“Lana, look! Geno’s getting his crown!”
“I hope it fits his majesty!” said Boso sourly.
Geno said nothing. He was scanning Boso’s head with great anxiety to discover if, perhaps, Boso had more apparent bumps than he. But Boso’s head appeared quite smooth and natural.
“Maybe you’d better grow up before you say anything,” he said.
“It’s normal for you to have a swelled head,” Boso replied.
“Please, Boso and Geno!” Gurri said.
Lana kept silent. Geno and Boso looked at each other with expressions which they imagined to be of the greatest ferocity. At last Lana laughed. “You don’t know how funny you look, Geno,” she said.
“Funny!” Geno rasped.
“Making faces like that, I mean.”
“Oh, so I’m making faces, am I! Well, let me tell you, you have the funniest face I ever saw . . . except Boso’s,” Geno added as an afterthought.
Lana gasped. “Why, you rude boy . . . !”
Rolla said, “Children, please!” and looked beseechingly at Faline.
Faline, however, did not intervene. Ever since Boso had suggested that it was cruel of her to drive Rolla away when she was hurt instead of sending a message to her children, she had suspected that she might not be altogether in the right; and this made her angrier than ever. She therefore preserved a sullen silence.
Boso said savagely, “They put on airs because they think Bambi will protect them.”
“You will not mention your leader’s name like that,” Faline said sternly.
Rolla turned to face her one-time friend. “Faline,” she said quietly, “it seems to me that Boso said nothing improper about Bambi. He said that you would not behave as you do if it were not for Bambi’s position. And I’m afraid he’s right. I’ll be glad to be judged by Bambi at any time.”
“Children,” Faline commanded stiffly, “I see we’ve made a mistake in associating with these people. Let us go. There’s no need to spoil our beautiful day.”
With that she turned and galloped off. Shortly Geno and, more slowly, Gurri followed her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE SUCCEEDING DAY DAWNED bright and fine, Faline and her children returned to the meadow. No one else was there. Rolla, Lana and Boso did not appear.
To Gurri the place seemed particularly empty; emptier, somehow, in the flooding sunshine than it would have been on a day of gloom.
Pricked still by a conscience that she tried to stifle, Faline asked her daughter what bothered her.
“Nothing,” Gurri replied. “What should be bothering me?”
“I can see you’re not happy,” Faline insisted.
Gurri did not wish to answer, but she could not help it.
“I’m sorry about Aunt Rolla and the children,” she admitted. “I feel that we haven’t been fair to them.”
“That’s a very disloyal way to talk,” Faline replied with annoyance in her voice.
“I’m sorry, Mother, but that’s how I feel. I don’t like to lose such old friends without a good reason.”
“A good reason!” Faline trembled with anger. “You don’t call it a good reason to . . .”
Gurri interrupted her.
“Very well, Mother, I’m sorry. Let me say simply that I’m sorry to lose good friends for any reason.”
“Friends are easy to find,” Faline snapped untruthfully.
She had hardly spoken when Geno noticed two young roe-bucks entering the meadow.
“Look,” he said. “Strangers.”
Faline followed the direction of his glance.
“Perhaps here are some new friends,” she suggested.
Geno hurried to meet them.
“Hello!” he said.
The new arrivals regarded him rather sheepishly, but they finally greeted him.
“What are your names?” asked Geno.
“This is Nello,” one of them replied, “and I am Membo.”
He spoke with a sort of nervous desperation. The one named Nello was more grave.
“I am Geno, the son of Bambi,” Geno told them, “and this is my sister, Gurri.”
“Greetings, Gurri,” the young bucks said. “We have heard of both of you.”
“You have?” Geno exclaimed.
“Naturally we know of the son of Bambi,” Nello said soberly, “and also of the daughter of Faline.”
“What beautiful manners you have,” remarked Gurri frankly.
The young bucks said nothing. Geno, looking at them with interest, noticed the bumps on their heads that foretold their maturity to come. He thought, “My head looks like that.”
Gurri said, “What are you doing here? We have never seen you before.”
“We came because we were unhappy,” Membo said.
Gurri could not help noticing that as he stood, with his weight lightly placed on one hind leg, he trembled violently.
“You seem very nervous, Membo,” she said.
He had difficulty in answering her. “I—I’m s-sorry,” he stammered.
“You must excuse him,” Nello hurried to say. “He had a very bad experience during the terror when He came to kill.”
“What was it?” Geno asked eagerly.
“Our mother was killed,” Nello said reluctantly.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Gurri. “Is that why you are alone?”
“Yes,” replied Membo simply.
“Then you must meet our mother,” decided Gurri. She called Faline and introduced them to her. Faline was very gracious.
“You must play with Gurri and Geno,” she said. “It doesn’t do to mope, even after such a sad thing as that.”
“Th-thank you!” said Membo.
Faline seemed to be lost in thought.
“I wonder,” she said at last, “I wonder if you would like to stay with us.”
“Stay with you?” said Membo wonderingly.
Faline felt that if she was very kind to these two orphans she would not have to reproach herself any longer for her injustice to Rolla.
