"I'll bet a few dollars that you haven't, if you've lived all your life in the Middle West," Lennox answered. "Maybe you've got what the scientists call an inherited memory of it. It's the kind of meat your grandfather used to live on--venison." Both of them had seemed pleased that he liked the venison. And both seemed boyishly eager to test his reaction to the great, wild huckleberries that were the dessert of the simple meal. He tried them with much ceremony. Their flavor really surprised him. They had a tang, a fragrance that was quite unlike anything he had ever tasted, yet which brought a curious flood of dim, half-understood memories. It seemed to him that always he had stood on the hillsides, picking these berries as they grew, and staining his lips with them. But at once he pushed the thoughts out of his mind, thinking that his imagination was playing tricks upon him. And soon after this, Lennox led him out of the house for his first glimpse of the hills in the darkness. They walked together out to the gate, across the first of the wide pastures where, at certain seasons, Lennox kept his cattle; and at last they came out upon the tree-covered ridge. The moon was just rising. They could see it casting a curious glint over the very tips of the pines. But it couldn't get down between them. They stood too close, too tall and thick for that. And for a moment, Dan's only sensation was one of silence. "You have to stand still a moment, to really know anything," Lennox told him. They both stood still. Dan was as motionless as that day in the park, long weeks before, when the squirrel had climbed on his shoulder. The first effect was a sensation that the silence was deepening around them. It wasn't really true. It was simply that he had become aware of the little continuous sounds of which usually he was unconscious, and they tended to accentuate the hush of the night. He heard his watch ticking in his pocket, the whispered stir of his own breathing, and he was quite certain that he could hear the fevered beat of his own heart in his breast. But then slowly he began to become aware of other sounds, so faint and indistinct that he really could not be sure that he heard them. There was a faint rustle and stir, as of the tops of the pine trees far away. Possibly he heard the wind too, the faintest whisper in the world through the underbrush. And finally, most wonderful of all, he began to hear one by one, over the ridge on which he stood, little whispered sounds of living creatures stirring in the thickets. He knew, just as all mountaineers know, that the wilderness about him was stirring and pulsing with life. Some of the sounds were quite clear--an occasional stir of a pebble or the crack of a twig, and some, like the faintest twitching of leaves in the brush not ten feet distant, could only be guessed at. "What is making the sounds?" he asked.