e his
feet to see how his natural snowshoes (Nature's winter gift to every
grouse) were developing, before letting him go again. But the grouse
was an old bird, not to be caught napping, who had thought on the
possibilities of being followed ere he made his plunge. He had ploughed
under the snow for a couple of feet, then swerved sharply to the left
and made a little chamber for himself just under some snow-packed spruce
tips, with a foot of snow for a blanket over him. When I fell forward,
disturbing his rest most rudely ere he had time to wink the snow out of
his eyes, he burst out with a great whirr and sputter between my left
hand and my head, scattering snow all over me, and thundered off through
the startled woods, flicking a branch here and there with his wings,
and shaking down a great white shower as he rushed away for deeper
solitudes. There, no doubt, he went to sleep in the evergreens,
congratulating himself on his escape and preferring to take his chances
with the owl, rather than with some other ground-prowler that might
come nosing into his hole before the light snow had time to fill it up
effectually behind him.

Next morning I was early afield, heading for a ridge where I thought the
deer of the neighborhood might congregate with the intention of yarding
for the winter. At the foot of a wild little natural meadow, made
centuries ago by the beavers, I found the trail of two deer which had
been helping themselves to some hay that had been cut and stacked there
the previous summer. My big buck was not with them; so I left the trail
in peace to push through a belt of woods and across a pond to an old
road that led for a mile or two towards the ridge I was seeking.

Early as I was, the wood folk were ahead of me. Their tracks were
everywhere, eager, hungry tracks, that poked their noses into every
possible hiding place of food or game, showing how the two-days' fast
had whetted their appetites and set them to running keenly the moment
the last flakes were down and the storm truce ended.

A suspicious-looking clump of evergreens, where something had brushed
the snow rudely from the feathery tips, stopped me as I hurried down the
old road. Under the evergreens was a hole in the snow, and at the bottom
of the hole hard inverted cups made by deer's feet. I followed on to
another hole in the snow (it could scarcely be called a trail) and then
to another, and another, some twelve or fifteen feet apart, leading i