which may be the result of generations of accumulated
observation, guides the wavey and the caribou. Something, which may be
the result of unconscious inference from a life-time of observation,
guides the man. In the animal we call it instinct, in the man, reason;
and in the case of the trapper tracking pathless wilds, the conscious
reason of the man seems almost merged in the automatic instinct of the
brute. It is not sharp-sightedness--though no man is sharper of sight
than the trapper. It is not acuteness of hearing--though the trapper
learns to listen with the noiseless stealth of the pencil-eared lynx. It
is not touch--in the sense of tactile contact--any more than it is touch
that tells a suddenly awakened sleeper of an unexpected noiseless
presence in a dark room. It is something deeper than the tabulated five
senses, a sixth sense--a sense of _feel_, without contact--a sense on
which the whole sensate world writes its records as on a palimpsest.
This palimpsest is the trapper's chart, this sense of _feel_, his weapon
against the instinct of the brute. What part it plays in the life of
every ranger of the wilds can best be illustrated by telling how Koot
found his way to the fur post after the rabbit-hunt.

* * * * *

When the midwinter lull falls on the hunt, there is little use in the
trapper going far afield. Moose have "yarded up." Bear have "holed up"
and the beaver are housed till dwindling stores compel them to come out
from their snow-hidden domes. There are no longer any buffalo for the
trapper to hunt during the lull; but what buffalo formerly were to the
hunter, rabbit are to-day. Shields and tepee covers, moccasins, caps and
coats, thongs and meat, the buffalo used to supply. These are now
supplied by "wahboos--little white chap," which is the Indian name for
rabbit.

And there is no midwinter lull for "wahboos." While the "little white
chap" runs, the long-haired, owlish-eyed lynx of the Northern forest
runs too. So do all the lynx's feline cousins, the big yellowish cougar
of the mountains slouching along with his head down and his tail lashing
and a footstep as light and sinuous and silent as the motion of a snake;
the short-haired lucifee gorging himself full of "little white chaps"
and stretching out to sleep on a limb in a dapple of sunshine and shadow
so much like the lucifee's skin not even a wolf would detect the
sleeper; the bunchy bob-cat bounding and skimm