He jumped backward as a grouse arose almost from under his feet. The grouse, a little brown hen, flew to the other side of the creek and stood with feathers ruffled, clucking nervously. John’s eyes strayed back to the place from which she had flown.
Blue smoke curled from the trunk of a still burning pine there, and three feet away from the pine the grouse had made her nest in a cluster of grass. The water from the flooded stream bed had come high enough to dampen the nest and the grass about it. None had burned, and the thirteen eggs in the nest were uninjured.
Awe-stricken, John glanced once more at the scolding, nervous grouse. The wariest of all game birds had dared return to the fire, a thing it feared even more than it feared man, because its nest was there! There came to John a sl
