go ramming around the woods with chips on their shoulders, looking
for hunters armed with bowie-knives and repeating rifles. You wouldn't,
either--not as long as there were rabbits to be had for the stalking.
But on this occasion the Kitten's conduct certainly savored of
recklessness, if not of real bravery. Being entirely unacquainted with
the land-looking profession, he naturally supposed that the man had come
for his deer. And he didn't propose to let him have it. He considered
that that venison belonged to him, and he took his stand on the carcass,
laid his ears back, showed his white teeth, made his eyes blaze, and
spit and growled and snarled defiantly. The land-looker didn't quite
know what to do. His section line lay straight across the deer's body,
and he did not want to leave it for fear of confusing his reckoning, but
the Kitten, though only half grown, looked uncommonly business-like. He
had no gun, nor even a revolver, for he was hunting for pine, not fresh
meat. He had left his half-axe in camp, and when he felt in his pocket
for his jack-knife it was not there. Then he looked about for a club. He
had been told that lynxes always had very thin skulls, and that a light
blow on the back of the head was enough to kill the biggest and fiercest
of them, let alone a kitten. But he couldn't even find a stick that
would answer his purpose.

"Well," he said, when they had stared at each other a minute or two
longer without coming to any understanding, "I suppose if you won't turn
out for me, I'll have to turn out for you"; and he made a careful
circuit at a respectful distance, picked up his line again, and went on
his way.

The winter dragged on very slowly, with many ups and downs, but it was
gone at last. Summer was easier, if only because he was not obliged to
use up any of his vitality in keeping warm. Sometimes, indeed, he was
really too warm for comfort, so he presently changed his coat and put
on a thinner one. People like to talk about the coolness of the deep
woods, but the truth is that there isn't any place much hotter and
stuffier than a dense growth of timber, where the wind never comes, and
where the air is heavy and still. And then there are the windfalls and
the old burnings, where the sun beats fiercely down among the fallen
trees till the blackened soil is hot as a city pavement, and where dead
trunks and half-burned logs lie thrown together in the wildest
confusion--places which are almost imp