flew off?"

"It could," Mun began, but his about-to-be-expressed opinion that such a premise was wholly reasonable was interrupted by Melinda's, "Nonsense!"

Harky blazed, forgetting his sensible plan to ignore her. "Watta you know about it?"

"Now don't lose your temper, Harold," Melinda chided. "It's silly to suppose Duckfoot's half duck."

Harky drew his arm back. "Silly, huh? I've a good mind to—"

"Harky!" Mun roared. "Men don't hit wimmen!"

"Why don't they?" Harky growled.

"You're being childish, Harold," Melinda said sweetly. "Duckfoot's simply gone off somewhere. Perhaps he got tired and went home."

Harky tried to speak and succeeded only in choking. If it was insult to assert that Duckfoot could not be half duck, it was heresy even to imply that he left a hunt and went home because he was tired. Harky recovered his breath.

"Duckfoot didn't go home!" he screamed.

"Really, Harold," Melinda said, "it isn't necessary to make so much noise."

Harky was saved by the bell-like tones of a suddenly-tonguing hound.

"Queenie's got one," Raw Stanfield said.

"That's Glory tonguing," Melinda corrected. "She's pitched just a shade higher than Queenie."

"Now, Miss," Raw stuffed his tobacco into a corner of his mouth, "I know my own hound."

"There she is," Melinda said.

A second hound, almost exactly like the first but with subtle differences that were apparent when both tongued at the same time, began to sing. Raw Stanfield promptly swallowed his chew. Butt Johnson and Mun were momentarily too shocked to move.

Harky gasped. There was witchery present that had nothing to do with Duckfoot. Raw didn't know his own hound when he heard it, but Melinda did. Then Harky put the entire affair in its proper perspective. What else could you expect when you brought a girl on a coon hunt? Raw was just so shook up that he might be pardoned for failing to recognize Queenie even if he saw her.

"Le's git huntin'," Raw muttered.

Guiding himself by the blended voices of Queenie and Glory rising into the night air, and seeming to hover at treetop level for a moment before they faded, Harky began to run. The cold air whipped his face. The night whispered of all the marvels that have been since the beginning of time and will be until the end. For a moment, he even forgot Melinda.

This, he thought, was what coon hunting really meant. Listening to the hounds and trying to keep pace; knowing that somewhere far ahead, swift and silent-running Thunder was also on the coon's trail; drawing mental pictures of the coon and his scurry to be away; Thunder bursting upon and surprising the coon, who'd be listening to the tonguing hounds; the chorus as all hounds gathered at the tree. Harky laughed out loud.

Now he knew what a running deer knew, he told himself, and almost instantly the swiftest deer seemed unbearably slow. He was the wind itself, and he exulted in the notion that the other plodding humans, who would surely be running, would just as surely be far behind. They hadn't had his experience in running away from Mun.