Wanda and Gypsy and Shep saw much of one another. They were all very
happy, perhaps because they were very busy. Full of enthusiasm that
was at once gay and serious Wanda had thrown herself into her "Work"
immediately upon returning home in the early springtime. Before the
tragic event which for the time had driven her life out of its groove
she had already won for herself the title, bestowed merrily by Wayne
Shandon, of the "White Huntress." Her "work," to which she gave up so
many hours of each day, was purposeful, steadily pursued, and brought
her a vast pleasure. The game she hunted was the squirrel tossing his
grey body through the branches of pine and cedar, the quail calling
from the hillsides, the cottontail scampering through the underbrush,
the yellowhammer, the woodpecker, the wide winged butterflies sailing
through the orchard and across the meadow lands. The weapon with which
she hunted was a camera which she carried in its black case slung over
her shoulder or hanging from the horn of Gypsy's saddle.
Reared since babyhood in a land where men and women were few and where
the wild things of the forests were many and unafraid, she had long ago
come to look upon the little, bright eyed woodland folk as her
playmates. Many of her childhood sorrows and joys were linked with
their fates. Her first great grief had occurred when she was ten years
old and Jule, her brown bear cub,--named after the cook to whom he bore
in the child's eyes a marked resemblance, a slight and necessary
variation in the termination of the name taking care of the matter of a
difference in sex,--came to an untimely end through the instinctive and
merciless conduct of Shep's grandparents. The house was filled with
chipmunks who frightened Julia, to whom they were "jest rats, drat
'em," and who raided the kitchen systematically. A trained grey
squirrel barked from the trees above the house, and pet rabbits were
numerous and unprofitable about the vegetable garden. At the age when
little girls in the cities were dressing and undressing their dolls,
Wanda was taming a palpitating heart in some little fury [Transcriber's
note: furry?] breast or leaning breathlessly, like a small mother bird
herself, over a nest in the grass watching eagerly for the tender bills
to peck and chip their way out into the wonderful world.
It was but natural therefore that after her childhood had gone and she
had outgrown her passion for numberless pets overrunning the house just
as her sisters in the cities had outgrown their pleasure in dressing
and undressing dolls, she should become the "White Huntress." She
loved more than ever the wildness of the forest lands, and the ways of
the woodland things were wonderful and mysterious to her. And now,
from a new angle, they were her study.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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