“Yes,” she replied. “I’ve often thought that when Geno began to grow up it would be nice for him to have male companions of his own age.”
“You mean—stay with you forever?” Even the restrained Nello showed excitement.
“Oh, Madame Faline!” cried Membo.
“You must call me Mother if you decide to stay.”
The brothers were deeply moved. They stammered their incoherent thanks, but Faline shrugged them away.
“Now you will have good friends,” she said to Gurri.
“Better than friends!” Geno exclaimed excitedly.
“You are all t-too kind!” said Membo.
“Let’s play!” Geno suggested.
The others agreed thankfully.
From then on, Geno was a leader to them. They felt that upon him descended the splendid mantle of Bambi, and while they were not subservient, they made him understand that they appreciated this distinction. Even though there was no difference in their ages, they treated him as an elder brother.
In the interest and pleasure of this new relationship, even Gurri hardly spared a thought for Lana and Boso. The two families seldom encountered each other; and when they did they behaved like strangers.
The brothers repeated again and again how happy they were.
“It makes us realize how incomplete life was for us before we were lucky enough to meet you,” they told Faline.
As for Faline, if there had ever been any selfish motive behind her adoption of the two young deer, it quickly passed. She came to be almost as fond of these newcomers to her family circle as she was of her own two children and tried at all times to show her equal affection for them.
The days passed happily. During their play, Membo surpassed them all in speed. When he ran, no one else could keep up with him; not even Geno who had hitherto been counted the fastest of the younger deer in the forest.
One day, when the five of them returne
d to their sleeping place, Gurri spoke of this to Nello.
“He has very strong hind legs,” Nello said, “and, of course, his nervousness makes him faster.”
“I think he is getting less nervous,” Gurri remarked.
“I believe you are right, and that is to be expected under the circumstances.”
“There’s that squirrel,” Geno broke in, “and he seems to have found his stores.”
“I have found some stores,” the squirrel corrected him. “I don’t know whether they’re mine or not.”
“Squirrel,” Gurri said accusingly, “I’m afraid you’re a thief.”
The squirrel almost choked on the nut he was eating.
“Well, of all the impudence!” he gasped.
“If you’re taking someone else’s savings, you’re a thief,” stated Gurri firmly.
“What nonsense!” squeaked the squirrel, his tail a bushy exclamation point. “What utter nonsense!”
His cheeks were puffed out both with indignation and the nuts he had stuffed in his pouches.
“Well, what else can you call yourself?” demanded Gurri with mock severity.
The squirrel’s nose trembled. “I believe in the brotherhood of squirrels,” he said loftily.
“Perhaps you should explain the brotherhood which entitles you to gobble up someone else’s property,” persisted Gurri.
“There is no such thing as property,” the squirrel announced grandly. “Everything belongs to everybody.”
“You’re just a cuckoo with fur,” Gurri said impudently.
“Why, really, you get worse every minute!” spluttered the squirrel. “Let me tell you, young lady, I’m old enough to be your father, even if I’m not big enough, and that entitles me to a certain amount of respect. All the squirrels work hard when fall comes, gathering nuts and hiding them and forgetting where they put them.”
“I told you you should learn to remember.”
“Fiddlesticks! If you ask me, there’s too much remembering going on. Suppose I did remember where I hid the nuts I gathered. If I saw someone else helping himself, I’d be angry and want to fight. What good would that do?”
Gurri was unable to find an answer to this argument, so the squirrel went on thoughtfully:
“Moreover, some other squirrel might have gathered better nuts than I had, and so I’d rather find his anyway.”
“They might be worse, too,” suggested Geno.
“That’s not the way to look at it,” declared the squirrel obstinately. “If you go around thinking you’re being cheated, life becomes very unpleasant.”
“That’s true enough,” admitted Gurri.
“Of course it’s true. You’re not going to call me a liar, too, I hope.”
“But suppose,” Nello interposed, “that some squirrel didn’t gather any nuts at all? Would you be willing to let him steal the fruits of your labor?”
“You confuse the issue,” announced the squirrel. “Nuts aren’t fruit and never will be. The suggestion isn’t true anyway. All squirrels gather nuts in autumn.”
“But just suppose one didn’t,” insisted Nello.
“In that case,” the squirrel said, “he’d be welcome to eat his fill. It would cost more time and effort to see that everybody gathered nuts than it would to support a lazy one like that.”
Very calmly he cracked another nut. The roe-deer stretched themselves for sleep. The squirrel’s mind was as active as his muscles. They needed time to think up proper answers to refute him.
Chapter Twenty-Six
SPRING HAD REALLY COME TO the forest. The chestnuts were laden with sticky buds. The oak wore a lacy coat of green. The forest paths, the open glades and the meadow were misted with young grass and darkly patched with purple violets.
Already the swallow was darting ceaselessly around. The woodpecker’s drill drummed against the trees. An early butterfly or two drifted on the wind, and bees went once more about their business.
The scent of growth, the sound of busy life were in the air. The breeze that blew was soft. It whispered to the daffodils who nodded back. Every day the concert of the birds swelled sweetly.
