pessimists, always finding something to complain about, even in
their love days.

And these were love days. That was the odd thought that came to
Carrigan as he lay half on his face, his fingers slowly and
cautiously working a loophole between his shoulder-pack and the
rock. They were love days all up and down the big rivers, where
men and women sang for joy, and children played, forgetful of the
long, hard days of winter. And in forest, plain, and swamp was
this spirit of love also triumphant over the land. It was the
mating season of all feathered things. In countless nests were the
peeps and twitters of new life; mothers of first-born were
teaching their children to swim and fly; from end to end of the
forest world the little children of the silent places, furred and
feathered, clawed and hoofed, were learning the ways of life.
Nature's yearly birthday was half-way gone, and the doors of
nature's school wide open. And the tiny brown songster at the end
of his birch twig proclaimed the joy of it again, and challenged
all the world to beat him in his adulation.

Carrigan found that he could peer between his pack and the rock to
where the other warbler was singing--and where his enemy lay
watching for the opportunity to kill. It was taking a chance. If a
movement betrayed his loophole, his minutes were numbered. But he
had worked cautiously, an inch at a time, and was confident that
the beginning of his effort to fight back was, up to the present
moment, undiscovered. He believed that he knew about where the
ambushed man was concealed. In the edge of a low-hanging mass of
balsam was a fallen cedar. From behind the butt of that cedar he
was sure the shots had come.