the pine-tree on the cliff-top, the woodsman
instinctively threw forward his rifle. But the next moment he dropped
it, with a slight flush, and gave a quick glance around him as if he
feared that unseen eyes might have taken note of the gesture.

"Hell!" he muttered, "I'd 'a' been no better'n a _murderer_, 'f I'd
'a' gone an' plugged the Old Girl _now_!"

THE FIGHT AT THE WALLOW

I

FAR to the northeast of Ringwaak Hill, just beyond that deep,
far-rimmed lake which begets the torrent of the Ottanoonsis, rise the
bluff twin summits of Old Walquitch, presiding over an unbroken and
almost untrodden wilderness. Some way up the southeasterly flank of
the loftier and more butting of the twin peaks ran a vast, open shelf,
or terrace, a kind of barren, whose swampy but austere soil bore no
growth but wiry bush. The green tips of this bushy growth were a
favoured "browse" of the caribou, who, though no lovers of the
heights, would often wander up from their shaggy and austere plains in
quest of this aromatic forage. But this lofty mountainside barren had
yet another attraction for the caribou. Close at its edge, just where
a granite buttress fell away steeply toward the lake, a tiny, almost
imperceptible spring, stained with iron and pungent with salt,
trickled out from among the roots of a dense, low thicket. Past the
bare spot made by these oozings, and round behind the thicket, led a
dim trail, worn by the feet of caribou, moose, bear, deer, and other
stealthy wayfarers. And to this spring, when the moon of the falling
leaves brought in the season of love and war, the caribou bulls were
wont to come, delighting to form their wallow in the pungent, salty
mud.

The bald twin peaks of Old Walquitch were ghostly white in the
flood of the full moon, just risen, and swimming like a globe of
witch's fire over the far, dark, wooded horizon. But the bushy
shelf and the spring by the thicket, were still in shadow. Along the
trail to the spring, moving noiselessly, yet with a confident
dignity, came a paler shadow, the shape of a huge, gray-white
caribou bull with wide-spreading antlers.

At the edge of the spring the bull stopped and began sniffing the
sharp-scented mud. Apparently he found no sign of a rival having
passed that way before him, or of a cow having kept tryst there.
Lifting his splendid head he stared all about him in the shadow, and
up at the bare, illuminated fronts of the twin peaks.

[Illustration: