He had also traveled extensively and knew all the safe places for a fox to stop. At last, after enduring many hardships and sleeping in swamps and on beds of nettles, and sometimes having to run all night and not sleep at all, and being forced to move so many times that he never had any home feeling, he had discovered the most delightful spot imaginable. It was a beautiful wood toward the north of the island, where the gnarled old trees were so thick and crooked and the weeds so tall that the sun never touched the ground, and it was so dark and gloomy there men said it was the home of gnomes and goblins and no one could be induced to pass through it. Even the little streams gurgled hoarsely and their waters were black, and the great owls couldn’t tell when it was night and so hooted throughout the day, and bats were always flying about with shrill screams. As many wild creatures looking for peace found their way here and never again went out of the forest, he had much good company. There were foxes, bears, birds, deer, monkeys, rabbits, squirrels, pigeons, ducks, and a host of tiny things like worms, beetles, scorpions, mice, ants, lizards, centipedes, frogs, grasshoppers, eels, snails, crabs and caterpillars, and also a wild hen and her mate, who had a very hard time ever raising a family, a pouyou brought all the way from South America with the initials of a sailor who would never see it again cut on its brown shell armor, crickets that the Japanese call grass larks and that sing more sweetly there than any place in the world, a tortoise so many hundreds of years old he didn’t remember when he was born, a rusty old crocodile who called himself Luxuriant-Thick-Mud-Master and a parrot that had known the misery of living in a cage until once the door was left open. Then he went away without saying good-by and flew straight over the hills and rivers and rice fields until he lit on a tree in this wood. How he chuckled when he knew he had reached the land he had so often heard about, the land the birds call Napatantutu, which in their language means Stay Here Always. And at first he thought it a great joke to scream “Look out,” and a few other human words not so polite, and throw all the animals in a panic. But after he had been there a while he either reformed or forgot how men talked and so bothered them no more. The tortoise having lived longer than any of the others, had had time to find out more, and he said there was a huge monster in a far-distant part of the wood that was neither man nor beast, but more dangerous than either. “Its eyes were bright as any glass, Its scales were hard as any brass,”