EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



i 



EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



All that May day long I had been trying to break 

 my record of birds seen and heard between dawn 

 and dark. Toward the end of the gray afternoon an 

 accommodating Canadian warbler, wearing a black 

 necklace across his yellow breast, carried me past my 

 last year's mark, and I started for home in great 

 contentment. My path wound in and out among the 

 bare white boles of a beech wood all feathery with 

 new green-sanguine-colored leaves. Always as I 

 enter that wood I have a sense of a sudden silence, 

 and I walk softly, that I may catch perhaps a last 

 word or so of what They are saying. 



That day, as I moved without a sound among the 

 trees, suddenly, not fifty feet away, loping wearily 

 down the opposite slope, came a gaunt red fox and a 

 cub. With her head down, she looked like the pic- 

 ture of the wolf in Red Riding-Hood. The little cub 

 was all woolly, like a lamb. His back was reddish- 

 brown, and he had long stripes of gray across his 

 breast and around his small belly, and his little sly 

 face was so comical that I laughed at the very first 

 sight of it. What wind there was blew from them to 



