of bark where they stayed about
two weeks, when they went home, leaving the field to Bill and myself.

We put in two days cutting wood and calking and mudding the shanty
wherever the chinking and mud had been worked out by squirrels and
other small animals. As soon as we had this work done we put in our
time setting our bear traps. We also built two bear pens. After we
had the bear traps all set, we then began putting out small traps,
setting the most of the small steel traps for fox and building more
deadfalls and repairing those that we had made the year before for
marten on the ridges, and along the creek for mink and coon.

After this work was done we gave more time to bear hunting. We had a
good deal of freezing weather without much snow for tracking. Being
very noisy under foot, we were compelled to hunt for several days by
driving the deer, that is, one of us would stand on the runways in
the heads of basins or hollows and in the low places on the ridges
where it was natural for deer to pass through when jumped up. In
going from one ridge to another, we would get a deer in this way
nearly every day, and one day we had the good luck to get three bears
while driving, an old bear and two cubs. We were also having fairly
good luck with the traps.

The first snow that fell to make good tracking was a damp one, and
hung on the underbrush so much that it was impossible to see but a
few yards unless in very open timber. Here I wish to relate an
incident that nearly caused my hair to turn white in a very short
time. I am not given very much to superstitions or alarmed at
unnatural causes, but in this case I will confess that I felt like
showing the white feather.

I was working my way very cautiously along the side of a ridge and
down near the base of the hill in low timber, as that is the most
natural place to find deer in a storm of this kind. I had just
stepped out of the thicket into the edge of a strip of open timber
where I could see for several rods along the side of the hill. I had
barely stepped into the open when I caught sight of some object
jumping from a knoll to a log where it was partly concealed behind
some trees, so that I was unable to make out what it was. I was sure
that I had never seen anything like it before, either in the woods or
out in civilization. I could get a glimpse of the thing as it would
pass between the trees, then it would disappear behind brush or a
large tree for a moment, then I