e 'Fraid One.

From all these enemies Tookhees has one refuge, the little arched nest
beyond the pretty doorway under the mossy stone. Most of his enemies
can dig, to be sure, but his tunnel winds about in such a way that they
never can tell from the looks of his doorway where it leads to;
and there are no snakes in the wilderness to follow and find out.
Occasionally I have seen where Mooween the bear has turned the stone
over and clawed the earth beneath; but there is generally a tough root
in the way, and Mooween concludes that he is taking too much trouble
for so small a mouthful, and shuffles off to the log where the red ants
live.

On his journeys through the woods Tookhees never forgets the dangerous
possibilities. His progress is a series of jerks, and whisks, and jumps,
and hidings. He leaves his doorway, after much watching, and shoots
like a minnow across the moss to an upturned root. There he sits up and
listens, rubbing his whiskers nervously. Then he glides along the root
for a couple of feet, drops to the ground and disappears. He is hiding
there under a dead leaf. A moment of stillness and he jumps like a
jack-in-abox. Now he is sitting on the leaf that covered him, rubbing
his whiskers again, looking back over his trail as if he heard footsteps
behind him. Then another nervous dash, a squeak which proclaims at once
his escape, and his arrival, and he vanishes under the old moss-grown
log where his fellows live, a whole colony of them.

All these things, and many more, I discovered the first season that I
began to study the wild things that lived within sight of my tent. I
had been making long excursions after bear and beaver, following on
wild-goose chases after Old Whitehead the eagle and Kakagos the wild
woods raven that always escaped me, only to find that within the warm
circle of my camp-fire little wild folk were hiding whose lives were
more unknown and quite as interesting as the greater creatures I had
been following.

One day, as I returned quietly to camp, I saw Simmo quite lost in
watching something near my tent. He stood beside a great birch tree, one
hand resting against the bark that he would claim next winter for his
new canoe; the other hand still grasped his axe, which he had picked up
a moment before to quicken the tempo of the bean kettle's song. His dark
face peered behind the tree with a kind of childlike intensity written
all over it.

I stole nearer without his hearing me; bu