“What is it, Mother?”
“I’m afraid something terrible has happened to your Aunt Rolla.”
“Aunt Rolla!”
They listened.
“That’s not Aunt Rolla’s voice,” said Geno.
Bambi plunged through a privet hedge into a clearing. It was Rolla lying on her side.
“Rolla,” Faline cried, “what is it?”
Rolla’s voice was weak. “There’s something wrong with my hind leg.”
“Not the thunder-stick!” Faline’s voice shook with horror.
“I’m afraid so.”
Bambi examined the leg.
“It’s not so bad,” he exclaimed with relief. “How did it happen? Didn’t you do what I told you?”
“Oh, yes, we went to the edge of the forest just as you said, but some of the hunters left the main body and came where we were hiding. They carried a thing in their front paws, and every now and then they lifted it to their mouths.”
“That’s how they drink,” said Bambi.
“Well, when they came where we were, we had to run. I sent the children one way while I went another. They came after me, of course, but I thought I’d get away. You remember, Faline, we were saying that we had got through many winters successfully. . . . Anyhow, I thought I’d got rid of them again. I was just turning into cover when the thunder-stick struck me. It knocked me right off my feet, but I managed to get up and drag myself as far as here.”
“Then why don’t you go on?” Geno asked.
“I can’t move it now. My leg is like a stick.”
“Did the children behave well?”
“Oh, yes, Faline, very well.”
“Do you . . .” Faline hesitated . . . “do you suppose they’re safe?”
“That is the only thing that worries me.” Rolla’s eyes showed how deep was her worry. “I must get up and look for them.”
She struggled, but without success.
“I think you had better lie still,” Bambi said. “You’re pretty well covered here, and only rest will cure your leg.”
“But the children! What about the children?”
“We’ll find them,” Faline assured her, “and send them to you.”
“Oh, if you only would!”
“Of course we will!” Gurri sniffed the air as though she expected to distinguish them at once.
“Where were you to meet them?” Bambi asked.
“At the feeding-place that the brown He made if I was delayed and if it was safe.”
“Then we’ll go there at once,” Faline assured her.
“Then hurry,” Rolla urged. “Please hurry!”
Quickly they left.
“Do you think she’s all right, Bambi?” Faline asked anxiously.
“Of course she is. She may limp a little. That’s all.”
“I’m so glad,” sighed Gurri.
They ran through the forest trying not to notice the havoc all around them. Yet their fear of Him was made stronger by what they saw. It seemed so utterly senseless, such wholesale killing.
Geno remembered what the hare had said of the cat.
“The cat kills because he has a liking for it.”
That, the hare said, made the cat worse than the fox. If that was so, He was a demon. He did not even worry what He killed or wounded.
They passed the fox lying rigid in the path. He was dead, his face contorted in a fierce grimace of hate. From his many wounds it was clear that he had died a terrible death.
They hurried on.
So it always was. The greater killed the less; the strong attacked the weak.
Lana and Boso were feeding eagerly at the racks where the brown He had left the clover.
“Boso!” Gurri cried.
Boso looked over his shoulder, his jaws moving regularly.
“Well?” he asked indistinctly.
“Your mother!” Gurri cried.
Boso and Lana noticed Bambi. They both stopped eating.
“Mother!” Lana echoed.
Boso sprang forward. “Nothing has happened to her?”
“I’m afraid she’s wounded,” Bambi said to them gravely.
Lana trembled. “Not . . . ?”
Bambi quickly reassured them. “No, nothing serious, I’m glad to say. But she will have to stay quietly where she is and you’ll have to do everything you can for her.”
“Oh, we will! We will!” Lana promised.
Boso’s muscles trembled with the need for action. “Where is she?” he demanded.
Briefly Gurri told him. The description was hardly complete before they were away, the snow spurting from their flashing hoofs.
“Well,” Bambi sighed, “now you can eat.”
“But what about the Kings?”
