urrowed his way almost as quickly as the fox himself would have done
it. With his jaws he tore through the half-inch outer crust, and a
moment later stood in the open, with the fire between him and Le Beau.

The windfall was a blazing furnace, and suddenly Le Beau ran back a
dozen steps so that he could see on the farther side. A hundred yards
away he saw Miki making for the deeper forest.

It was a clear shot. At that distance Le Beau would have staked his
life that it was impossible for him to miss. He did not hurry. One
shot, and it would be over. He raised his rifle, and in that instant a
wisp of smoke came like the lash of a whip with the wind and caught him
fairly in the eyes, and his bullet passed three inches over Miki's
head. The whining snarl of it was a new thing to Miki. But he
recognized the thunder of the gun--and he knew what a gun could do. To
Le Beau, still firing at him through the merciful cloud of smoke, he
was like a gray streak flashing to the thick timber. Three times more
Le Beau fired. From the edge of a dense clump of spruce Miki flung back
a defiant howl. He disappeared as Le Beau's last shot shovelled up the
snow at his heels.

The narrowness of his escape from the man-beast did not frighten Miki
out of the Jackson's Knee country. If anything, it held him more
closely to it. It gave him something to think about besides Neewa and
his aloneness. As the fox returns to peer stealthily upon the deadfall
that has almost caught him, so the trapline was possessed now of a new
thrill for Miki. Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague
significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger.
And he welcomed it. His wits were sharpened. The fascination of the
trapline was deadlier than before.

From the burned windfall he made a wide detour to a point where Le
Beau's snowshoe trail entered the edge of the swamp; and here, hidden
in a thick clump of bushes, he watched him as he travelled homeward
half an hour later.

From that day he hung like a grim, gray ghost to the trapline.
Silent-footed, cautious, always on the alert for the danger which
threatened him, he haunted Jacques Le Beau's thoughts and footsteps
with the elusive persistence of a were-wolf--a loup-garou of the Black
Forest. Twice in the next week Le Beau caught a flash of him. Three
times he heard him howl. And twice he followed his trail until, in
despair and exhaustion, he turned back. Never was Miki caugh