“They have killed off all my kinsfolk, and they’ll be killing me next,” protested the fox.  “But they shall be pardoned for that if only they save the forest.”

That year Karr never ran into the woods without some animal’s asking if the humans could save the forest.  It was not easy for the dog to answer; the people themselves were not certain that they could conquer the moths.  But considering how feared and hated old Kolmarden had always been, it was remarkable that every day more than a hundred men went there, to work.  They cleared away the underbrush.  They felled dead trees, lopped off branches from the live ones so that the caterpillars could not easily crawl from tree to tree; they also dug wide trenches around the ravaged parts and put up lime-washed fences to keep them out of new territory.  Then they painted rings of lime around the trunks of trees to prevent the caterpillars leaving those they had already stripped.  The idea was to force them to remain where they were until they starved to death.

The people worked with the forest until far into the spring.  They were hopeful, and could hardly wait for the caterpillars to come out from their eggs, feeling certain that they had shut them in so effectually that most of them would die of starvation.

But in the early summer the caterpillars came out, more numerous than ever.

They were everywhere!  They crawled on the country roads, on fences, on the walls of the cabins.  They wandered outside the confines of Liberty Forest to other parts of Kolmarden.

“They won’t stop till all our forests are destroyed!” sighed the people, who were in great despair, and could not enter the forest without weeping.

Karr was so sick of the sight of all these creeping, gnawing things that he could hardly bear to step outside the door.  But one day he felt that he must go and find out how Grayskin was getting on.  He took the shortest cut to the elk’s haunts, and hurried along—­his nose close to the earth.  When he came to the tree stump where he had met Helpless the year before, the snake was still there, and called to him: 

“Have you told Grayskin what I said to you when last we met?” asked the water-snake.

Karr only growled and tried to get at him.

“If you haven’t told him, by all means do so!” insisted the snake.  “You must see that the humans know of no cure for this plague.”

“Neither do you!” retorted the dog, and ran on.

Karr found Grayskin, but the elk was so low-spirited that he scarcely greeted the dog.  He began at once to talk of the forest.

“I don’t know what I wouldn’t give if this misery were only at an end!” he said.

“Now I shall tell you that ’tis said you could save the forest.”  Then Karr delivered the water-snake’s message.

“If any one but Helpless had promised this, I should immediately go into exile,” declared the elk.  “But how can a poor water-snake have the power to work such a miracle?”