THE forest lay black in the close embrace of the odorous young night. Soft, balsamic waves of air rose strata above strata, stealing between roughly corrugated boles and smooth trunks, and the satin-soft stems of the young saplings who had yet to win their spurs as knights of the wood against the mighty winds; permeating every dell and dingle, every copse and tangled covert. The nostrils which these air-waves touched tingled with delight, and the lungs which were bathed and invigorated by this life-giving essence from nature’s laboratory expanded with a conscious strength, and sent the red blood bounding from them on its ceaseless errand. The season was early summer. Beneath the interlacing boughs it was black—black as the night of Egypt’s curse. A solid bank of gloom which bore no outline and no shape. So might it have been just before God uttered his first command to things terrestrial. Here and there a tree arose above its army of fellows, and the delicate tracery of spreading branch, and even of tapering leaf, was etched upon the vastness overhead. In the sky the faithful stars were burning. Not the smallest speck of cloud veiled their earnest faces, and the mellow radiance which their united power shed fell like a blessing upon the glad earth. But the forest baffled the star rays—those gentle messengers which came so timidly upon their missions of light. The leaves at the tops of the trees gleamed glossy and green, but they were a numberless multitude of shields to the solitude below.

The forest went off to the gullied hills in one direction; in another it sloped sharply down a bluff to the river, with an accompaniment of running briers and rotting, lichen-covered stumps and an occasional fallen warrior of the wood which some storm had overcome. The river was not wide—a half-grown rabbit might have swum it with ease had the water been stagnant—but here it ran swift and deep between its high, rock-bound banks. It flowed silently, though, except for a low purling where a drift had formed and a sucking gurgle where a ledge let down the bed.

This river was a source of much worry and concern to the wood-people. All of them could swim, some well and some very badly, but more than one family circle had been bereft by reason of the treacherous stream, for in addition to the velocity with which it wound its way through the wood, shifting whirlpools lurked within it, against which the strongest swimmer’s power was as naught. There was a second forest across the river, not as large as the first, it is true, but still wide enough to shelter many a tiny dweller, as well as give him food. So when friend wanted to visit friend, or cousin to call upon cousin, there was this black, whispering barrier stretching between, mocking them with its insinuating murmurs, and seeking to lure them to its faithless and fatal bosom with low cooings and shining, siren arms. And on certain moonlit nights in spring there had been those who heard the mating call wafted through the stillness. Coming in answer, they had suddenly found themselves standing on the brink of that taunting river, while from the other shore the cry would come again, tender and appealing. Then hot blood and the madness of the season would have their way, and the young buck, belong to what family he may, would put discretion behind him and glide out into the stream with the echo of his mistress’ call as a beacon and a guide. On rare occasions one would make the passage safely. More often, as he battled with the current, snaky fingers would shoot up from beneath and grip him, whirl him around and around in maddening circles, and finally drag him down with a hiss of victory, and his lifeless carcass might have been seen afloat the next day, miles away.

All this was before the great storm. After that had come and gone things were different with the forest-people.

It was at the close of a day in mid-summer. For weeks there had been no rain. Day after day the sun had come up, had scorched and burned and seared, and had gone down. The leaves curled upon the trees; the grass blades became brittle; the rabbit runs were so hot at midday that they hurt the pads of the cottontails, and they lay panting in their burrows, waiting for night. Then it was that the wood-people blessed the river, for there was no water anywhere else. The river sank foot by foot, leaving cracked, baked stretches of yellow clay as it receded. Still it ran doggedly, and breathed defiance. It would take more than one dry summer to rob it of its terror and strength. At last there came a day which was born with portents of some awful thing to come. The sun rose hazy, like a ball of blood. The air, which had been hot, became stifling. It pressed on the chest and burned in the throat. The chipmunks and the squirrels sought their nests wildly; the birds went deeper into the forest. By noon all of the little people who had a home were in it. But so far nothing had happened. Mid-afternoon a growl of wrath came from the west, and a long, leaden band pushed its edge over the horizon. A terrible silence hung over the forest; the unnatural calm which precedes some great calamity. Then a chill breath stirred the upper leaves, followed by gusts of wind almost icy. Night came long before its time, and the sky which for weeks had been a shining surface of blinding light became a seething, tossing caldron of billowy clouds and murky vapors, and threading through all the tumbled mass was a vivid network of flame. The chariots of the storm came thundering down the slopes of the sky, and the forest shivered, and bent, and tossed its thousands of arms in agony. Thick limbs were rent from writhing, groaning bodies, and cast furiously down. Some veteran giants, weakened by the natural decay of years, mingled their death-cry with the hoarse bellow of the destroying wind and fell crashing and quivering to the earth. Then came rain, and a cessation of the demoniac fury.

