ss
animals; besides firing at them in the darkness would be a very
uncertain mode of killing even a single one of them.

Did Ossaroo intend to sit up all night and shoot at them with his
arrows? The chances were he should not hit one; and from the way
Ossaroo talked he had made up his mind to a whole hetacomb! Certainly
he could not do it with his bow and arrows. How then was he going to
take the wholesale vengeance he had rowed?

They knew of no sort of trap that could be arranged, whereby more than a
single dog might be captured; and it would take some time with such
weapons as they had to construct the rudest kind of trap. True, there
was the "dead-fall" that might be rigged up in a few minutes from logs
that lay near; but that could only fall once, crushing one victim,
unless Ossaroo sat up to rearrange it. Besides, the cunning dogs might
not go under it again, after one of their number had been immolated
before their eyes.

Karl and Caspar could not conceive what plan Ossaroo intended to pursue;
but from experience they knew he had some one; and therefore they asked
him no questions, but watched his proceedings in silence.

The first thing that Ossaroo did was to collect from the antelope all
the tendons or sinews that he could lay his fingers on. Some, also, he
obtained from the barking-deer, which Caspar had killed in the morning;
and others he took from the limbs of the yaks that had been brought home
in their skins. In a short while he had a goodly bunch of these tough
strings; which he first dried before the fire, and then twisted after
his own fashion into slender cords. In all he made more than a score of
them--Karl and Caspar of course acting under his directions, and lending
him all necessary help during the operation. These cords, neatly twined
and dried by the heat, now resembled strings of coarse catgut; and it
only remained for Ossaroo to knot and loop them, and form them into
snares.

Of course Karl and Caspar now knew what Ossaroo purposed--to snare the
dogs of course. Yet how the snares were to be set, or how a wild dog
could be captured with a piece of catgut, was more than they could
comprehend. Surely, thought they, the dogs will gnaw such a string to
pieces in half a minute, and set themselves free again? So it would
have appeared, and so they would doubtless have done had the snares been
set for them in the ordinary manner. But Ossaroo had a plan of his own
for setting snares