WILD LIFE ON THE WING 
course by some kind of chart in order to 
reach it. 
The night was so dark that he could see 
nothing of his surroundings. He only knew 
that this wood was quieter and more airy 
than any that he had yet been in ; and from 
this he might have deduced that there was 
little undergrowth to shut out the night wind, 
or harbour soft-footed hunters. 
But the stormy dawn, earnest of a rainy day, 
showed him his refuge, wide and bare, full of 
the sweet draughty airs which blew down 
from the hills. Garrybrack is a very old wood. 
The trees themselves are beeches, still lissom, 
and not thicker than a man's body ; but their 
roots are deep in a stratum of the leaves and 
mast of a yet older wood, and they suck 
sustenance from the sodden jetsam of their 
parents. Here and there the stump of one 
of these older trees still stands, rotted by the 
corroding drip from its children's branches, and 
shaggy with moss. Every autumn lays down 
another carpet of dead leaves, and the ground, 
spongy with the black mould, is broken up by 
ancient rabbit burrows. The wood-people have 
lived in the wood for as long as the trees. There 
has always been a pigeon's nest in the old holly 
on the south side ; twenty generations of stoats 
have been suckled under the pine stump ; and 
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