s some giant moose had gone shambling over the quaking mud
bottom. But Ba'tiste looked only at a long shuffling foot-mark the
length of a man's fore-arm with padded ball-like pressures as of monster
toes. The French hunter would at once examine which way that great foot
had pointed. Were there other impressions dimmer on the dry mud? Did the
crushed spear-grass tell any tales of what had passed that mud hole? If
it did, Ba'tiste would be seen wandering apparently aimlessly out on the
prairie, carrying his uncased rifle carefully that the sunlight should
not glint from the barrel, zigzagging up a foothill where perhaps wild
plums or shrub berries hung rotting with frost ripeness. Ba'tiste did
not stand full height at the top of the hill. He dropped face down, took
off his hat, or scarlet "safety" handkerchief, and peered warily over
the crest of the hill. If he went on over into the next valley, the
other men would say they "guessed he smelt bear." If he came back, they
knew he had been on a cold scent that had faded indistinguishably as the
grasses thinned.

Southern slopes of prairie and foothill are often matted tangles of a
raspberry patch. Here Ba'tiste read many things--stories of many bears,
of families, of cubs, of old cross fellows wandering alone. Great slabs
of stone had been clawed up by mighty hands. Worms and snails and all
the damp clammy things that cling to the cold dark between stone and
earth had been gobbled up by some greedy forager. In the trenched
ravines crossed by the trappers lay many a hidden forest of cottonwood
or poplar or willow. Here was refuge, indeed, for the wandering
creatures of the treeless prairie that rolled away from the tops of the
cliffs.

Many secrets could be read from the clustered woods of the ravines. The
other hunters might look for the fresh nibbled alder bush where a busy
beaver had been laying up store for winter, or detect the blink of a
russet ear among the seared foliage betraying a deer, or wonder what
flesh-eater had caught the poor jack rabbit just outside his shelter of
thorny brush.

The hawk soaring and dropping--lilting and falling and lifting
again--might mean that a little mink was "playing dead" to induce the
bird to swoop down so that the vampire beast could suck the hawk's
blood, or that the hawk was watching for an unguarded moment to plunge
down with his talons in a poor "fool-hen's" feathers.

These things might interest the others. They did not in