line of tracks to save another that is too hard pressed, while
it leaps aside to hide or fly in a different direction. Thus the Stag
had sought to save his wounded mate, but the hunters remorselessly
took up her trail and gloated like wolves over the slight drip of
blood. Within another short run they found that the Stag, having
failed to divert the chase to himself, had returned to her, and at
sundown they sighted them a quarter of a mile ahead mounting a long
snow-slope. The doe was walking slowly, with hanging head and ears.
The buck was running about as though in trouble that he did not
understand, and coming back to caress the doe and wonder why she
walked so slowly. In another half-mile the hunters came up with them.
She was down in the snow. When he saw them coming, the great Stag
shook the oak-tree on his brow and circled about in doubt, then fled
from a foe he was powerless to resist.

[Illustration: "The Doe was walking slowly."]

[Illustration]

As the men came near the doe made a convulsive effort to rise, but
could not. Duff drew his knife. It never before occurred to Yan why he
and each of them carried a long knife. The poor doe turned on her foes
her great lustrous eyes; they were brimming with tears, but she made
no moan. Yan turned his back on the scene and covered his face with
his hands, but Duff went forward with the knife and did some dreadful,
unspeakable thing, Yan scarcely knew what, and when Duff called him he
slowly turned, and the big Stag's mate was lying quiet in the snow,
and the only living thing that they saw as they quit the scene was the
great round form bearing aloft the oak-tree on its brow as it haunted
the nearer hills.

And when, an hour later, the men came with the sleigh to lift the
doe's body from the crimsoned snow, there were large fresh tracks
about it, and a dark shadow passed over the whitened hill into the
silent night.

* * * * *

What morbid thoughts came from the fire that night! How the man in Yan
did taunt the glutted brute! Was this the end? Was this the real
chase? After long weeks, with the ideal alone in mind, after countless
blessed failures, was this the vile success--a beautiful, glorious,
living creature tortured into a loathsome mass of carrion?

[Illustration]

VII

But when the morning came the impress of the night was dim. A long
howl came over the hill, and the thought that a wolf was on the trail
that