Above the afterglow gleamed a patch of beryl-green. Etched against the color was the faintest, finest, and newest of crescent moons. It seemed almost as if a puff of wind would blow it, like a cobweb, out of the sky. As the shifting tints deepened into the unvarying peacock-blue of a Northern night, the evening star flared like a lamp hung low in the west while the dark strode across the shadows of the forest, cobalt-blue against the drifted snow. As the winter stars flamed into the darkening sky, a tide of night-life flowed and throbbed under the silent trees. One by one the wild folk came forth, to live and love and die in this their day, even as we humans in ours.

Long after the twilight had dimmed into the jeweled darkness, opalescent with the changing colors of the Northern Lights, from the inner depths of the woods there came a threat to the life of nearly everyone of the forest folk. Yet it seemed but the mournful wail of a little child. Only to the moose, the blackbear and the wolverine was it other than the very voice of Death.

Fifty feet above the ground, from a blasted and hollow white pine, the plaintive sound again shuddered down the wind. From a hollow under an overhanging bough, a brownish-black animal moved slowly down the tree trunk, headfirst, which position marked him as a past-master among the tree folk. Only those climbers who are absolutely at home aloft go forward down a perpendicular tree trunk. As the beast came out of the shadow it resembled nothing so much as a big black cat, with a bushy tail and a round, grayish head. Because of this appearance the trappers had named it the blackcat. Others call it the fisher, although it never fishes, while to the Indians it is the pekan—the killer-in-the-dark. In spite of its rounded head and mild doggy face, the fisher belongs to those killers, the weasels. Next to the wolverine, he is the most powerful of his family, and he is far and away the most versatile.

To-night, on reaching the ground, the pekan followed one of the many runways he had discovered in the ten-mile beat that formed his hunting-ground. Like most of the weasels, he lived alone. His brief and dangerous family life lasted but a few days in the fall of every year. When his mate tried to kill him unawares, the blackcat knew that his honeymoon was over, and departed again to his hollow tree, many miles from Mrs. Blackcat. To-night, as he moved at a leisurely pace across the snow, in a series of easy bounds, his lithe black body looped itself along like a hunting snake, while his broad forehead gave him an innocent, open look. If in the tree he had resembled a cat, on the ground he looked more like a dog.

There was one animal who was not misled by the frank openness of the fisher’s face. That one was a hunting pine marten, who had just come across a red squirrel’s nest made of woven sticks thatched with leaves, and set in the fork of a moose-wood sapling some thirty feet from the ground. Cocking his head on one side, the marten regarded the swaying nest critically out of his bright black eyes. Convinced that it was occupied, with a dart he dashed up the slender trunk, which bent and shook under his rush.

But Chickaree had craftily chosen a tree that would bend under the lightest weight, and signal the approach of any unwelcome visitor. Before the marten had covered half the distance, four squirrels boiled out of the nest and, darting to the end of the farthest twigs, leaped to the nearest trees and scurried off into the darkness. The marten had poised himself for a spring when he saw the fisher gazing up at him. Straightway he forgot that there were squirrels in the world. With a tremendous spring, he landed on the trunk of a near-by hemlock and slipped around it like a shadow.

It was too late. With a couple of effortless bounds, the blackcat reached the trunk and slipped up it with the ease and speed of a blacksnake. The marten doubled and twisted and turned on his trail, and launched himself surely and swiftly from dizzy heights at arrowy speed. Yet, spring and dash as he would, there was always a pattering rush just behind him. Before the branches, which crackled and bent under the lithe golden-brown body, had stopped waving, they would crash and sag under the black weight of the fisher. With every easy bound the black came nearer to the gold. The pine marten is the swiftest tree-climber in the world, bar one. The blackcat is that one. As the two great weasels flashed through the trees, they seemed to be running tandem. Every twist and turn of the golden leader was followed automatically by the black wheeler, as if the two were connected by an invisible, but unbreakable bond.