It was a night which the wood-dwellers never forgot. Birds were killed by the dozens, and the lives of many of the four-footed kind were given up as well. The secret trails were obliterated and blocked, and the runways of the weasel and the rabbit became a trackless wilderness.

Long before the sun arose the next morning, an old raccoon cautiously poked his black nose out of a hole in a maple tree, near the first fork. This raccoon was the oldest and the wiliest of the wood-folk that lived in the forest. An old boar coon was he, and many years had passed over his wise little head. Once before, in his youth, such a storm as this had swept over the forest. His mother had him out teaching him how to stalk ground sparrows, and the storm came so suddenly that they had no time to reach home, so had taken shelter under a shelving rock on the bluff by the river. He had weathered that storm successfully, and in later years had paid scant heed to nature’s bursts of anger. A raccoon, of all things, was surely smart enough to keep out of the way of a falling limb. The whiskers about the muzzle of the old coon were gray; his eyes were black and beady, and some wonderment was expressed in them as he rolled them around on the once familiar scene. He had not slept the night before, for his house had shook and creaked its warnings hour after hour, and the hungry voice of the wind had howled down at him from the hole above his head. Everything was changed outside. A neighbor tree lay prostrate at the foot of his own; a broken limb sagged at the side of his door, and everywhere was disorder and destruction. A trifle dazed by it all in spite of his superior wisdom, the old fellow slid back into his den and fell to crunching the bones of a chicken he had captured two nights before.

Though the storm had hopelessly tangled the secret ways which had been nosed out and trodden with so much care, and had been the death of many of their kind, yet it had brought its blessing, too, in that it had conquered for the people of the wild their enemy, the river. It was in this way.

At a certain point on the southern bank of the river an old elm tree grew, quite near the edge of the water. The bank had crumbled and the tree had leaned, until at length its top hung almost over the center of the stream. Nothing but its great roots twined about hidden rocks kept it from falling. Directly across from the elm, close to the shore on the other bank, an ancient sycamore had stood, leaning very slightly towards the river. Now when the storm came down from the north the sycamore’s roots gave way and it swayed and fell, its top, by some strange freak, lodging in the fork of the elm, and the force of its fall wedged it in firmly and snugly. And behold! here was a bridge for the feet of the wood-folk, and they could pass high and dry and laugh down at their baffled foe.

There was but one passageway for the many members of the many tribes, and naturally trouble arose sometimes, and there were nights when the river smiled placidly and opened its arms and waited. Sometimes one victim came; sometimes two, for the bridge became the scene of many a midnight tragedy and moonlighted fray, and in the end it was the river which was the victor, after all. It did not have to seek its prey. It simply waited, and took its tribute very much as of old, though in a different manner.

So the years went by. Mates were chosen; families were born; battles were fought. The strong devoured the weak, much as the human folks do in another way. The old raccoon still lived in his maple. Though others of his kind often harbored by threes, fours, or even sixes in a single tree, this aristocrat was not sociable, and preferred a hermit existence except once a year, when the sap of spring renewed his youth and sent him a-courting. Then a sleek, mild-eyed little mate would come and keep house for him until the children were old enough to hear a dog running half a mile away. Then quite abruptly, upon the return of mother and offspring some day, they would be met by a white-fanged visage and ordered to go elsewhere for a bed.

The forest was the abode of little people. Nothing larger than the raccoon found a home there. He was practically lord of the demesne, partly because of his age and sagacity, partly because of his might as a warrior. His record was three dogs whipped in single fight. He did not fear any dog so long as the men did not come poking around with their blinding lanterns and their guns. And it might be told, further, that when he set foot upon one end of the tree-bridge, he usually went to the other end.

