fierce conviction that he had vanquished everything in the world
possessed him. He peered back into the dark cavern of evergreen
out of which the streamlet gurgled, and then trotted straight away
from it, growling back his defiance as he ran. At a safe distance
he stopped, and faced about. Nothing was following him, and the
importance of his achievements grew upon him. He began to swell;
his fore-legs he planted pugnaciously, he hollowed his back, and
began to bark with all the puppyish ferocity that was in him. And
though he continued to yelp, and pounded the earth with his paws,
and tore up the green grass with his sharp little teeth, nothing
dared to come out of the black forest in answer to his challenge!

His head was high and his ears cocked jauntily as he trotted up
the slope, and for the first time in his three months of existence
he yearned to give battle to something that was alive. He was a
changed Peter, no longer satisfied with the thought of gnawing
sticks or stones or mauling a rabbit skin. At the crest of the
slope he stopped, and yelped down, almost determined to go back to
that black patch of forest and chase out everything that was in
it. Then he turned toward Cragg's Ridge, and what he saw seemed
slowly to shrink up the pugnaciousness that was in him, and his
stiffened tail drooped until the knotty end of it touched the
ground.

Three or four hundred yards away, out of the heart of that cup-
like paradise which ran back through a break in the ridge, rose a
spiral of white smoke, and with the sight of that smoke Peter
heard also the chopping of axe. It made him shiver, and yet he
made his way toward it. He was not old enough--nor was it in the
gentle blood of his Mackenzie mother--to know the meaning of hate;