The next night the Boy watched again, from the cover of the hay-stack. Before long the doe leaped smoothly into the pasture, stamping for the fawns. Then he saw the flash of her white tail signaling for them to follow, and after that, two tinier tails wig-wagging through the dusk as they disappeared in the alders down by the brook that ran through the lower end of the pasture.
The Boy stared after them awhile, a smile of sympathy in his eyes. Then--ever so softly, so as not to alarm them--he slipped across to where she had leaped the fence, and lifted the top bars away.
Once back in the good green woods, both Fleet Foot and the fawns capered joyously.
Up and down through the forest trails they galloped,--down to Lone Lake, then back to Pollywog Pond and along the familiar trails on the slopes of Mt. Olaf. Summer was even riper and lovelier than when they had been taken to the Valley Farm,--and to the fawns, remember, it was their first taste of mid-summer in the Maine woods.
These tiny fellows leaped and gamboled hide-and-seek, till you would have thought they would have broken their fragile legs among the boulders and fallen tree-trunks. But their mother knew her training had been thorough, and they would know just how to leap and land with safety.
"Hello, there!--Chick-a-dee-dee, Chick-a-dee-dee," a little gray bird in a black cap kept calling, as he followed from tree to tree.
When at last they had had their dinner of warm milk, and Fleet Foot had cropped her fill of the tender green things that lay like a banquet table everywhere about them, she led them to a little rocky ledge that over-looked Lone Lake, where they could lie under the partial shade of a clump of yellow birch trees and rest, while she chewed her cud. The black fly season was well past, and there was nothing to disturb them save a passing swarm of midges that couldn't begin to bite through their thick fur.
(They little dreamed that Frisky, the Red Fox Pup, was peering down on them from a higher crag, where he, too, crouched on the red-brown soil that proved such a perfect cam-ou-flage.)
No one save a fox could have seen the fawns, so long as they lay still, their tawny orange-brown coats blended so perfectly with the ground. And if anyone had noticed the white spots on their sides, he would have taken them for a glint of the creamy birch-bark.