Gurri remembered the lark and spoke of it, of its heartwarming song, its modest mien and circumstances.
Membo said eagerly, “I should like to hear it sing.”
Gurri shook her head. “It lives in the fields where He is always present. It’s a dangerous song for us to hear.”
The roe-deer lost their winter coats and put on brilliant summer red. Geno’s crown grew in two horns each the size and thickness of a finger. These horns still kept a mosslike covering, but he was inordinately proud of them, looking at himself constantly in the mirror of the pool to discover if they had grown.
Membo and Nello also had their budding crowns, but theirs were not so far advanced as Geno’s. This gave them additional cause to regard him as their chief.
The sapling took the tall oak’s advice and grew with new vigor. Little by little it filled the space left it by the fallen branch. Silently but mightily it strove to achieve its purpose before the oak’s leaves should become thick enough to reduce the rays of light that reached it.
The roe-deer, on the way to their meadow, ate the lower buds from tree and bush, rejoicing in their juiciness. Then they would run across the meadow, dodging and chasing one another, twisting, turning, bucking, stopping abruptly on stiffened legs, while the grass hissed silkily behind them.
Faline watched them fondly. All of them were handsome, agile, gay. Membo was much less nervous. Geno grew daily more like his father—in looks and in character.
Bambi did not visit them. His crown was slow in coming. He thought of them often, especially of Geno; but without his crown he felt he could not leave his retreat.
Most of the bucks roamed the forest paths again, their antlers fully grown, but still shrouded in their mossy covers. Soon they would strip these coverings away, leaving the naked points bright and shining.
The Kings, too, began to appear, still to the great dismay of Faline, although she made a brave effort to control her nervousness. She even spent time trying to persuade Membo and Nello of the beauty of the Kings and of their close relationship to the roe-deer. Nello and Membo were not so easily impressed with the soundness of these arguments, however, and their loud “ba-ohs” whenever the Kings appeared rang throughout the forest.
Gurri told her adopted brothers of the encounter she had witnessed between the rival Kings in the clearing.
“My goodness!” Membo exclaimed. “I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with creatures who are as fierce as that!”
“But later in the year they were very gentle,” Gurri mused.
“I wonder why,” said Geno.
Finally Bambi came to see them.
His antlers had grown to their full dimensions. He had rubbed the covering skin from them on the stout trees of the forest and now, stained by the sap of the trees he had injured in stripping them, they gleamed bright as dark ivory.
Membo and Nello were awed at his appearance, but they conducted themselves well, standing straight and still, awaiting his notice. He was in an affable mood, glad to be united with his family again, glad that he no longer had to lurk hidden from his kind in the recesses of his cave.
“Well,” he said, after greeting his mate and children, “whom have we here?”
“This is Membo and this Nello,” Faline informed him.
He saluted them courteously.
“They are my new children,” Faline said.
“So-ho!” Bambi fixed them with his dark and brilliant eyes. “Your new children, are they! Well, this is rather a surprise.”
Membo and Nello shifted uneasily.
“Who may your father be?” Bambi inquired.
“He’s dead, sir,” they replied. “He was slain by the thunder-stick.”
“I have adopted them,” Faline went on. “They have neither father nor mother.”
“I see. Well, let me lo
ok at them.”
Membo and Nello walked sheepishly before him.
“Nice lads,” Bambi said at last. “They move well. They hold their heads high. How do they get on with our friends? With Lana and Boso, for instance?”
Silence fell upon them all. None of them knew how to answer.
“Well?” Bambi urged impatiently. “Are you all dumb?”
“We don’t see them any more,” Geno said at last.
“You don’t see them! And why not?”
Faline told of Rolla’s escape from the wolf-dog and Geno’s subsequent peril.
Bambi listened gravely.
“And now,” he summed up when she had finished, “Boso in particular feels that you have used his mother ill.”
“Yes,” Faline agreed. “Moreover, he accused me of shielding myself behind you, of taking advantage of your position to make life miserable for Rolla.”
“He shouldn’t have said that even if he believed it,” Bambi decided. He thought for a while. “How is Rolla’s leg?”
“I think it’s all right. She limps only slightly.”
“I see.”
Again there was silence.
All of them felt uneasy, and when Bambi spoke again, it was almost as if they were startled by some stranger.
“Gurri,” Bambi said, “will you allow me to speak with your mother and Geno alone for a moment?”
Gurri immediately led Membo and Nello away.
“Faline,” Bambi continued, “Rolla undertook to be judged by me. This, then, I have to say: First, I think you have behaved wrongly. You can blame no one for the blindness of despair. You should try to patch up this difference with Rolla without delay. Second, it would have been more admirable for Geno to understand and make allowances for Boso. We are, rightly or wrongly, the first family among the roe-deer. If we cannot understand and forgive, we are not worthy of our station.”
Faline hung her head. Bambi’s voice put into clear words what her conscience had for a long time been whispering to her. She felt ashamed.
Geno said, “But, Father . . .”
“I see no necessity for argument, son. You are getting your crown. If you cannot think and act like a grownup, you do not deserve it.”