Perri said thoughtfully, “You annoyed the screech-owl very much, Geno. That wasn’t wise. He’s really not a bad old bird, and as far as wisdom is concerned—well, we all think we’re pretty good at something.”
“At least, his being here is a sign it’s time to go to the meadow,” Gurri said relievedly. “If I don’t get a scamper pretty soon, I’ll break something.”
Geno looked around. The blackbird was still singing, the woodpecker hammered at his tree. Overhead a covey of ducks flew squawking toward the plain, and a solitary heron traced his majestic course.
“It’s too early,” he remonstrated. “You can’t go yet.” But a swishing sound among the bushes warned him that he was too late.
The blackbird and the woodpecker fell abruptly silent. A jay shrieked savagely, a magpie scolded. The hare, in the pathway, made a frantic leap for safety.
“Gurri!” Geno cried.
Like a bullet from a gun, Perri shot among the higher branches of the trees.
“Back, stupid girl! Back!” she chattered; but she was too late.
Swift as a red flash, the fox sprang from the path-side. Gurri heard a deep, menacing growl in his throat. His weight bore down on her. She felt the tearing pain of teeth high in her shoulder as she fell. He stood over her worrying for her throat. She heard, as through the mist of a dream, her brother’s cry of anguish and Perri’s high upbraiding. Then came a sound like a brief clap of thunder. The fox somersaulted as though he had been dealt a powerful blow and fell heavily on his side. She heard, before the last remnant of consciousness left her, a strange and puzzling sound like hoofs deliberately and slowly placed. Something bent over her, something whose very scent was terror.
“Poor little brute!” said a deep and roaring voice.
The forest gamekeeper bent over Gurri, with sun-browned face and hair and bright blue eyes. His shooting suit and shirt were also brown and blue, and his heavy boots and leather puttees were brown. He knelt over her, examining the wound.
“A torn muscle,” he said thoughtfully. “That’ll heal. We’ll take care of that. Lucky I happened to be around.”
He slung his gun over his left arm and took the wounded roe-deer in his arms. To all the watchers in the trees the sound of his steps was like the echo of doom.
Geno could stand it no longer. Almost frantic he rushed from the scene, his brain, numb with disaster, forgetting his father’s explicit command.
“Mother!” he shrieked. “Mother!”
He did not even see her when she came, but went on galloping aimlessly in widening circles, crying endlessly:
“Mother!”
“Geno!” she said sharply. “Here I am! What is it?”
Geno cried in a strangled voice: “Gurri! Gurri, she . . .”
Bambi sprang into sight.
“Father!”
“What is it, son?” The deep voice was imperative but kind.
“It’s Gurri . . . the fox . . . and He . . . !”
Haltingly he told his story. At the end of it all three of them stood silent, knowing that dumb agony only animals can know.
“Show me the place,” Bambi said at last.
Geno took them both to where the fox was lying. The strong smell of blood was dreadful in their nostrils.
“Sometimes He brings justice,” Bambi said.
“Do you suppose . . . ?” Faline said without much hope. She was thinking, they both realized, of Gobo. “Do you suppose . . . ?”
With his muzzle to the ground Bambi moved along the path and out into the dark meadow. That was the last they were to see of him for several days.
Chapter Seven
NEXT DAY THE FOREST CREATURES held their inquiry into the “Cause of Death.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” declared the magpie virtuously. “I screeched as loud as I could.”
“And I also!” snapped the jay, ready to fight. He had been accused of carelessness on a previous occasion and couldn’t forget it.
“Well,” faltered the hare, “there was little I could do. Dear me, I’m very small and I haven’t horns, or even very good teeth any more. But, oh dear me, I did warn her once. Beware of the fox, I said! Oh yes, indeed I swear I did!”
“There seems to be no doubt of it,” sighed Perri. “The affair was due to her own carelessness.”
Silently the screech-owl floated in and settled on a branch of the oak.
“Maybe it’ll teach her a lesson,” he said. “I always say the burned child dreads the fire, although it is also a fact that the cracked pitcher goes oftenest to the well, which makes the whole deduction rather bewildering.”
