ure was the hilltop, roughly rounded, and naked save for one
maple-tree, now ablaze with scarlet and amber. Along the line of hills
across the dusk valley the last of the sunset laid a band of clear
orange, which faded softly through lemon and pink and violet and
tender green to the high, cold gray-blue of the dome above the hill,
where one crow was beating his way toward the tree-tops on the farther
ridge. The tranquillity of the scene was curiously at variance with
the loud vapourings of the bull, as he raged up and down behind the
bars, watched tremblingly by the pair of awestruck yearlings.

Over on the other side of the hill, behind the red maple, where the
hillocks and fern patches lay already in a cool, violet-brown shadow,
stood a high-antlered red buck, listening to the bull's ravings. He
had just come out of the woods and up to the snake fence of split
rails which bounded the pasture. With some curiosity, not unmixed with
scorn, he had sniffed at the fence, a phenomenon with which he was
unfamiliar. But the voice of the bull had promptly absorbed his
attention. There was something in the voice that irritated him,--which
seemed, though in a language he did not know, to convey a taunt and a
challenge. His fine, slim head went high. He snorted several times,
stamped his delicate hoofs, then bounded lightly over the fence and
trotted up the slope toward the shining maple.

For most of the greater members of the wild kindred,--and for the
tribes of the deer and moose, in particular,--the month of October is
the month of love and war. Under those tender and enchanting skies,
amid the dying crimsons and purples and yellows and russets, and in
the wistfulness of the falling leaf, duels are fought to the death in
the forest aisles and high hill glades. When a sting and a tang
strike across the dreamy air, and the frosts nip crisply, then the
blood runs hot in the veins and mating-time stirs up both love and
hate. The red buck, as it happened, had been something of a laggard in
awakening to the season's summons. His antlers, this year, had been
late to mature and overlong in the velvet. When he entered the field,
therefore, he found that other bucks had been ahead of him, and that
there were no more does wandering forlorn. He had "belled" in vain for
several days, searched in vain the limits of his wonted range, and at
last set out in quest of some little herd whose leader his superior
strength might beat down and supp