Powerful beaks, instead of remaining closed and without sound, snapped and hissed at him as the big gray owls watched his passing.

He heard the rustling of brush, soft as the stir of a woman's dress, where living things were secretly moving, and he heard the louder crash of clumsy and piggish feet, and caught the strong scent of a porcupine as it waddled to its midnight lunch of poplar bark.

Then the trail ended, and Jolly Roger's scent led into the pathless forest, with its shifting streams and pools of moonlight, its shadows and black pits of darkness.

And here--now--Peter began his trespass into the strongholds of the People of the Night.

He heard a wolf howl, a cry filled with loneliness, yet with a shivering death-note in it; he caught the musky, skunkish odor of a fox that was stalking prey in the face of a whispering breath of wind; once, in a moment of dead stillness, he listened to the snap of teeth and the crackle of bones in one of the dark pits, where a fisher-cat--with eyes that gleamed like coals of fire--was devouring the warm and bleeding carcass of a mother partridge.