Uncle Andy did not answer for a moment.  Perhaps it was because he was so busy lighting his pipe, or perhaps he hoped to hear the sound again before committing himself—­for so experienced a woodsman as he was had good reason to know that most of the creatures of the wild have many different cries, and sometimes seem to imitate each other in the strangest fashion.  He had not long to wait.  The wild voice sounded again and again, so insistently, so appealingly that the Child became greatly excited over it.  The sound was something between the bleat of an extraordinary, harsh-voiced kid and the scream of a badly frightened mirganser, but more penetrating and more strident than either.

“Oh, it’s frightened, Uncle Andy!” exclaimed the Child.  “What do you think it is?  What does it want?  Let’s go and see if we can’t help it!”

The pipe was drawing all right now, because Uncle Andy had made up his mind.

“It’s nothing but a young fawn—­a baby deer,” he answered.  “Evidently it has got lost, and it’s crying for its mother.  With a voice like that it ought to make her hear if she’s anywhere alive—­if a bear has not jumped on her and broken her neck for her.  Ah! there she comes,” he added, as the agitated bellowing of a doe sounded from further back in the woods.  The two cries answered each other at intervals for a couple of minutes, rapidly nearing.  And then they were silent.

The Child heaved a sigh of relief.

“I’m so glad he found his mother again!” he murmured.  “It must be terrible to be lost in the woods—­to be quite alone, and not know, when you cried, whether it would be your mother or a bear that would come running to you from under the black trees!”

“I agree with you,” said Uncle Andy, with unwonted heartiness.  It was not too often that he was able to agree completely with the Child’s suggestions in regard to the affairs of the wild.  “Yes, indeed,” he added reminiscently; “I tried it myself once, when I was about your age, away down in the Lower Ottanoonsis Valley, when the country thereabouts was not settled like it is now.  And I didn’t like it at all, let me tell you.”

“What came ?” demanded the Child breathlessly.  “Was it your mother, or a bear?”

“Neither!” responded Uncle Andy.  “It was Old Tom Saunders, Bill’s uncle—­only he wasn’t old, or Bill’s uncle, at that time, as you may imagine if you think about it.”

“Oh!” said the Child, a little disappointed.  He had rather hoped it was the bear, since he felt assured of his uncle’s ultimate safety.

“And I knew a little Jersey calf once,” continued Uncle Andy, being now fairly started in his reminiscences and unwilling to disappoint the Child’s unfailing thirst for a story, “in the same woods, who thought she was lost when she wasn’t, and made just as much noise over it as if she had been.  That, you see, was what made all the trouble.  She was a good deal of a fool at that time—­which was not altogether to be wondered at, seeing that she was only one day old; and when her mother left her sleeping under a bush for a few minutes, while she went down through the swamp to get a drink at the brook a couple of hundred feet away, the little fool woke up and thought herself deserted.  She set up such a bleating as was bound to cause something to happen in that wild neighborhood.”