THE WARDEN MEETS AN INVADER
two squirrels
THE bond between them had kept Bannertail near his mate, and her warning kept him not too near. Yet it was his daily wont to come to the nesting tree and wait about, in case of anything, he knew not what. Thus it was that he heard a rustling in the near-by limbs one day, then caught a flash of red. A stranger approaching the tree of trees. All Bannertail's fighting blood was aroused. He leaped by well-known jumps, and coursed along well-known overways, till he was on the nesting tree, and undulated like a silvery shadow up the familiar trunk to find himself facing the very Redsquirrel whose range he once had entered and from whom he, Bannertail, had fled. But what a change of situation and of heart! Redhead scoffed and shook his flaming tail. He shrieked his "skit, skit" and stood prepared to fight. Did Bannertail hold back—he, Bannertail, that formerly had declined the combat with this very rogue? Not for an instant. There was new-engendered power within compelling him. He sprang on the Red bandit with all his vigor and drove his teeth in deep. The Redhead was a fighter, too. He clinched and bit. They clung, wrestled and stabbed, then, losing hold of the tree, went hurling to the earth below. In air they flung apart, but landing unhurt they clinched again on the ground; then the Redhead, bleeding from many little wounds, and over-matched, sought to escape, dodged this way and that, found refuge in a hole under a root; and Bannertail, breathless, with two or three slight stabs, swung slowly up the tree from which Silvergray had watched the fight of her mate.
There never yet was feminine heart that withheld its meed of worship from her fighting champion coming home victorious—which reason may not have entered into it at all. But this surely counted: The young ones' eyes were opened, they were no longer shapeless lumps of flesh. They were fuzzy little Squirrels. The time had come for the father to rejoin the brood.
With the come-together instinct that follows fight, he climbed to the very doorway; she met him there, whisker to whisker. She reached out and licked his wounded shoulder; when she reentered the den he came in too; nosing his brood to get their smell, just as a woman mother buries her nose in the creasy neck of her baby; he gently curled about them all, and the reunited family went sound asleep in their single double bed.
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