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; but something was growing swiftly in Peter's shrewd little head, and he sensed impending danger whenever he heard the sound of the axe.