In a field at the edge of the smaller forest was a negro cabin, where lived the black people with a horde of tattered children and two dogs. One was a shepherd; gentle, calm-eyed, intelligent. The other was a coon-dog; little, muscular, aggressive. A coon-dog is as distinctive a breed as is the collie or the spaniel. It is true he is an ignoble mixture of many, but it takes the certain and correct blending of various strains to make a coon-dog. He must have the nose of a pointer, the speed of a greyhound, the strength of a mastiff, and the stubbornness of a bull-dog. The model coon-dog is low, short, and heavy-set; his back and sides are nearly black, and his throat, belly, and feet are a reddish brown. Such was the dog which hung about the negro cabin till hunger sent him nosing along the floor of the forest. He had trailed coons long enough to know that they never touch earth in the day, and that the scent is freshest in the early part of the night, just after a light rain. So that night in spring when the soft, balsamic odors rose strata above strata, the coon-dog, impelled by the pain in his stomach, which was like a hundred tearing claws, set off at a smart trot through the sassafras bushes and the dewberry vines, heading for the smaller forest on the southern side of the river. His keen nostrils revealed a trail before he had gone a dozen yards in the wood, and with a low whine he followed it with amazing swiftness and accuracy. In and out it led, and the smell which the traitor feet had left grew stronger. Almost the dog gave tongue, so close he knew his quarry must be, when he stopped, confused, with his fore feet resting on the slanting trunk of a tree. He had come to the bridge of the forest-people, and the hot trail led up the incline before him. Off in the shadows near to one side something called—a sharp, barking cry. The dog cocked his ears and jerked his head around, but quickly decided that he had nothing to do with whatever it was that had temporarily engaged his attention, and again turned to the bridge, restless and eager. He had never attempted its passage, but its surface was broad and the bark rough, and hunger is a stern master. Quickly he squatted and leaped, thrust out his claws so that they caught and held, and in another moment he was creeping warily up the tree with the scent still warm beneath his guiding nostrils.

But other ears had heard that low mating call which the dog had ignored. The old boar coon of the maple tree, driven by loneliness and the magic of the season, was ambling in his humpbacked, awkward way along a narrow path curving down the bluff on the northern side of the river, bent on securing a bride for perhaps the twentieth time. He stopped and listened alertly at the Circe-sound, then moved swiftly towards the tree-bridge to respond in person. With remarkable agility for his years he gained a footing on the sycamore trunk, showing his teeth with a low growl of displeasure as the strong odor of opossum told him that one had just passed that way. A few feet further on his ears detected a scratching sound on the other end of the bridge. Some impudent cousin had dared to risk his anger—for was not this his bridge when he chose to set his royal foot upon it? He would make him give way and retreat, or cast him off, for he had done the like before. On up the ghostly white trunk of the fallen sycamore he glided, his fur rising in wrath as the scratching beyond grew louder and louder and came closer and closer. Gaining the apex of the bridge first, the raccoon thrust his black muzzle over the fork where the two trees touched, and not five feet away came the coon-dog, timorously but steadily. The ring-tailed warrior did not attempt to choke the fierce snarl which rasped between his white fangs. What was this upon his bridge! A four-footed thing which disgraced his shape by living with and serving the human-people—a dog!

The intruder stopped, sank on his belly, and gave back a savage growl—his gage of battle. Below the river dimpled in the starlight and murmured joyfully along the shores. Carefully the dog inched forward, his mouth open, his upper lip curled back. The coon waited, his beady eyes watching the play of every muscle in the form of his antagonist, and the curving claws on all four feet shot out to their fullest length. These were his main defence; his teeth were secondary. Both animals were at a disadvantage. The dog was out of his element, and his footing was very precarious. On the other hand the coon, while perfectly at home, never waged his battles in a tree. When he fought it was lying flat on his back on the ground. But the guile of many years was in his sly old brain, and where the trees locked was a little hollow safely bulwarked by the peculiar way in which the branches had entwined. As the dog leaped at his throat he threw himself on his back and struck out with all four feet at once. But the starved alien knew his business well. Ignoring the stinging rents which the hind claws made, he bore the fore legs down with the force of his fall, and his jaws gained the coveted hold without which no coon can be conquered. But that was not all the battle. Fiercely the old boar wrestled, ripping the body of his foe with lightning-like movements of his strong legs, gnashing his teeth in a vain effort to use them, and struggling for breath. The dog bore his awful punishment like a martyr, lying as closely as he could so as to impede the other’s movements, but never uttering a cry of pain and wrenching and tugging at the furry throat over which his jaws had closed. In the intensity of their joint efforts neither had a thought of caution. Presently the raccoon was out of the hollow where he had lain to receive the attack; there was a slip, a scuffle, and through twenty feet of space two writhing bodies, locked so closely as to seem almost one, fell with a loud splash into the liquid depths below. And so the river received them both, and a whirlpool sucked them down.

Now the bark on the tree-bridge is almost worn away from the constant passing of little feet, which before had been afraid.