t him up. I long to behold some of that surloin broiling! Rabbit
meat, indeed!" and Rod whipped out his hunting-knife, and fell upon
the carcass with the zeal of a hungry bald eagle.

In a few minutes we had stripped off the skin. Rod then wrenched off
the antlers, cut out the muffle (the end of the nose), and also about
a hundred weight of what he considered the choicest of the meat. The
rest of it--nine or ten hundred pounds--we could only leave where it
had fallen. It would be of no use to us, so far from the settled
lands.

[Illustration: THE TIGER.]

To carry our spoils down to our canoe, we had to make two trips; for
the antlers alone were as much as one could take along at once. We had
gone back after them and the hide.

"Too bad," remarked Rod, "to leave all this flesh here to rot above
ground."

"I doubt if it be left to rot above ground," said I. "There are too
many hungry mouths about for that."

"Right there," said Rod; "and that makes me think we might use it to
lure them, and to bait our traps with. Drag it out to the path, and
set the traps round it."

The idea seemed a good one. So we cut the remains of the carcass in
two. Whole it was too heavy to be moved. Then, fastening some stout
withes into them, we dragged the pieces, one after the other, out to
the path, and left it at the place where the path entered the
cranberry bushes. This done, we set the traps about it,--the remaining
five,--and then went back to the canoe with the antlers and skin.

"Made a very fair thing of it, after all," remarked Rod, as we floated
with the current down to our camp. "Tell you what, old fellow, these
steaks are not to be sneezed at. More than ordinary pot luck just at
this time."

It is needless to say that we fully satisfied our taste for venison
that night, or that our breakfast next morning was merely a repetition
of supper. Such things are to be expected in the wilderness. Suffice
it to add, that we neither overate nor overslept, but were up betimes,
and off to examine our traps considerably before sunrise. We did not
go up in the canoe on the river, but walked along the bank through the
woods.

"We may surprise a bear or a lynx at the carcass," said Rod.

So, as we drew near the place where we had left it in the path the
evening before, we made our way amid the brush with as little noise
as possible. A small hollow, overrun with hackmatack, led up towards
the spot. We crept along the bed of it, in o