In the one I know best, as in most of our New England pastures, the cattle have long ceased to browse and men came only because nature draws them thither. The wild creatures seem to sense this and to lose much of their woodland fear of me. Last night, in the first promise of the gray of dawn a fox barked at my camp door, scratching at the threshold as if he were the house dog, asking to be let in out of the cold and lie at the fire. I heard the barnyard roosters faintly crowing in the distance, but a little screech owl called clearly on a limb just beyond the ridge-pole. The roosters' cry had in it nothing but self-gratulatory bombast. I know town-dwarfed men that talk like that. The owl's call was to his mate, as was the roosters', but there was no bombast in its plaint, just a mournfulness of endearment, a touch of tears at the silence and delay. After a little the other came and all the mournfulness went out of the tone. Instead there was cooing in its quality as the two talked reassuringly a moment. The first call is of six or eight notes that start high and tremulo down the owl's diatonic scale to a low one that has a round, flute-like quality though the whole sounds as if it were made somewhere else and were merely echoing from the wood. The bird is as hard to locate by sound as an echo would be and is usually much nearer than it seems when I hear him. The second call is the last note of the first one, three or four times repeated with such rapidity that it has a flute-like reverberation that is almost like a round and very musical purr. The cry of this bird has been called eerie and disquieting, but I do not think it so, even in the loneliness of the question call. The satisfied one is as gentle and cuddly as one can find among birds. [Illustration: The Fox that slips along the Winding Path at Dawn]