f a great body in the darkness at the
mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague,
threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards
he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was,
rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night.

After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled
fire, but they heard nothing more. In the morning they started out to
look at the few traps they had set the previous evening and to put
out new ones. By an unspoken agreement they kept together all day, and
returned to camp towards evening.

On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment, that the lean-to
had been again torn down. The visitor of the preceding day had returned,
and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and bedding, and
destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its tracks, and on
leaving the camp it had gone along the soft earth by the brook, where
the footprints were as plain as if on snow, and, after a careful
scrutiny of the trail, it certainly did seem as if, whatever the thing
was, it had walked off on but two legs.

The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs, and
kept up a roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting on
guard most of the time. About midnight the thing came down through the
forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hill-side for
nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it moved about,
and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a
peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the fire.

In the morning the two trappers, after discussing the strange events of
the last thirty-six hours, decided that they would shoulder their packs
and leave the valley that afternoon. They were the more ready to do this
because in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign they had caught
very little fur. However, it was necessary first to go along the line of
their traps and gather them, and this they started out to do.

All the morning they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each
one empty. On first leaving camp they had the disagreeable sensation of
being followed. In the dense spruce thickets they occasionally heard a
branch snap after they had passed; and now and then there were slight
rustling noises among the small pines to one side of them.

At noon they were back within a couple of miles o