The tomtits whispered excitedly together: “Oh, isn’t he clever! Isn’t he just too clever!”
A robin, not so easily impressed, snapped: “What are you pecking at now?”
The screech-owl blinked at them sleepily.
“I mean,” he said with some condescension, “that if Gurri ever escapes Him, she may be a wiser, if a sadder, girl.”
Faline gasped with hope and fear.
“Ah,” she begged, “don’t torture me! Do you think that Gurri is alive?”
“I don’t think,” the screech-owl began ponderously; but stopped when he heard a titter from the English sparrows.
“Order down there!” screamed the jay, who was very curious. “Pray proceed, screech-owl.”
“As I was saying,” the owl opened and closed his beak a few times which gave him a very judicial appearance, “I don’t think—I know.”
“You know Gurri’s alive?” Geno cried joyfully.
“Yes, young one, saving my breath to cool my porridge or, in other words, to make a long story short, I saw Him pass beneath my tree down by the pool with Gurri in His arms. She was struggling quite hard and it seemed to me He was caressing her. This may sound quite incredible to you, but I have pretty good eyesight, especially in the dark, and that is what I saw. I tried to be of some assistance to her by flying down very low and screaming the worst insults in His ear; but either He didn’t understand me or He didn’t want to fight.”
“Now listen,” the robin said, blowing out his scarlet vest, “I may be easy to fool, but if you expect me to believe that you challenged Him to single combat . . . !”
“Well,” said the screech-owl easily, “I was pretty sure he hadn’t studied proverbs, and where ignorance is bliss, I always say . . . !”
“Quite!” The robin strutted a few steps and cocked his beady eye. “Proceed.”
“Finally I followed Him a good way toward the big nest He has built on the ground near here, and He took Gurri in. Now it so happens there’s an owl I know there already, and he finds it boring but quite comfortable. I flew to tell Bambi what I know and here I am.”
“Oh, forgive me, screech-owl,” Geno broke in impulsively. “Please forgive me!”
The screech-owl focused a large eye on Geno. “There’s nothing to forgive,” he said with surprising kindness. “Boys will be boys, I always say.”
Faline, as is the way with all mothers, had already passed from worrying over her daughter’s death to a worry almost as poignant over her well-being.
But the screech-owl said, finally, “While there’s life, there’s hope!” and from this Geno, at least, drew strong comfort.
It was hard to meet Rolla and her children in the meadow, to see Rolla’s anxious, loving glances and understand how, as a result of Gurri’s disappearance, her care of Lana had redoubled. It was particularly mortifying for Geno to note how Boso searched the shadows with eye and ear and quivering nose, as though to say: “Had I been there this thing would never have happened.”
Finally Faline and Geno stopped visiting the meadow entirely. Faline had discovered a large clearing deep in the forest which both puzzled and interested her.
“Big oak trees stood here once,” she said, nuzzling the stumps. “What do you suppose can have happened to them?”
Geno wasn’t much interested in stumps. He had talked with the hare on the w
ay out—a much happier hare since the death of the fox, and the hare had met a field-mouse.
“I don’t generally have much to do with them,” the hare asserted, “I don’t really. But they do get around. Bless my soul and whiskers, they go places I wouldn’t dare get within a mile of. And one of them had been to His form—nest, the screech-owl called it, rather ignorantly, I thought—he goes there for cheese, can you imagine? Bless my whiskers, the tastes of some people! But he says Gurri’s there and he says, moreover, he gets in and out all the time, so why can’t she? Of course, he is smaller, you might say, but a ray of hope is always a blessing. Be sure to tell your mother. A remarkable woman, I always say . . . !”
Geno told Faline as she nuzzled the stumps of oak, but it did not cheer her up much.
“I’m afraid she might be like Gobo,” she sighed. “He came back from his association with Him full of arrogance and believing that He was his friend, so you can imagine what happened finally: he died by the thunder-stick.”
“How terrible!” Geno gasped.