“Still the Kings, eh, Faline? Well, there’s no need for concern. They’ll be far away. Always when the great killing starts they leave for new pastures. They won’t return for several days. Until then, the forest is yours.”
Geno and Gurri were already feeding.
“You don’t know how good it tastes,” Geno mumbled; but Gurri stopped.
“How can we enjoy our food knowing what has happened today,” she cried.
Bambi said, “Those who live must eat. That is the law.”
Reassured as to the Kings, Faline joined Geno at the fragrant clover.
“Your father is right, Gurri,” she said. “How can we be sure this is the end? It is our duty to conserve our strength.”
Gurri rejoined them. The food was good after their exhausting experiences. They ate so heartily they didn’t notice that Bambi had left them again. He had work to do.
Chapter Nineteen
THEN, ONE DAY BEFORE THE wind, comes snow. . . .”
Geno remembered how that sentence had always figured in his mother’s stories of her brother Gobo.
It seemed that the snow which had already fallen was a mere trifle, a mere trickle compared with the real snowfall that came now.
Snow fell on snow.
He thought, too, that he had experienced the winter’s wind.
But he had not.
The wind blew now in irresistible gales.
The snow ceased. The wind kept blowing. Great banks and drifts gathered in the forest. The trees were clothed in icicles.
The shriek of the wind, as it swept down from the hills, was like the howling of an animal in pain. Overnight the pool froze until it resembled solid rock.
The glitter of ice on the snow hurt his eyes. When the sun shone rarely, the ice glowed like fire. When the skies were gray, it gleamed starkly.
Of His kind, only the brown He visited the forest. He came with arms laden with food. Sometimes Hector was at His heels, stumbling through drifts, his shaggy coat frozen into solid spikes.
It was the time that He has made of peace for game: the closed season.
The animals sensed the existence of this armistice. Confidently the roe-deer roamed in search of food. Even during daylight they were to be seen moving quietly through the forest lanes.
Hares left their thickets and scurried here and there in search of food. Pheasants flew freely, gathering in the feeding-place, chuckling one to the other. Robins and sparrows tangled in their legs, greedily filling their crops with the abundant grain.
Only the Kings were shy. Denuded of their antlers, they kept themselves in privacy, not caring to be seen shorn of the symbol of their majesty.
At nightfall they roamed singly or in groups of two or three, stag with stag, female with female, all rivalries forgotten.
Sometimes a squirrel, awakened from his winter sleep, peered uncertainly at the frozen world before he retired to slumber on, forgetting his winter-shrunken belly in a dream of autumn fullness.
This was a time of hushed and simple peace, in which the only enemies were wind and snow and ice.
Like the Kings, Bambi had lost his crown. The great antlers that were his pride had fallen from him. Faline, Geno and Gurri did not see him.
Apart from this loss, they did not fare so badly. True, they missed the sweet young grass that sunshine brought. Never were their appetites entirely satisfied. Yet His store was free to them, and since the Kings had gone into retirement, they had no reason to be nervous of them.
Faline was congratulating herself upon this condition of affairs when a worried magpie spoke with her.
“There’s something wrong in this wood,” the magpie said.
The hare backed away from nibbling at the scraps of fodder that fell on the ground. His paw had healed marvelously. Only when the air was damply cold did he feel any ill effects from it.
“Something wrong?” he queried, taking up his old-time pose of watchful fear.
“What can be wrong?” Faline asked.
The magpie shivered inside her feathers. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ll bet my next year’s eggs there’ll turn out to be something.”
A near-by robin jeered: “The magpie always thinks she has second sight!”
The magpie drew her head deep into a ruff of feathers. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she snapped.
The time was getting on toward evening. Purple shadows crept across the snow. The screech-owl sailed silently to a perch upon the sleeping oak. He sat there blown up like a puffball, his big eyes gleaming.
“Why, screech-owl,” Geno said, “we haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“No,” the screech-owl said grandly, “I’ve been wintering abroad.”
“Where’s that?” Gurri asked.
