BIG REDDY, STRATEGIST 51 
yip, yip, yip, that would have waked the Sleep- 
ing Beauty, and go tearing off toward his tor- 
mentor. Then Reddy, with a kind of chuckle, 
would slink up the slope through the laurel, make 
a wide loop, and while the collie was up on the 
mountain somewhere, would resume his barking 
close to the edge of the garden again! Back 
would come the collie, and the whole operation 
would be repeated, till Reddy’s sense of humor 
was satisfied or somebody fired a gun. He had 
an entire and wholesome respect for a gun,—not 
for a man, mind you, but for a man’s gun. If 
the man didn’t have a gun, Reddy didn’t hesitate 
sometimes to follow along behind him, through 
the woods or even across an open field, out of 
sheer curiosity to see where he was going. If the 
man turned, he was behind a tree or a tussock or 
a bush before you could have clapped eyes on him, 
Everything in the woods interested Reddy; he 
thoroughly enjoyed life every minute. 
But after Christmas, the first winter of his 
adult life, a deep snow came, and it grew bitterly 
cold. Reddy didn’t mind the cold so much—he 
had a warm den under some rocks well up the 
