ing like a sleuth-hound's.
"If you want caribou, you've got to take 'em while they're around. Old
hunters have a saying: 'They're here to-day, to-morrow nowhere.' And
that's about the size of it."

"Let's start off this minute!" Dol jerked out the words while he bolted
the last salt shreds of his pork. "Hurry up, you fellows! You're as slow
as snails. I'd eat the jolliest meal that was ever cooked in three
minutes."

"No wonder you squirm and shout all night, then, until sane people with
good digestions feel ready to blow your head off," laughed Cyrus, who
was one of the laggards; but he disposed of the last mouthfuls of his
own meal with little regard for his digestive canal.

In rather less than twenty minutes the four were scanning with wide eyes
certain fresh foot-marks, plainly printed on a patch of soft oozing
clay, midway on the boggy tract.

"Whew! Bless me! Those caribou-tracks?" Cyrus caught his breath with
amazement while he crouched to examine them. "Why, they're bigger than
any moose-tracks we've seen!"

"Isn't that great?" gasped Dol.

"Well, come to think of it, it is," answered the guide, in the stealthy
tones of an expectant hunter; "for a full-grown bull-caribou don't stand
so high as a full-sized moose by two or three feet, and he don't weigh
more'n half as much. Still, for all that, caribou deer beat every other
animal of the deer tribe, so far's I know, in the size of their hoofs,
as you'll see bime-by if luck's with us! And my stars! how they scud
along on them big hoofs. I'd back 'em in a race against the smartest of
your city chaps that ever spun through Maine on his new-fangled 'wheel,'
that he's so sot on."

Garst, who was an enthusiastic cyclist, with a gurgle of unbelieving
mirth, prepared to dispute this. There might have ensued a wordy
sparring about caribou versus bicycle, had not the guide been impressed
with the necessity for prompt action at the expense of speech.

"We must quit our talk and get a move on," he whispered, and led the
forward march across the bog, his eyes every now and again narrowing
into two gleaming slits, as if he were debating within himself, while he
studied the ground or some bush which showed signs of being nibbled or
trampled. Then he would sweep the horizon with long-range vision.

But not a tuft of hair or glancing horn hove in sight.

The marsh was left behind. The hoof-marks were lost in a wide meadowy
sweep of open ground, bounded at a distance