the woods. A stick snapped to the right and a low '_Woof_'
came from the left. Then all was still. Yan felt them sneaking around,
felt them watching him from the cover, and strained his eyes in vain
to see some form that he might shoot. But they were wise, and he was
wise, for had he run he would soon have seen them closing in on him.
They must have been but few, for after their council of war they
decided he was better let alone, and he never saw them at all. For
twenty minutes he waited, but hearing no more of them, arose and went
homeward. And as he tramped he thought, "Now I know how a deer feels
when the grind of a moccasined foot or the click of a lock is heard
in the trail behind him."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

In the days that followed he learned those Sandhills well, for many a
frosty day and bitter night he spent in them. He learned to follow
fast the faintest trail of deer. He learned just why that trail went
never past a tamarack-tree, and why it pawed the snow at every oak,
and why the buck's is plainest and the fawn's down wind. He learned
just what the club-rush has to say, when its tussocks break the snow.
He came to know how the musk-rat lives beneath the ice, and why the
mink slides down a hill, and what the ice says when it screams at
night. The squirrels taught him how best a fir-cone can be stripped
and which of toadstools one might eat. The partridge, why it dives
beneath the snow, and the fox, just why he sets his feet so straight,
and why he wears so huge a tail.

[Illustration]

He learned the ponds, the woods, the hills, and a hundred secrets of
the trail, but--_he got no deer_.

And though many a score of crooked frosty miles he coursed, and
sometimes had a track to lead and sometimes none, he still went on,
like Galahad when the Grail was just before him. For more than once,
the guide that led was the trail of the Sandhill Stag.

IV

[Illustration]

The hunt was nearly over, for the season's end was nigh. The
moose-birds had picked the last of the saskatoons, all the
spruce-cones were scaled, and the hunger-moon was at hand. But a
hopeful chickadee sang '_See soon_' as Yan set off one frosty day for
the great Spruce Woods. On the road he overtook a woodcutter, who told
him that at such a place he had seen two deer last night, a doe and a
monstrous stag with "a rocking-chair on his head."

[Illustration]

Straight to the very place went Yan, and found the tracks