e, because, as
Pete instantly inferred, the snow there had been partly blown away,
partly packed, by the unbroken winds. They were far out of gunshot.
But he was going to trail them down even through that deep snow. By
tireless persistence and craft he would do it, if he had to do it on
his hands and knees.

Such wind as there was, a light but bitter air drawing irregularly
down out of the north-west, blew directly from the man to the herd,
which was too far off, however, to catch the ominous taint and take
alarm. Pete's first care was to work around behind the herd till this
danger should be quite eliminated. For a time his hunger was forgotten
in the interest of the hunt; but presently, as he toiled his slow way
through the deep of the forest, it grew too insistent to be ignored.
He paused to strip bark from such seedlings of balsam fir as he
chanced upon, scraping off and devouring the thin, sweetish pulp that
lies between the bark and the mature wood. He gathered, also, the
spicy tips of the birch-buds, chewing them up by handfuls and spitting
out the residue of hard husks. And in this way he managed at least to
soothe down his appetite from angry protest to a kind of doubtful
expectancy.

At last, after a couple of hours' hard floundering, the woods thinned,
the ground sloped upward, and he came out upon the flank of the ridge,
a long way behind the herd, indeed, but well around the wind. In the
trail of the herd the snow was broken up, and not more than a foot and
a half in depth. On a likely-looking hillock he scraped it away
carefully with his feet, till he reached the ground; and here he found
what he expected--a few crimson berries of the wintergreen, frozen,
but plump and sweet-fleshed. Half a handful of these served for the
moment to cajole his hunger, and he pressed briskly but warily along
the ridge, availing himself of the shelter of every rampike in his
path. At last, catching sight of the hindmost stragglers of the herd,
still far out of range, he crouched like a cat, and crossed over the
crest of the ridge for better concealment.

On the eastern slope the ridge carried numerous thickets of
underbrush. From one to another of these Pete crept swiftly, at a rate
which should bring him, in perhaps an hour, abreast of the leisurely
moving herd. In an hour, then, he crawled up to the crest again, under
cover of a low patch of juniper scrub. Confidently he peered through
the scrub, his rifle ready. But hi