kapun, who had not
dreamed of having so severe a battle.

The traps were soon reset and Oowikapun, with the heavy wolf on his
back, set out for his camp. As he had set some smaller traps for minks
and martens in a different direction, he turned aside to visit them.
This would cause him to return to his camp by another trail. While
moving along under his heavy load he was surprised to come across the
snowshoe tracks of another hunter. He examined them carefully, and
decided that they were made by some person who must have passed along
there that very morning, early as it was.

As the trail of this stranger, whoever it could be, was in the direction
of the traps which Oowikapun wished to visit, he followed them up. When
he reached his traps he found that a mink had been caught in one of
them, but the stranger had taken it out and hung it up in plain sight
above the trap on the branch of a tree. Then the stranger, putting on
fresh bait, had reset the trap. Of course Oowikapun was pleased with
this, and delighted that the stranger, whoever he was, had acted so
honestly and kindly toward him.

Fastening the mink in his belt he hurried on to his camp as fast as he
could under his heavy load, for his wounded arm had begun to swell and
was causing him intense pain. His stoical Indian nature would have
caused him to withstand the pain with indifference, but when he
remembered how the wolf, maddened by his capture, had wrought himself up
into such a frenzy that his mouth was all foaming with madness when he
made that last desperate spring and succeeded in fastening his fangs in
his arm, he feared that perhaps some of the froth might have got into
his arm, and unless some remedies were quickly obtained, madness might
come to him, to be followed by a most dreadful death.

But what could he do? He was several days' journey from his own
village, and many miles from any hunter of his acquaintance. He had, in
his vanity, come alone on this hunting expedition, and now alone in the
woods, far away from his friends, here he is in his little hunting
lodge, a dangerously wounded man.

Fortunately he had taken the precaution of sucking as many of the wounds
as he could reach with his mouth, and then had bound a deerskin thong on
his arm above the wound as tightly as he could draw it.

Very few, comparatively, were the diseases among the aboriginal tribes
of America before the advent of the white man. Their vocation as
hunter