Those woods were the most imposing and mysterious feature in Colin's world. They bounded it in a way. Beyond a certain shallow point in them lay the Unknown, the Woodland Wonder, whereof he had heard much, but which he had never explored for himself. And this reminded him unpleasantly that he was barely fourteen, in stature measuring five feet three _and_ three eighths, facts which never obtruded themselves baldly upon his memory when he romped about the salt-marshes, or rowed a boat--or if no boat was forthcoming, paddled a washtub--on the broad tidal river that wound in and out between the marshes. Yet though the unprobed mystery of the dense woods vexed him with the feeling of being immature and young--woodland distances look vaster at fourteen than at eighteen--it fascinated him, too, more than did any riddle of the salt-marshes or lunar enigma of the ebb and flow of tide in the silvery, brackish river formed by an arm of sea that coursed inland for many a mile to meet a freshwater stream near the town where Colin was born. Any daring boy above the age of ten could learn pretty nearly all there was to know about that tidal river: of the mammal and fish wherewith it teemed, from the great harbor seal, once the despot of the river, to the tiny brit that frolicked in the eddies; and about the graceful bird-life that soared above its brackish current. He could bathe, shrieking with excitement, as wild from delight as any young water-bird, in the foam of the rocky bar where fresh stream and salt stream met with a great crowing of waters and laughter of spray. He could imitate the triple whistle, the shrill "Wheu! Wheu! Wheu!" of the greater yellow-legs so cleverly as to beguile that noisy bird, which is said to warn every other feathered thing within hearing, into forgetting its panic and alighting near him. He could give the drawn-out, plaintive "Ter-lee-ee!" call of the black-breasted plover, and find the crude nest of the spotted sandpiper nestling beneath a tall clump of candle-grass. All these secrets and many more were within easy reach and could be studied in his unwritten Nature Primer whose pages were traced in the flight of each bird and the spawn of every fish. But the Heart of the Woods was a closed book to most fourteen-year-old boys born and brought up in the little tidal town of Exmouth. Colin had often longed to turn the pages of that book--to penetrate farther into the woods than he had dared to do yet. This longing was fanned by the tales of men who had hunted, trapped or felled trees in them, who could spell out each syllable of the woodlore to be studied in their golden twilight; and who, as they roved and read, could put a finger on many a colored illustration of Nature's methods set against a green background of branches or fluttering underbrush, like the flitting foliage of moving pictures.