The screech-owl didn’t answer her.
“What’s new?” he inquired.
The robin said maliciously: “If you want to know where the screech-owl goes, there’s a broken-down barn not far from here. . . .”
The hare cut in, “The magpie suspects something is wrong in the forest.”
The screech-owl looked thoughtful. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew it!”
“Knew what?” asked Geno.
“When I saw that dog.”
“Not His dog?” queried Gurri.
“Good heavens, no,” the screech-owl said. “Hector’s all right. This is another sort of dog entirely. Have any of you ever heard of a wolf?”
“Wolf!” whispered the hare. “What is it, a sort of fox?”
“Well, you might say so, in a way. And then again you might not. I suppose you’ve never heard of the nth power?”
“I never have,” said Gurri.
“Nor I,” admitted Geno.
The robin snickered.
“It’s a great pity you never studied algebra,” the screech-owl sighed. “It would have been very simple to describe the wolf as a fox to the nth power.”
He clucked his tongue regretfully. The robin said:
“I suppose it would be very difficult to tell us if the wolf is a bird, or an animal, or maybe even a fish. I suppose it would be impossible to say whether it has four legs or two. Whether it runs along the ground or flies through the air. Whether . . .”
“Empty vessels make the most sound,” the screech-owl struck in.
“What’s a vessel?” Geno asked; but again the screech-owl disdained to answer.
The magpie chattered, “I feel it coming all over me. This wolf is a bad thing. I get a message . . .” She hopped violently along the rack on which she perched.
The hare said irritably, “You’re driving me quite wild, all of you. I swear I never heard so much mystery in all my life. The screech-owl spoke of a dog—bless my paws and whiskers and deliver me from evil!—then he spoke of a wolf, then of the fox, then of the enth, whatever that is, and now the magpie gets a message . . . !”
The succeeding days things did begin to happen in the forest. Again an air of gloom and fear weighed down its inhabitants.
It all began, although none of them knew it, with the illness of the mayor of a neighboring village. The mayor had a great dog named Nero. This dog was huge and gray with a black muzzle and a ruff of fur around his neck. His ancestry was unknown, but the screech-owl was quite right when he guessed his resemblance to a wolf. For not far back in Nero’s family-tree there had been wolves, those slinking, silent hunters who are the terror of the regions where they dwell.
Nero had been a friendly, blundering brute until his master’s illness robbed him of his usual exercise. Cursed with boredom, Nero began to exercise himself.
Longer and longer became his expeditions in the snow, and the farther away from home and kennel he strayed, the less he looked like a dog.
One day he adventured into the forest. He smelled the life that went on freely there. He came across a carcass half picked by crows, the corpse of some poor creature starved and vanquished by the winter. His bark died in his throat. He threw up his head and howled.
Nero had reverted to his ancestors.
He had become a wolf.
Chapter Twenty
TWO DAYS LATER NERO KILLED his first roe-deer. The killing occurred at dusk. The victim was a doe.
Made bold by the truce that reigned in the woods, she was seeking a fragment of fresh vegetation that might not be completely covered by snow.
The hackles on Nero’s neck rose when he saw her. The growl died in his throat. He stalked her mercilessly, in perfect silence.
After the kill, the howl that grew and swelled in his great throat filled the forest with the threat of doom.
Every living creature that heard it trembled.
Nero attacked the dead doe savagely. Then, satisfied, he lay panting in the snow to rest.
The twilight deepened.
Suddenly a quiver ran from the great dog’s nose to the last hair of his pluming tail. He began to hear now the call of home. Before him lay the mangled body of his prey. The shudder shook him again. Remorse flattened his ears. His tail sank between his legs.
Silently, secretly, oppressed by a sure sense of guilt, he slunk from the shadows of the trees.
That night his master called him to the bedside. Nero went crouching, his belly close to the floor. Of one thing he was absolutely certain: that his master knew everything.
But the sick man did not know of Nero’s misdeeds.
