prang out of his covert and darted away.

Beatrice was amazed. The significance of the incident went further than
the fact of mere good hearing. The coyote, except when he chooses to
wail out his wrongs at the fall of night, is one of the forest shadows
for silence--yet Ben had heard him. It meant nothing less than that
strange quickening of the senses found in but few--master woodsmen--that
is the especial trait and property of the beasts themselves.

Now that they climbed toward Spruce Pass their talk died away, and more
and more they yielded themselves to the hushed mood of the forest. Their
trail was no longer clearly pronounced. It was a wilderness
thoroughfare in the true sense,--a winding path made by the feet of the
great moose journeying from valley to valley.

Wild life became ever more manifest. They saw the grouse, Franklin's
fowl so well beloved by tenderfeet because of their propensity to sit
still under fire and give an unsteady marksman a second shot. Fool hens,
the woodsman called them, and the motley and mark of their weak
mentality were a red badge near the eye. The fat birds perched on the
tree limbs over the trail, relying on their mottled plumage, blending
perfectly with the dull grays and browns of the foliage, to keep them
out of sight. But such wiles did not deceive Ben. And once, in provision
for their noon lunch, a fat cock tumbled through the branches at
Beatrice's pistol shot.

The pine squirrels seemed to be having some sort of a competitive field
meet, and the tricks they did in the trees above the trail filled the
two riders with delight. They sped up and down the trunks; they sprang
from limb to limb; they flicked their tails and turned their heads
around backward and stood on their haunches, all the time chattering in
the greatest excitement. Once a porcupine--stupid, inoffensive old Urson
who carries his fort around on his back--rattled his quills in a near-by
thicket; and once they caught a glimpse of a mule deer on the hillside.
This was rather too cold and hard a country, however, to be beloved by
deer. Mostly they dwelt farther upriver.

All manner of wild creatures, great and small, had left signs on the
trails. There were tracks of otter and mink, those two river hunters
whose skins, on ladies' shoulders, are better known than the animals
themselves. They might be only patches of fur in cities, but they were
living, breathing personages here. Particularly they were personages