drawn melancholy wail of a puma; again and again three wildcats hunting together screeched savagely to startle and confuse their prey.
Such was the chorus which greeted Black Bull at the hour of his birth on an April morning when the Low Country was young and the fear of the white man had not yet settled over the wilderness and stilled the wilderness voices. The spring had been damp and cold. This was the first warm clear dawn in many weeks, and for that reason the outcry of the preying beasts and the great birds which frequented the cypress swamp swelled louder and longer than usual. The wild black cow, standing guard over her first-born in the recesses of a vast canebrake, shook her horns and glanced apprehensively to right and left. Many times she had listened to this fearful concert of the primeval forest—listened unmoved and indifferent, because she was a child of the forest herself and knew how to meet its dangers. But on this morning, when she had just become a mother, she was afraid.
Her calf, glossy black from nose to tail tip, lay on a dry bed of leaves in the midst of canes which towered thirty feet above him. For forty miles or more the canebrake stretched between the great swamp and the dry upland woods, forming an evergreen belt a half mile in width, the height and girth of the canes attesting the richness of the dark
