“Then tell me why you are glad the water-snake is dead,” responded the boy.

“It’s a long story,” said the raven; “you wouldn’t have the patience to listen to it.”

But the boy insisted that he had, and then the raven told him the whole story about Karr and Grayskin and Helpless, the water-snake.  When he had finished, the boy sat quietly for a moment, looking straight ahead.  Then he spoke: 

“I seem to like the forest better since hearing this.  I wonder if there is anything left of the old Liberty Forest."’

“Most of it has been destroyed,” said Bataki.  “The trees look as if they had passed through a fire.  They’ll have to be cleared away, and it will take many years before the forest will be what it once was.”

“That snake deserved his death!” declared the boy.  “But I wonder if it could be possible that he was so wise he could send sickness to the caterpillars?”

“Perhaps he knew that they frequently became sick in that way,” intimated Bataki.

“Yes, that may be; but all the same, I must say that he was a very wily snake.”

The boy stopped talking because he saw the raven was not listening to him, but sitting with gaze averted.  “Hark!” he said.  “Karr is in the vicinity.  Won’t he be happy when he sees that Helpless is dead!”

The boy turned his head in the direction of the sound.

“He’s talking with the wild geese,” he said.

“Oh, you may be sure that he has dragged himself down to the strand to get the latest news about Grayskin!”

Both the boy and the raven jumped to the ground, and hastened down to the shore.  All the geese had come out of the lake, and stood talking with an old dog, who was so weak and decrepit that it seemed as if he might drop dead at any moment.

“There’s Karr,” said Bataki to the boy.  “Let him hear first what the wild geese have to say to him; later we shall tell him that the water-snake is dead.”

Presently they heard Akka talking to Karr.

“It happened last year while we were making our usual spring trip,” remarked the leader-goose.  “We started out one morning—­Yksi, Kaksi, and I, and we flew over the great boundary forests between Dalecarlia and Haelsingland.  Under us we, saw only thick pine forests.  The snow was still deep among the trees, and the creeks were mostly frozen.

“Suddenly we noticed three poachers down in the forest!  They were on skis, had dogs in leash, carried knives in their belts, but had no guns.

“As there was a hard crust on the snow, they did not bother to take the winding forest paths, but skied straight ahead.  Apparently they knew very well where they must go to find what they were seeking.

“We wild geese flew on, high up in the air, so that the whole forest under us was visible.  When we sighted the poachers we wanted to find out where the game was, so we circled up and down, peering through the trees.  Then, in a dense thicket, we saw something that looked like big, moss-covered rocks, but couldn’t be rocks, for there was no snow on them.