Under the strain it was the nerves of the marten which gave way first. Not that he stopped, and cowered, helpless and shaking, like the rabbit-folk, nor ran frothing and amuck as do rat-kind when too hardly pressed. No weasel, while he lives, ever loses his head completely. Only now the marten ran more and more wildly, relying on straight speed and overlooking many a chance for a puzzling double, which would have given him a breathing-space. The imperturbable blackcat noted this, and began to take short cuts, which might have lost him his prey at the beginning of the hunt.

At last, the long and circling chase brought them both near an enormous white pine, which towered some forty feet away from the nearest tree. A bent spruce leaned out toward the lone pine. With a flying leap, the marten reached the spruce and flashed up the trunk, with never a look behind. His crafty pursuer saw his chance. Landing in a lower crotch of the spruce, with a flying take-off he launched himself outward and downward into mid-air, with every ounce and atom of spring that his steel-wire muscles held. It seemed impossible that anything without wings could cover the great gap between the two trees; but the blackcat knew to an inch what he could do, and almost to an inch did the distance tax his powers. In a wide parabola his black body whizzed through the air half a hundred feet above the ground, beginning as a round ball of fur, which stretched out until the fisher hung full length at the crest of his spring. If the tree had been a scant six inches farther away, the blackcat would never have made it. As it was, the huge clutching, horn-colored claws of his forepaws just caught, and held long enough to allow him to clamp down his hold with his hind paws.

The marten, who had started fifty feet ahead of the blackcat and had lost his distance by having to climb up, jump, and then climb down, passed along the trunk of the pine on his way to the ground just as the blackcat landed, his lead cut down to a scant ten feet. Without a pause, the pekan deliberately sprang out into the air and disappeared in a snow bank full forty feet below. Not many animals, even with a snow buffer, could stand a drop of that distance, but the great black weasel burst out of the snow, his steel-bound frame apparently unjarred, and stood at the foot of the tree.

As the marten reached the ground and saw what was awaiting him, his playful face seemed to turn into a mask of rage and despair. The round black eyes flamed red, the lips curved back from the sharp teeth in a horrible grin, and with a shrieking snarl and a lightning-like snap he tried for the favorite throat-hold of the weasel-folk. He was battling, however, with one quite as quick and immeasurably more powerful. With a little bob the blackcat slipped the lead of his adversary, and the flashing teeth of the marten closed only on the loose tough skin of the fisher’s shoulder. Before he could strike again the blackcat had the smaller animal clutched in its fierce claws, with no play to parry the counter-thrust of the black muzzle. In another second, the golden throat was dabbled with blood, which the fisher drank in great gulps like the weasel that he was. According to human notions, the dreadful and uncanny part of the contest was that, throughout the whole fight and the blood-stained finish, the blackcat’s face was the mild, reflective, round face of a gentle dog.

His first blood-thirst slaked, the fisher slung the limp body of the marten over his shoulder with a single flirt of his black head, and winding his way up the tree trunk, cached it for a time in a convenient crotch, feeling sure that no prowler would meddle with a prey which bore upon its pelt the scent and seal of the blackcat.

All through a two-day snowstorm, the fisher had kept to his tree, and his first kill that night only sharpened the blood-lust which swept raging through his tense body. Following the nearest runway, he came to the shore of a wide, rapid, little forest river, which at this point had a fall which insured current enough to keep it from freezing. Near its bank, the ranging blackcat came upon a fresh track in the soft snow. First there were five marks—one small, two large, and two small. The next track showed only four marks with the order reversed, the larger marks being in front, instead of behind the smaller. A little way farther on, and the smaller marks, instead of being side by side, showed one behind the other.

