And as they played they began for the first time to
imitate the old mother keeping guard over them, sitting up often to
watch and listen and sift the winds, trying to understand what fear was,
and why they had been taken away from the sunny hillside where the world
was so much bigger and brighter than here. But home is where mother
is,--that, fortunately, is also true of the little Wood Folk, who
understand it in their own savage way for a season,--and in their wonder
at their new surroundings the memory of the old home gradually faded
away. They never knew with what endless care the new den had been
chosen; how the mother, in the days when she knew she was watched, had
searched it out and watched over it and put her nose to every ridge and
ravine and brook-side, day after day, till she was sure that no foot
save that of the wild things had touched the soil within miles of the
place. They felt only a greater wildness, a deeper solitude; and they
never forgot, though they were unmolested, the strange feeling that was
born in them on that first terrifying night journey in their mother's
jaws.
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