no longer be silent.

"Pa," he asked, "how long has Old Joe been prowling these hills?"

A man who would speak of coons must think before he spoke. For a full ninety seconds Mun did not answer. Then he said seriously:

"A right smart time, Harky. There's them'll tell you that even if a coon don't get trapped, or shot, or dog kil't, or die no death 'fore his time, he'll live only about ten years anyhow. I reckon that may be so if you mean just ordinary coons. Old Joe, he ain't no ordinary coon. My grandpa hunted him, an' my pa, an' me, an' you've hunted him. Old Joe, he's jest about as much of a fixture in these hills as us Mundees."

Harky pondered this information. When he went to school down at the Crossroads, which he did whenever he couldn't get out of it, he had acquired some education. But he had also acquired some disturbing information. Miss Cathby, who taught all eight grades, was a very earnest soul dedicated to the proposition that the children in her care must not grow up to wallow in the same morass of mingled ignorance and superstition that surrounded their fathers and mothers.

Miss Cathby had pointed out, and produced scientific statistics to prove, that the moon was nothing more than a satellite of the earth. As such, its influence over earth dwellers was strictly limited. The moon was responsible for tides and other things about which Miss Cathby had been very vague because she didn't know. But she did know that the moon could not affect birth, death, or destiny.

Old Joe had been the subject of another of Miss Cathby's lectures. He was just a big coon, she said, though she mispronounced it "raccoon." It was absurd even to think that he had been living in the Creeping Hills forever. Old Joe's predecessor had also been just a big raccoon. Since Old Joe was mortal, and like all mortals must eventually pass to his everlasting reward, his successor would be in all probab