At the same instant they heard His voice. Twenty or thirty strong, He cried, “Ho! ho! Ha! ha!” It roared like the sound of winds and storms. He beat on the tree trunks as though they were drums. It was wracking and terrifying. A distant twisting and rending of parted bushes rang out. There was a snapping and cracking of broken boughs.
He was coming.
He was coming into the heart of the thicket.
Then short whistling flute-like trills sounded together with the loud flap of soaring wings. A pheasant rose from under His very feet. The deer heard the wingbeats of the pheasant grow fainter as he mounted into the air. There was a loud crash like thunder. Then silence. Then a dull thud on the ground.
“He is dead,” said Bambi’s mother, trembling.
“The first,” Ronno added.
The young doe, Marena, said, “In this very hour many of us are going to die. Perhaps I shall be one of them.” No one listened to her, for a mad terror had seized them all.
Bambi tried to think. But His savage noises grew louder and louder and paralyzed Bambi’s senses. He heard nothing but those noises. They numbed him while amidst the howling, shouting and crashing he could hear his own heart pounding. He felt nothing but curiosity and did not even realize that he was trembling in every limb. From time to time his mother whispered in his ear, “Stay close to me.” She was shouting, but in the uproar it sounded to Bambi as if she were whispering. Her “Stay close to me,” encouraged him. It was like a chain holding him. Without it he would have rushed off senselessly, and he heard it at the very moment when his wits were wandering and he wanted to dash away.
He looked around. All sorts of creatures were swarming past, scampering blindly over one another. A pair of weasels ran by like thin snakelike streaks. The eye could scarcely follow them. A ferret listened as though bewitched to every shriek that desperate Friend Hare let out.
A fox was standing in a whole flurry of fluttering pheasants. They paid no attention to him. They ran right under his nose and he paid no attention to them. Motionless, with his head thrust forward, he listened to the onrushing tumult, lifting his pointed ears and snuffed the air with his nose. Only his tail moved, slowly wagging with his intense concentration.
A pheasant dashed up. He had come from where the danger was worst, and was beside himself with fear.
“Don’t try to fly,” he shouted to the others. “Don’t fly, just run! Don’t lose your head! Don’t try to fly! Just run, run, run!”
He kept repeating the same thing over and over again as though to encourage himself. But he no longer knew what he was saying.
“Ho! ho! ha! ha!” came the death cry from quite near apparently.
“Don’t lose your head,” screamed the pheasant. And at the same time his voice broke in a whistling gasp and, spreading his wings, he flew up with a loud whir. Bambi watched how he flew straight up, directly between the trees, beating his wings. The dark metallic blue and greenish-brown markings on his body gleamed like gold. His long tail feathers swept proudly behind him. A short crash like thunder sounded sharply. The pheasant suddenly crumpled up in mid-flight. He turned head over tail as though he wanted to catch his claws with his beak, and then dropped violently to earth. He fell among the others and did not move again.
Then everyone lost his senses. They all rushed toward one another. Five or six pheasants rose at one time with a loud whir. “Don’t fly,” cried the rest and ran. The thunder cracked five or six times and more of the flying birds dropped lifeless to the ground.
“Come,” said Bambi’s mother. Bambi looked around. Ronno and Karus had already fled. Old Nettla was disappearing. Only Marena was still beside them. Bambi went with his mother, Marena following them timidly. All around them was a roaring and shouting, and the thunder was crashing. Bambi’s mother was calm. She trembled quietly but she kept her wits together.
“Bambi, my child,” she said, “keep behind me all the time. We’ll have to get out of here and across the open place. But now we’ll go slowly.”
The din was maddening. The thunder crashed ten, twelve times as He hurled it from His hands.
“Watch out,” said Bambi’s mother. “Don’t run. But when we have to cross the open place, run as fast as you can. And don’t forget, Bambi, my child, don’t pay any attention to me when we get out there. Even if I fall, don’t pay any attention to me, just keep on running. Do you understand, Bambi?”
His mother walked carefully step by step amidst the uproar. The pheasants were running up and down, burying themselves in the snow. Suddenly they would spring out and begin to run again. The whole Hare family was hopping to and fro, squatting down and then hopping again. No one said a word. They were all spent with terror and numbed by the din and thunderclaps.
It grew lighter in front of Bambi and his mother. The clearing showed through the bushes. Behind them the terrifying drumming on the tree trunks came crashing nearer and nearer. The breaking branches snapped. There was a roaring of “Ha, ha! Ho, ho!”
Then Friend Hare and two of his cousins rushed past them across the clearing. Bing! Ping! Bang! roared the thunder. Bambi saw how Friend Hare struck an elder in the middle of his flight and lay with his white belly turned upward. He quivered a little and then was still. Bambi stood petrified. But from behind him came the cry, “Here they are! Run! Run!”
There was a loud clapping of wings suddenly opened. There were gasps, sobs, showers of feathers, flutterings. The pheasants took wing and the whole flock rose almost at one instant. The air was throbbing with
