Bannertail had an ancient feud with the big Hen-hawk, whose stick nest was only a mile away, high in a rugged beech. There were a dozen farmyards that paid unwilling tribute to that Hawk, a hundred little meadows with their Mice and Meadowlarks, and one open stretch of marsh with its Muskrats and its Ducks. But the hardwood ridges, too, he counted on for dues. The Squirrels all were his, if only he could catch them. Many a game had he and Bannertail, a game of life and death.

They played again that morning in July. It was the same old swooping of the whistling pinions, and the grasping of strong yellow feet with hard black claws, grasping at nothing, where was a Graycoat half a heartbeat back, the same flaunting silver flag, the mocking "Grrrff, grrrff," the teasing and daring of the Hawk to make another swoop. Then did that big Hen-hawk what he should have done before. He filled the air with his war-cry, the long screaming "Yek-yek-yeeeek!" Coursing low and swift came another, his mate, the lady bandit, even fiercer than himself. Swift and with little noise she came. And when savage old Yellow-eyes swooped and Bannertail whisked around the tree, he whisked right into the clutches of the deadlier she-one. He barely escaped by a marvellous side rush around the trunk. Here again was Yellow-eyes, but right in his face Bannertail dashed his big silvery tail. The Hawk in his haste clutched at its nothingness, or he would have got the Graycoat. But luck was with Bannertail, and again he dodged around the trunk. Alas, the she Hawk was there, and struck; her mighty talons grazed his haunch, three rips they made in his glossy, supple coat. In an instant more the Redtail would have trussed him, for there was no cover, only the big, outstanding trunk, with the Hen-hawks above and below. A moment more and Bannertail's mate, helpless in the distant nest, would have seen him borne away. But as they closed, he leaped—leaped with all his strength, far from them into open air, and faster than they could fly in such a place, down, down, his silver plume in function just behind him, down a hundred feet to fall and land in a thicket of laurel, wounded and bleeding, but safe. He scrambled into a thicker maze, and gazed with new and tenser feelings at the baffled Hen-hawks, circling, screaming high above him.

Soon the bandits gave up. Clearly the Graycoat had won, and they flew to levy their robber-baron tribute on some others that they held to be their vassals.

Yes, Bannertail had won, by a narrow lead. He had taken a mighty hazard and had learned new wisdom—Never play the game with death till you have to, for if you win one hundred times and lose once you have lost your whole stake. On his haunch he carried, carries yet, the three long scars, where the fur is a little paler—the brand of the robber baroness, the slash of the claws that nearly got him.

Have you noted that in the high Alleghenies, where the Graycoats seldom see hunters of any kind, they scamper while the enemy is far away; but they peer from upper limbs and call out little challenges? In Jersey woods, where a wiser race has come, they never challenge a near foe; they make no bravado rushes. They signal if they see an enemy near, then hide away in perfect stillness till that enemy, be it Hawk in air or Hound on earth, is far away, or in some sort ceases to be a menace.

And menfolk hunters, who tell of their feats around the glowing stove in the winter-time, say there is a new race of Graycoats[227]
[228] come. Any gunner could kill one of the old sort, but it takes a great hunter such as themselves to get one of the new. This latter-day Graycoat has gotten much wisdom into his little brain, and one of the things he knows: "It never pays to gamble with destruction."

The new race, they say, began in a certain hickory wood. We know that wood, and we have seen a little how the wisdom came, and can easily reason why it spread.