ain with a voice so terrible
and unearthly that the Calf in his hiding-place shook with fright. And
no wonder, for I think that even you will be startled the first time
that you hear a big Stag belling.

Very soon an answering roar came from a distance, and another Stag,
as thin and fierce-looking as the first, but not quite so big, came
belling up the combe. And the great Stag left the Hinds and went
forward to meet him, looking very stately and grand. For he walked on
tip-toe, loftily and slowly, with his head thrown back, and his chin
high in air, while his eyes rolled with rage, and his breath spurted
forward in jets of steam through the cold, damp air, as he snorted
defiance. Then presently both Stags dropped their heads and made for
each other; and they fought with locked horns, shoving and straining
and struggling, backward and forward and round and round, till the
smaller Stag could fight no longer but turned and fled limping away,
with the blood flowing from a deep thrust in his flank. Then the great
Stag threw up his head and belled again with triumph, and huddling the
Hinds together once more, he drove them on before him.

For three weeks and more this roaring and fighting continued; for
Deer, you must know, put all the quarrelling of the year into a single
month; which sounds like a curious arrangement, but may after all be
better than that of certain other creatures, which fight the whole
year round. All this while the Calf's mother kept him carefully out of
the way of stags; but none the less he had visitors. For one day a
little brown bird with a long beak came flapping rather crookedly up
the combe as if uncertain whither to go next, and then suddenly making
up her mind, came down and lighted in front of the Calf's very nose.
He was a little astonished, but his mother gave the little bird her
kindest glance and said:

"Welcome back to Exmoor, Mistress Woodcock. How have you fared this
dry summer, and what passage had you over the sea?"

And the little bird answered with somewhat of a foreign accent and in
rather a sad voice, "I am safe and sound, my lady Hind, for we had
good weather; but there were a few that started before me, and are not
yet come, and I greatly fear that they were blown into the sea by a
storm. And the summer was so dry that many springs failed, and many
times I had to catch up my chicks and carry them one by one to new
feeding-grounds over the pine-forests and across the blue fio