which they were allowed to worry and chew and swallow like the
shameless little Greedinesses they were. And when they had finished a
meal, they simply went to sleep, and slept and slept and slept, till
they seemed to be furry lumps of warm fat sleep, all neatly rolled up
with their noses under their tails.

One day, Baltook was sitting on his favourite look-out place on Carboona
about a dozen yards from his den, gazing down into the green and golden
depths of the drowsy afternoon.

To all outward appearances, the world looked pretty much as it had done
for the last ten thousand years. So had the hemlocks looked, so had the
spruces, ever since the first fox had made his earth upon Carboona, and
the world of the foxes had clashed with, that of the lynxes, and the old
hatred began. But Baltook was not thinking of lynxes today, not indeed
of anything else in particular. He had just feasted off a very plump
rabbit, and inside the den, the family was busy wrangling over the
bones. So the possibilities of other game did not tickle his brain,
although his nose kept up a series of fine wrinklings, just from force
of habit, to find what sort of folk might be walking down the wind.

Yet in spite of everything looking so thousands-of-years-the-same,
something very important _was_ happening, after which Carboona would be
never quite the same.

_There were strangers walking in the wind!_

If Baltook did not scent them, that was no fault of his nose. If you sit
very high up you cannot expect your nose to tell you what is happening
very far down. It is along the level of the runways that the nose does
its business; and Baltook's nose forgot to be very busy, even where he
sat.

Down, down, down, through the vast forests of spruce and fir, with here
and there a sycamore, or some huge hemlock that seemed to have hugged
five hundred winters to its old black heart, the strange folk came
journeying on scarcely-sounding feet. The forest was so thick, and the
ground so springy with fir-needles, that Baltook's eyes and ears gave
him no more warning than his nose. Yet a vague murmur of softly-padding
feet was audible,--to ears near enough to catch it--the ears of the
little peoples that live close along the ground.

At the doorways of little underground dwellings between the twisted
fir-roots, small furry bodies, with long tails, and eyes like sparkles
of black dew, crouched quivering with expectancy, as the murmuring sound
went by. To