r the first time he experienced the pang
of physical anguish, as fierce teeth, small, but sharp, tore at the
tender hide of his neck, feeling the way to his throat. He lay
helplessly kicking under this onslaught, and bleated piteously for his
mother.

[Illustration: "TURN HIS NARROW, SNARLING FACE TO SEE WHAT THREATENED."]

At that same moment, and just in time, the mother arrived. Her eyes,
usually so gentle, were aflame with rage. Before the fisher--for such
the daring little assailant was--could do more than turn his narrow,
snarling face to see what threatened, and while yet the first sweet
trickle of blood was in his throat, a knife-edged hoof came down upon
his back, smashing the spine. He squirmed aside and made one futile
effort to drag himself away. A second later he was pounded and trampled
into a shapeless mass.

The fisher being small and his fangs not very long, the fawn's wounds
were not serious. He picked himself up and crowded close against his
mother's flank. Tenderly the doe licked him over as he nursed, and then,
when his slim legs had stopped trembling she led him away to another
hiding-place.

This experience so jarred the little animal's nerves that for a week or
more his mother could not leave him alone, but had to snatch such
pasturage as she could get near his hiding-place. His confidence in the
tactics of invisibility had been so shaken that whenever his mother
tried to leave him he would jump up and run after her. The patient old
doe got thin under these conditions; but by the time her little one had
recovered his nerves he was strong enough to follow her to her favoured
feeding-grounds, and thereafter her problems grew daily less difficult.
The summer passed with comparatively little event, and by autumn, when
his mother began to develop other instincts, and occasionally, in the
companionship of a tall, wide-antlered buck, seemed to forget him
altogether, he was a very sturdy, self-reliant youngster, in many ways
equipped to take care of himself. Ignored by the tall buck, whom he eyed
with vague disfavour, he still hung about his mother, pasturing with her
usually, and always sleeping near her in the thickets. But his first
summer had supplied him with the most important elements of that
knowledge which a red deer's life in the wilderness of the north
demands.

The courses of the varied knowledge which the wild creatures must carry
in their brains in order to survive in the struggle wou