The blackcat read this snow-riddle at a glance. The five marks showed where a northern hare, or snowshoe rabbit, had been sitting; the fifth mark being where its bobbed tail had touched the snow. The larger marks had been the marks of the fur snowshoes, which it wears in winter on its big hopping hind-legs, and the smaller the mark of the little forepaws which, when he was sitting, naturally touched the ground in front of the hind paws. When the hare hopped the position was reversed, as the big hind paws, with every hop, struck the ground in front of the others, the hare traveling in the direction of the larger marks. The last tracks showed that the hare had either scented or seen its pursuer; for a hare’s eyes are so placed that it can see either forward or backward as it hops. As the little forelegs touched the ground, they were twisted one behind the other so as to secure the greatest leverage possible.

The blackcat settled doggedly down to the chase. Although far slower in a straightaway run than either the hare or the fox, it can and will run down either in a long chase, although it may take a day to do it. To-night the chase came to a sudden and unexpected end. The hare described a great circle nearly half a mile in diameter, at full speed, and then, whiter than the snow itself, squatted down to watch his back trail and determine whether his pursuer was really intending to follow him to a finish. Before long, the squatting hare saw a black form on the other side of the circle, with humped back looping its way along. At such a sight the smaller cottontail rabbit would have run a short distance, and would then have crouched in the snow, squealing in fear of its approaching death. The hare is made of sterner stuff. Moreover, this one was a patriarch fully seven years old—a great age for any hare to have accomplished in a world full of foes.

Wabasso, as Hiawatha named him, had not attained to this length of years without encountering blackcats. In some unknown way, probably by a happy accident, he had learned the one defense which a hare may interpose to the attack of a fisher, and live. Reaching full speed almost immediately, he cleared the snow in ten-foot bounds, four to the second, while the wide, hairy snowshoes, which nature fits to his white feet every winter, kept him from sinking much below the surface.

The keen eyes of the blackcat caught sight of the hare’s first bound in spite of his protective coloration, and he at once cut across the diameter of the circle. In spite of this short cut, the hare reached the bank of the open river many yards ahead. Well out in the midst of the rushing icy water lay a sand bar, now covered with snow. To the blackcat’s amazement and disgust, and contrary to every tradition of the chase, this unconventional hare plunged with a desperate bound fully ten feet out into the icy water. Wabasso was no swimmer, and had evidently elected to travel by water in the same way which he had found successful by land. Kicking mightily with his hind legs he hopped his way through the water, raising himself bodily at every kick, only to sink back until but the top of his white nose showed. Nevertheless, in a wonderfully short time he had won his way through the wan water, and lay panting and safe on the sand bank. If pursued, he could take to the water again and hop his way to either shore, along which he could run and take to the water whenever it was necessary.

To-night no such tactics were needed. The fisher, in spite of his name, hates water. He can swim, albeit slowly and clumsily, in the summer time. As for leaping into a raging torrent of ice-cold water—it was not to be considered. The blackcat raced up and down the bank furiously, and not until convinced that the rabbit was on that snow bank for the night, did he give up the hunt and go bounding along the bank of the river after other and easier prey. For the first time that night the mildness of his face was marred by a snarling curl of the lips, showing the full set of cruel fighting teeth with which every weasel, large or small, is equipped.

As the blackcat followed the line of the river, his sharp ear caught a steady and monotonous sound, like someone using a peculiarly dull saw. Around a bend the still water was frozen. Against the side of the bank an empty pork-keg had drifted down from some lumberman’s camp, and frozen into the ice. In front of the shattered keg crouched a large, blackish, hairy animal, gnawing as if paid by the hour. It was none other than the Canada porcupine—“Old Man Quillpig,” as he is called by the lumberjacks, who hate him because he gnaws to sawdust every scrap of wood that has ever touched salt. The porcupine saw the blackcat, but never ceased gnawing. Many and many an animal has thought that he could kill sluggish, stupid Quillpig. The wolf, the lynx, the panther, and the wildcat all have tried—and died. So to-night the porcupine kept on with his gnawing, under the star-shine, convinced that no animal that lived could solve his defense.

THE SAFE RABBIT