“So you see, I can’t be very cheerful. Gurri is so very headstrong and impressionable.”
They wandered dejectedly deeper into the clearing. It was a lush and fertile spot. Hazel bushes sprouted lustily; young white poplars shot their urgent growth toward the sun; elders, sloes and privets tangled in profusion, and a fine, soft grass spread thickly on the ground.
The old oak roots had kept vitality. New shoots burst from the tough bark, green and bitter-sweet and swollen tight with sap. Geno thought he had never tasted anything so good before.
Although neither of them was aware of it, this was the haunt of the elk. They converged from all sides when the light was right—when the moon was thin, or if clouds covered it. Geno had his mouth stuffed with the fine-tasting shoots he had discovered when the first of these giant deer entered the clearing. He thought he must be looking at a huge, distorted shadow; but when a second and a third and then a group of four joined forces with the first, he realized that these great animals were real. Frightened, he ran to his mother, but she also had noticed them. She was seized with the terror which always grips roe-deer when they see big animals. She did not even answer Geno intelligently when he pressed her with breathless questions.
“Ba-oh!” she shrieked and ran. He could hear her cries, “Ba-oh! Ba-oh!” dying away along the path.
So terrified was he at this show of fear in Faline, that his own limbs refused to work at all. Finally he felt a surge of power run through him and he dashed after her in great leaps. His straining haunches gleamed for a moment among the lower brush; then he was gone, and only the echo of his cry, in imitation of his mother’s, lingered in the clearing:
“Ba-oh. ba-oh, ba-oh!”
In the clearing the birds and lesser animals gathered fearfully to learn the cause of so much terror.
“What is it, Faline?” inquired Perri.
“Oh, oh, oh!” trembled Faline.
The hare was there on his hind legs, spinning this way and that like a top.
“Oh, bless my soul and whiskers,” he muttered, “I smell nothing, I swear I don’t! Or do I? Oh, dear, what can it be?”
The robin flew down from the topmost twig of the ruined poplar.
“I see nothing,” he said decisively, “nothing at all!”
“The Kings!” groaned Faline. “We saw the Kings!”
Perri clicked her tongue. “Tsk, tsk,” she said resignedly, “what a fuss you make about a deer that’s simply larger than yourself! They really are just like you to look at, you know, Faline, and just as harmless.”
“What nonsense!” Faline bridled. “They’re coarse, ugly monsters. . . .”
Geno calmed himself. He found himself halfway agreeing with Perri. Those great animals with their forests of newly rubbed antlers looked rather like his father. The screech-owl was sitting on a low pine branch aloof from the rest, moodily contemplating a bank of wild thyme. He was a frequent visitor to the clearing since he had brought the news of Gurri’s rescue.
“What is it, screech-owl?” Geno asked.
The screech-owl did not move his bright eyes.
“I met a compatriot of mine this evening,” he said crustily, “who advanced a thesis which I am determined to disprove. I have sat here all night, and I am convinced the fellow is a humbug.”
“What did he say?” inquired Geno, impressed despite himself by such an ardent pursuit of learning.
“He made the statement, ‘Thyme flies,’ ” the owl said with some rancor. He shuffled his feet with restrained fury. “I have sat here on this branch all night and I am prepared to stake five white mice against a grain of corn that thyme does not fly. My dear Geno, it is obvious that it is not even equipped with the machinery with which to fly. Look at it. Do you see even the faintest trace of a wing?”
Geno examined it. He took an experimental mouthful of it.
“It may not fly,” he said at last, “but it makes pretty good eating!”
Chapter Eight
GURRI CAME TO HER SENSES as the brown He bore her to His house. At first she struggled, threshing this way and that, but finally it was borne upon her that this creature, who smelled so revolting and moved in such a peculiar and clumsy manner, was also immensely strong. He held her easily against His breast, and every now and then He made roaring sounds and scratched her behind her ears.
