te-man's
"glorious gains" to live with the feeling called up by that Indian
drum.

IX

The Cat And The Skunk

Sam was away on a "massacree" to get some bread. Guy had been trapped
by his natural enemy and was serving a term of hard labour in the
garden; so Yan was alone in camp. He went around the various mud
albums, but discovered nothing new, except the fact that tracks were
getting more numerous. There were small Skunk and Mink tracks with the
large ones now. As he came by the brush fence at the end of the blazed
trail he saw a dainty little Yellow Warbler feeding a great lubberly
young Cow-bird that, evidently, it had brought up. He had often heard
that the Cow-bird habitually "plays Cuckoo" and leaves its egg in the
nest of another bird, but this was the first time he had actually
seen anything of it with his own eyes. As he watched the awkward
mud-coloured Cow-bird flutter its ungrown wings and beg help from the
brilliant little Warbler, less than half its size, he wondered whether
the fond mother really was fooled into thinking it her own young, or
whether she did it simply out of compassion for the foundling. He now
turned down creek to the lower mud album, and was puzzled by a new
track like this.

[Illustration: Track of small mud turtle]

He sketched it, but before the drawing was done it dawned on him that
this must be the track of a young Mud-turtle. He also saw a lot of
very familiar tracks, not a few being those of the common Cat, and he
wondered why they should be about so much and yet so rarely seen. Of
course the animals were chiefly nocturnal, but the boys were partly
so, and always on the ground now, so that explanation was not
satisfactory. He lay down on his breast at the edge of the brook,
which had here cut in a channel with steep clay walls six feet high
and twenty feet apart. The stream was very small now--a mere thread
of water zigzagging over the level muddy floor of the "canon," as Yan
loved to call it. A broad, muddy margin at each side of the water made
a fine place of record for the travelling Four-foots, and tracks new
and old were there in abundance.

The herbage on the bank was very rank and full of noisy Grasshoppers
and Crickets. Great masses of orange Jewelweed on one side were
variegated with some wonderful Cardinal flowers. Yan viewed all this
with placid content. He knew their names now, and thus they were
transferred from the list of tantalizing mysteries to tha