ck, intelligent eyes, watched it fall, from
branch to branch, turning over and over--oh! so softly--to the ground.
When he had poked his way to it--walking flat-footed, like a bear or a
railway porter--it was dead. Slain in a breath! Without a flutter,
killed! By what? By disease--diphtheria. But not here would the
terrible drama be worked out. This was but an isolated victim, first
of the thousands that would presently succumb to the fell disease far,
far over there, to the westward, hundreds of miles away, in England and
Wales, perhaps, whither they were probably bound.

But the poor starved corpse, choked to death in the end maybe, was of
no use to the wolverine. As he sniffed it he found that out. The
thing was wasted to the bones even. And turning away from it--he
suddenly "froze" in his tracks where he stood.

One of those little wandering eddies which seem to meander about a
forest in an aimless sort of way, coming from and going now hither, as
if the breeze itself were lost among the still aisles, had touched his
wet muzzle; and its touch spelt--"Man!"

If it had been the taint of ten thousand deaths it could not have
affected him more. He became a beast cast in old, old bronze, and as
hard as bronze; and when he moved, it was stiffly, and all bristly, and
on end.

Animals have no counting of time. In the wild, things happen as
swiftly as a flash of light; or, perhaps, nothing happens at all for a
night, or a day, or half a week. Therefore I do not know exactly how
long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a
certain spot--himself unseen. All animals, almost, can do that, but
none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine. He
is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only--a name to conjure
with.

He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there _had_ been. He
found--showing himself again now--that a man--a hunter, a trapper, one
after fur--had made himself here a _cache_, a store under the earth;
and--well, the wolverine's great, bear-like claws seemed made for
digging.

He dug--and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have
known it. He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and
precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches,
and, with humped shoulders, stare--scowl, I mean--round in his
lowering, low-browed fashion.

Once a bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an
ele