When they reached the house, He carried her through an opening in the wall and stood the thunder-stick carelessly in a corner and fetched water in what seemed to be an extra hand. Even in the midst of her terror, Gurri could not fail to be impressed by such a miracle. The water had a peculiar smell, sharper than fern, and, with a thing like a big, soft leaf, He washed her wound with it. Then He brought something that looked like a very long strong spider-web and, using His agile front paws, bound it around the torn muscles.
“A little deeper,” He roared (Gurri found that by listening to the intonation she could make a little sense out of these roarings), “and the rascal would have got to the bone and that would have been bad. . . . Steady now, old girl! That’s it! There we are!”
He stood away from her, rubbing His hands on yet another spider-web. Gurri noticed, to her horror, that He had taken His skin and the top of His head off. She trembled violently. The bandage bound her too tightly and the room was wholly dreadful. He even seemed to have His own private sun which He flicked on and off at will.
Desperately she struggled to her feet and staggered to the opening through which He had carried her.
“There, there!” the brown He roared soothingly. “You don’t have to be scared of me. Come on! This way!” He hauled and pushed her into an open space outside with a sort of triple vine growing round it. She staggered into it and hurled herself at the vine. It did not break. “Don’t like my sanitarium, eh!” He laughed. “Well, you’re better off there than you are in the woods just now, believe me. You’ll get used to it.”
Gurri heard a commotion inside the house: a vast roaring the like of which she had never heard before. A creature on four legs with long, shaggy hair even browner than His, came bounding into the inclosure. She believed this violent monster to be a dog, and remembered with a fainting heart what Bambi had said: “He and His dogs are the most dangerous things in the forest.”
This dog ran over to her and sniffed at her noisily. He was a meat-eater. His breath sickened her. She stood perfectly still, trembling.
“Hector!” the brown He growled imperatively. “Come here, sir! Can’t you see the lady doesn’t like you? Go away!”
The dog immediately retreated outside the inclosure, squatting on his haunches with his great tongue hanging far out of his iron jaws, his bright eyes curiously intent on her. The brown He scratched behind her ears again.
“Don’t worry about Hector. He’s harmless.”
But Gurri did worry about Hector, and about Him, and the place in which she found herself, and the relentless vine which grew so regularly about the
inclosure. A shower of rain fell suddenly and passed. In the thin radiance of the crescent moon, this vine gleamed in a manner she had never seen before in any forest growth. She launched herself experimentally against it several times more, but she was hampered by her bindings. It was then she noticed that the main stems of this vine supported a secondary growth which had the regularity of a honeycomb. She could not even get her nose through this.
She stood back in despair, shivering like the autumn grass when the wind blows through it, and sick at heart. Only one thing was good. The dog and He had gone. She was alone.
She thought she was alone until a wild and paralyzing cry stunned her sensitive ears:
“Whoo-hoo-oo-oo!”
She started round, almost falling down with terror. In a hutch in a corner a great horned owl sat on a bar, watching her with livid eyes.
“Oh, please,” she gasped, “I’m not doing anything! I don’t want to be here. Let me live . . . !”
“I can’t hurt you,” the owl answered gloomily. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I can’t get out of this thing. I’m a prisoner, just as you are.”
He gnashed his beak with bitterness. Like the dog, he was an eater of meat. Gurri could not bear to approach too closely to him, but, as the night wore on, she lost some of her fear. Worn out, she lay down in a patch of rank grass and looked about her. To one side spread what seemed, in the vague moonlight, to be an endless expanse of open country; to the other, and quite close at hand, rose the dark cloud of the forest.
The forest, she thought wearily, where even now Faline and Geno roam in freedom. She wondered if Geno had disobeyed their father and called for help. Or did they think that she was dead?
She began to tremble again with a violence of grief and despair. Her eyes flooded with rare animal tears. But the night was soothing, her body was exhausted. Almost against her will, she slept.
Some hours later she awoke. The valley was a golden bowl. Sunlight was spun like a web above the forest trees, and scarfs and drifts of mottled light and shadow flowed toward the western end of earth. This young day was full of a sound that Gurri had not heard before: a bursting song so free, so full of pure delight that all the world seemed hushed to listen.