“What is it, old fellow?” he inquired, scratching the spot behind the velvet ears. “What’s got into you?” Then he called to his wife, “Has this dog been into any mischief?”
Nero cringed; but the master’s wife spoke up for him.
“He’s been out most of the day,” she said, “moping around.”
The master cradled Nero’s muzzle in his hand.
“Well,” he chuckled, “you can’t tell me animals don’t know what’s going on! I’m not so sick as that, old fellow. I’ll be up and around before you know it.”
The master spoke without knowledge. He could not get up to take Nero on his customary walks. Again the dog was left to his own devices.
Another doe died.
The forest rang again with the death howl.
The third time the wolf-dog felt the ancient call, Rolla was feeding sparsely on a bed of moss sheltered by the gigantic trunk of a fallen elm. Her leg had mended reasonably well. If she did not exert it beyond a certain point, it did not bother her. She moved easily, chipping away with one forehoof at the lacy scale of ice that grew above the moss. Nero moved silently into position behind her.
Lana and Boso were wandering close at hand, seeking some morsel of food. It was Boso who glanced up and saw that great, gray shadow slinking through the underbrush.
“Mother,” he cried in panic. “Run, Mother!”
Rolla threw up her head exactly as the wolf-dog sprang. She leaped forward in the nick of time.
Her eyes wide with fright, Rolla threw herself forward with a tremendous burst of speed. Hard on her heels came the wolf-dog.
The twisting chase was against Rolla from the start. Her first burst of speed was the reflex action of her kind. Soon the stiffness of her leg acted on her as a brake.
Boso and Lana made off at an angle. Th
e last Lana saw was her mother’s desperate attempt to shake the wolf-dog off by taking to the denser trees.
It was a foolish move. The heavy snow made the writhing turns impossible to take at speed. In a race of this kind Rolla’s game leg hampered her badly.
Fortunately the trees ended. Rolla bounded into a clearing which seemed vaguely familiar to her, even in her state of terror. But the wolf-dog was still gaining slowly.
Rolla realized that the end had come. She determined on a last, desperate maneuver. She wheeled quickly as a spinning leaf. The momentum of the wolf-dog carried him hurtling onward. Rolla thrust out her down-stretched head. It caught Nero behind the shoulder. His great speed aided her. He staggered, his legs gave way, he fell.
Quick as a flash Rolla wheeled sharply to the left to cover. She crashed through a growth of privet. Suddenly she understood why the clearing was so strangely familiar. Faline, Geno and Gurri cowered silently before her.
Nero recovered quickly. He rose up smarting with added rage. The close-set privet still quivered from the passage of the roe-deer. With an enormous leap the wolf-dog cleared it. In place of one victim, four shivered before his bloodshot eyes.
In that moment Geno saved Rolla.
Quick as a flash, urged on by the spur of fear, he ran.
The others, not so quick to think perhaps, or nerveless from their panic, did not move. The wolf-dog disregarded them. His reaction, quick as Geno’s, was to pursue. Brown streak drew gray fury like a magnet.
Blindly through the trees ran Geno. With great leaps, with spinning turns, doubling and dodging, straight as an arrow whenever it was possible, he tried to elude the wolf-dog. Now his speed, once matched against the birds, came into play. His belly whitened with the snow it scraped, so stretched to speed he was. His breath flew behind him like the spume from a waterfall, freezing in the icy air to tiny points of smoke; but the chase could not last.
Geno was young. The blood of Bambi did not course through muscles mature enough to carry out its urgings. Moreover, Geno, like all the forest creatures, was weak from the winter’s scarcity, while Nero had never gone hungry.
Geno’s legs grew heavy. His heart seemed to swell within him. His lungs labored.
The wolf-dog’s legs seemed strong as tough, resilient yew, his heart as firm as stone, his lungs as steady as live oak. As Geno weakened, he became more powerful. His breath coursed through his nostrils with the sound of a summer storm. The lather round his jaws was like the scum on standing water.