ed them from foes on
the ground, and left them nothing to fear but coons, whose slow, heavy
tread on the limber boughs never failed to give them timely warning. But
the leaves were falling now--every month its foes and its food. This was
nut time, and it was owl time, too. Barred owls coming down from the
north doubled or trebled the owl population. The nights were getting
frosty and the coons less dangerous, so the mother changed the place of
roosting to the thickest foliage of a hemlock-tree.

Only one of the brood disregarded the warning _'Kreet, kreet_.' He stuck
to his swinging elm-bough, now nearly naked, and a great yellow-eyed owl
bore him off before morning.

Mother and three young ones now were left, but they were as big as she
was; indeed one, the eldest, he of the chip, was bigger. Their ruffs had
begun to show. Just the tips, to tell what they would be like when
grown, and not a little proud they were of them.

The ruff is to the partridge what the train is to the peacock--his chief
beauty and his pride. A hen's ruff is black with a slight green gloss. A
cock's is much larger and blacker and is glossed with more vivid
bottle-green. Once in a while a partridge is born of unusual size and
vigor, whose ruff is not only larger, but by a peculiar kind of
intensification is of a deep coppery red, iridescent with violet, green,
and gold. Such a bird is sure to be a wonder to all who know him, and
the little one who had squatted on the chip, and had always done what he
was told, developed before the Acorn Moon had changed, into all the
glory of a gold and copper ruff-for this was Redruff, the famous
partridge of the Don Valley.

IV

One day late in the Acorn Moon, that is, about mid-October, as the
grouse family were basking with full crops near a great pine log on the
sunlit edge of the beaver-meadow, they heard the far-away bang of a gun,
and Redruff, acting on some impulse from within, leaped on the log,
strutted up and down a couple of times, then, yielding to the elation of
the bright, clear, bracing air, he whirred his wings in loud defiance.
Then, giving fuller vent to this expression of vigor, just as a colt
frisks to show how well he feels, he whirred yet more loudly, until,
unwittingly, he found himself drumming, and tickled with the discovery
of his new power, thumped the air again and again till he filled the
near woods with the loud tattoo of the fully grown cock-partridge. His
brother an