a business on hand to waste time upon the
cross trails, and when the double trail divided, he followed the
fainter, and the human one, as before. Of other hunters who, like
himself, were abroad in the woods, he saw little, for his eyes rarely
wandered from the ground under his nose. And those of the
forest-dwellers who caught sight of the great grey shape that went
floating through the trees, gave it a wide berth, with that curious
forest etiquette which is deeper than politeness, and is close in touch
with death.

When he emerged from the forest into the open country, Kiopo paused to
reconnoitre. His eyes became of the utmost importance now, because the
world was widening. In the forest you could only see where the trees
permitted, but now its place was taken by long grassy swells that
rippled under the wind. Into it, Kiopo swung his nose. It came in a
series of soft surges from the south. Many faint odours were travelling
down it now; scents that were the body of the wilderness lifted into the
air. They were subtly mixed, it would take the very finest nose to
disentangle them. With his eyes narrowed, and his head raised, Kiopo
searched the wind. His sensitive nostrils gave little quivers and rapid
twists that were like a play of fingers that dabbled delicately in the
air. The scents that came were chiefly those of the growing things,
grass, flowers and trees. But running through them, in fine streams of
odours, there were other scents that were like the flowing souls of
birds and beasts, spilt, in spite of themselves, into the wandering
world.

Was some tiny drop of Dusty Star's body-scent mixed among them--sending
out its wordless message through the enormous space? For all the keen
searching of Kiopo's nostrils, the drop, if it were there, escaped them.
But if the trails of the air were lost in the wilderness of the wind,
the trails of the earth remained, and still the one he had hitherto
followed went plainly through the grass. Once again Kiopo took it up,
following it steadily till at length he came to the spot where the
Indians had taken to the canoe. In the marshy ground under the willows,
he lost it completely. It was as if it was sucked into the marsh. In
vain he searched the whole neighbourhood, and ran backwards and forwards
in a desperate effort to find some vestige of the broken trail, always
returning with the same result to the roots of the willows among the
black ooze.

Now Kiopo's faultless wood-cr