a sidewise leap which carried him several feet away from the straight
path he had been following. Again he trotted ahead for a short
distance. And then he wheeled around and ran in a circle. And after he
had made the circle he jumped to one side once more, and ran along on
an old tree which had fallen upon the ground. He was not playing. No!
--Tommy Fox was just trying to obey his mother. Ever since he had been
big enough to wander off by himself she had told him that he must
never go anywhere without making jumps and circles. "It takes longer,"
she said; "but it is better to do that way, because it makes it hard
for a dog to follow you. If you ran straight ahead, Farmer Green's dog
could go smelling along in your footsteps, and if he didn't actually
catch you he could follow you right home and then we would have to
move, to say the least."

Tommy was so afraid of dogs that he almost never forgot to do just as
his mother told him. He was half-way home and passing through a clump
of evergreens, when he suddenly stopped. The wind was blowing in his
face, and brought to his nostrils a smell that made him tremble. It
was not a frightened sort of tremble, but a delicious, joyful shiver
that Tommy felt. For he smelled something that reminded him at once of
that feather with which he had been playing. And Tommy stood as still
as a statue and his sharp eyes looked all around. At first he could
see nothing. But in a minute or two he noticed something on the
ground, beneath one of the evergreen trees. He had looked at it
carefully several times; and each time he had decided that it was only
an old tree-root. But now he saw that he had been mistaken.

Yes! It was old Mother Grouse herself!