mother bear, with two butter-fat cubs wrestling and rolling in the moon glow.  Peter had never seen a bear.  But the mother, who raised her brown nose suddenly from the cool mold out of which she had been digging lily-bulbs, had seen dogs.  She had seen many dogs, and she had heard their howl, and she knew that always they traveled with man.  She gave a deep, chesty sniff, and close after that sniff a WHOOF that startled the cubs like the lashing end of a whip.  They rolled to her, and with two cuffs of the mother’s huge paws they were headed in the right direction, and all three crashed off into darkness.

In spite of his swelling heart Peter let out a little yip.  It was a great satisfaction, just at a moment when his nerves were getting unsteady, to discover that a monster like this one in the moonlight was anxious to run away from him.  And Peter went on, a bit of pride and jauntiness in his step, his bony tail a little higher.

A mile farther on, in another yellow pool of the moon, lay the partly devoured carcass of a fawn.  A wolf had killed it, and had fed, and now two giant owls were rending and tearing in the flesh and bowels of what the wolf had left.  They were Gargantuans of their kind, one a male, the other a female.  Their talons warm in blood, their beaks red, their slow brains drunk with a ravenous greed, they rose on their great wings in sullen rage when Peter came suddenly upon them.  He had ceased to be afraid of owls.  There was something shivery in the gritting of their beaks, especially in the dark places, but they had never attacked him, and had always kept out of his reach.  So their presence in a black spruce top directly over the dead fawn did not hold him back now.  He sniffed at the fresh, sweet meat, and hunger all at once possessed him.  Where the wolf had stripped open a tender flank he began to eat, and as he ate he growled, so that warning of his possessorship reached the spruce top.

In answer to it came a stir of wings, and the male owl launched himself out into the moon glow.  The female followed.  For a few moments they floated like gray ghosts over Peter, silent as the night shadows.  Then, with the suddenness and speed of a bolt from a catapult, the giant male shot out of a silvery mist of gloom and struck Peter.  The two rolled over the carcass of the fawn, and for a space Peter was dazed by the thundering beat of powerful wings, and the hammering of the owl’s beak at the back of his neck.  The male had missed his claw-hold, and driven by rage and ferocity, fought to impale his victim from the ground, without launching himself into the air again.  Swiftly he struck, again and again, while his wings beat like clubs.  Suddenly his talons sank into the cloth wrapped about Peter’s neck.  Terror and shock gave way to a fighting madness inside Peter now.  He struck up, and buried his fangs in a mass of feathers so thick he could not feel the flesh.  He tore at the padded breast, snarling and beating with his feet, and then, as the