he other's.

PART II. THE LANDLOOKER

Chapter XVI

In every direction the woods. Not an opening of any kind offered
the mind a breathing place under the free sky. Sometimes the pine
groves,--vast, solemn, grand, with the patrician aloofness of the
truly great; sometimes the hardwood,--bright, mysterious, full of life;
sometimes the swamps,--dark, dank, speaking with the voices of the
shyer creatures; sometimes the spruce and balsam thickets,--aromatic,
enticing. But never the clear, open sky.

And always the woods creatures, in startling abundance and tameness. The
solitary man with the packstraps across his forehead and shoulders had
never seen so many of them. They withdrew silently before him as
he advanced. They accompanied him on either side, watching him with
intelligent, bright eyes. They followed him stealthily for a little
distance, as though escorting him out of their own particular territory.
Dozens of times a day the traveller glimpsed the flaunting white flags
of deer. Often the creatures would take but a few hasty jumps, and then
would wheel, the beautiful embodiments of the picture deer, to snort and
paw the leaves. Hundreds of birds, of which he did not know the name,
stooped to his inspection, whirred away at his approach, or went about
their business with hardy indifference under his very eyes. Blase
porcupines trundled superbly from his path. Once a mother-partridge
simulated a broken wing, fluttering painfully. Early one morning the
traveller ran plump on a fat lolling bear, taking his ease from the new
sun, and his meal from a panic stricken army of ants. As beseemed two
innocent wayfarers they honored each other with a salute of surprise,
and went their way. And all about and through, weaving, watching, moving
like spirits, were the forest multitudes which the young man never saw,
but which he divined, and of whose movements he sometimes caught for a
single instant the faintest patter or rustle. It constituted the mystery
of the forest, that great fascinating, lovable mystery which, once it
steals into the heart of a man, has always a hearing and a longing when
it makes its voice heard.

The young man's equipment was simple in the extreme. Attached to a heavy
leather belt of cartridges hung a two-pound ax and a sheath knife. In
his pocket reposed a compass, an air-tight tin of matches, and a map
drawn on oiled paper of a district divided into sections. Some few of
the sections wer