Lightfoot the Deer

Lightfoot the Deer was unhappy.  It was a strange unhappiness, an unhappiness such as he had never known before.  You see, he had discovered that there was a stranger in the Green Forest, a stranger of his own kind, another Deer.  He knew it by dainty footprints in the mud along the Laughing Brook and on the edge of the pond of Paddy the Beaver.  He knew it by other signs which he ran across every now and then.  But search as he would, he was unable to find that newcomer.  He had searched everywhere but always he was just too late.  The stranger had been and gone.

Now there was no anger in Lightfoot’s desire to find that stranger.  Instead, there was a great longing.  For the first time in his life Lightfoot felt lonely.  So he hunted and hunted and was unhappy.  He lost his appetite.  He slept little.  He roamed about uneasily, looking, listening, testing every Merry Little Breeze, but all in vain.

Then, one never-to-be-forgotten night, as he drank at the Laughing Brook, a strange feeling swept over him.  It was the feeling of being watched.  Lightfoot lifted his beautiful head and a slight movement caught his quick eye and drew it to a thicket not far away.  The silvery light of gentle Mistress Moon fell full on that thicket, and thrust out from it was the most beautiful head in all the Great World.  At least, that is the way it seemed to Lightfoot, though to tell the truth it was not as beautiful as his own, for it was uncrowned by antlers.  For a long minute Lightfoot stood gazing.  A pair of wonderful, great, soft eyes gazed back at him.  Then that beautiful head disappeared.

With a mighty bound, Lightfoot cleared the Laughing Brook and rushed over to the thicket in which that beautiful head had disappeared.  He plunged in, but there was no one there.  Frantically he searched, but that thicket was empty.  Then he tood still and listened.  Not a sound reached him.  It was as still as if there were no other living things in all the Green Forest.  The beautiful stranger had slipped away as silently as a shadow.

All the rest of that night Lightfoot searched through the Green Forest but his search was in vain.  The longing to find that beautiful stranger had become so great that he fairly ached with it.  It seemed to him that until he found her he could know no happiness.