and said:

"There's one o' them."

Wilbur could only see a few little holes in the bark, but the old
woodsman, slicing off a section, showed the tree girdled with the
galleries that the beetle had made. He raised a whoop, and Wilbur in the
distance could hear the Supervisor saying, "Three," implying it was the
third piece found infected.

"But I don't quite see," said Wilbur, "how they make these galleries
running in all sorts of ways."

"I ain't no expert on this here," said Rifle-Eye. "But as far as I know,
in the spring a beetle finds an old decayed tree. She begins at once to
bore a sort of passageway, half in the bark an' half in the wood, an'
lays eggs all along the sides. When the eggs come out, each grub digs a
tunnel out from the big gallery, an' in about three weeks the grub has
made a long tunnel, livin' on the bark an' wood for its food, an' has
grown to be a beetle. Then it bores its way out an' flies away to
another tree to repeat the same interestin' performance."

"And if there are a lot of them," said Wilbur, "I suppose it stops the
sap from going up."

"Exactly," said the hunter. "But they generally begin on sickly trees."

"Wilbur," he called a moment later, "come here."

The boy hurried over to the old hunter, who was standing by a dead
tree--a small one, lying on the ground.

"Try that one," he said.

The boy struck it with the ax and it showed up alive with beetles and
grubs and honeycombed with galleries.

"Gee," said the boy, "that's a bad one."

"That's very like the way I found the other," said the old hunter; "one
very bad one lyin' on the ground an' just a few around it bad, while
just a short distance away there was no signs."

He stood and thought for a minute or two, but aside from the
coincidence, Wilbur could not see that there was anything strange in
that. They worked busily for a few moments, girdling the infected trees,
and also girdling some small useless trees near by, because, as the
hunter explained, when the beetles flew out seeking a new tree to
destroy, they would prefer one that was dying, as a tree from which
all the bark has been cut away all round always does, and then these
trees could be burned.

"Have you noticed wheel tracks around here?" asked the hunter
thoughtfully.

"I did think so," said Wilbur, "near that dead tree, but I s'posed, of
course, I was wrong. What would a wagon be doing up here?"

Suddenly the Ranger dropped his ax as though he ha