The summer days dragged by, one by one, until they were all gone. Moons waxed and waned, annual plants budded, flowered, and died, the glossy green of the pine needles changed to a dusky blue; and all of these things were as they should be. There was, however, one important and disastrous omission. No rain had fallen since April. It was bad for all the forest in general and very bad for certain people in particular. Of course, the little underground folk, such as the digger squirrels and gophers, didn’t particularly care. Their small stomachs seemed to be lined with fur; and the dryer the brushwood the easier they could gnaw it. Old Urson, the porcupine, might have found this arid season quite to his liking. But it was more than possible that he didn’t even know it hadn’t rained. For Urson is ever lost in a strange apathy, a mental stupor, and life must be to him an inscrutable mystery without head or tail. He is guileless and stupid and so slow that even a cub-bear can overtake him (although clumsy little Woof, because of certain removable decorations on Urson’s back, would not care to do it a second time) and one of his only two advantages is an utter indifference to the water supply. He can get along very well on the moisture in the tree limbs on which he browses. His other advantage is, of course, a convertible-armor arrangement that he uses for a back. One minute, and Urson looks sleek and almost as handsome as, say, a dromedary seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The next, and he becomes a formidable bundle of bristling spines, a veritable burr that is most painful to touch. Of course the poison people did not care. They could swim on demand, of course, but they were not fond of water. If rain came any time during the following winter it would be soon enough for them. They lay in heavy sleep on the rock ledges where the heat waves danced. It isn’t wise, however, to put one’s trust in that slumber and go climbing over those sun-blasted rocks with unprotected ankles. A rattlesnake may look dead as last year’s leaves, he may lie so still that even the buzzard—in the sky—is deceived, and yet he can spring straight out of his dark, wicked dreams and bury his hypodermic needles, filled with as deadly a poison as a scientist can concoct in his laboratory, in the exact spot of man’s flesh he chooses. The heat waves danced and spiraled in the air, the rocks grew too hot to touch, and still the serpents lay in their heat trance, wholly content. And lastly, the buzzards had no complaint with the drought.