A year later my canoe touched the same old landing.  For ten months I had been in the city, where Killooleet never sings, and where the wilderness is only a memory.  In the fall, on some long tramps, I had occasional glimpses of the little singer, solitary now and silent, stealing southward ahead of the winter.  And in the spring he showed himself rarely in the underbrush on country roads, eager, restless, chirping, hurrying northward where the streams were clear and the big woods budding.  But never a song in all that time; my ears were hungry for his voice as I leaped out to run eagerly to the big cedar.  There were the stakes, and the tin plate, and the bark roof all crushed by the snows of winter.  The bread was gone; what Killooleet had spared, Tookhees the wood mouse had eaten thankfully.  I found the old tent poles and put up my house leisurely, a hundred happy memories thronging about me.  In the midst of them came a call, a clear whistle,—­and there he was, the same full cravat, the same bright cap, and the same perfect song to set my nerves a-tingling:  I’m here, sweet Killooleet-lillooleet-lillooleet! And when I put crumbs by the old fireplace, he flew down to help himself, and went off with the biggest one, as of yore, to his nest by the deer path.

III.  KAGAX THE BLOODTHIRSTY.

[Illustration:  Kagax]

This is the story of one day, the last one, in the life of Kagax the Weasel, who turns white in winter, and yellow in spring, and brown in summer, the better to hide his villainy.

It was early twilight when Kagax came out of his den in the rocks, under the old pine that lightning had blasted.  Day and night were meeting swiftly but warily, as they always meet in the woods.  The life of the sunshine came stealing nestwards and denwards in the peace of a long day and a full stomach; the night life began to stir in its coverts, eager, hungry, whining.  Deep in the wild raspberry thickets a wood thrush rang his vesper bell softly; from the mountain top a night hawk screamed back an answer, and came booming down to earth, where the insects were rising in myriads.  Near the thrush a striped chipmunk sat chunk-a-chunking his sleepy curiosity at a burned log which a bear had just torn open for red ants; while down on the lake shore a cautious plash-plash told where a cow moose had come out of the alders with her calf to sup on the yellow lily roots and sip the freshest water.  Everywhere life was stirring; everywhere cries, calls, squeaks, chirps, rustlings, which only the wood-dweller knows how to interpret, broke in upon the twilight stillness.

Kagax grinned and showed all his wicked little teeth as the many voices went up from lake and stream and forest.  “Mine, all mine—­to kill,” he snarled, and his eyes began to glow deep red.  Then he stretched one sinewy paw after another, rolled over, climbed a tree, and jumped down from a swaying twig to get the sleep all out of him.