with only one breach through, the footprints
had beaten a little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot's dog might
have detected a motionless form under the thicket of spiney shrubs, a
form that was gray almost to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished
from the snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light--the
rabbit's eye. If the dog did catch that one tell-tale glimpse of an eye
which a cunning rabbit would have shut, true to the training of his
trapper master he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps the
pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself preserved as stolid a
countenance as the rabbit playing dead or simulating a block of wood.
Where the footprints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped down
and planted little sticks across the runway till there was barely room
for a weasel to pass. Across the open he suspended a looped string hung
from a twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop would send it
up with a death jerk for anything caught in the tightening twine.

All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to runway,
choosing always the places where natural barriers compel the rabbit to
take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a circle from his
cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back with many a zigzag
to the first snare made. If rabbits were plentiful--as they always were
in the fur country of the North except during one year in seven when an
epidemic spared the land from a rabbit pest--Koot's circuit of snares
would run for miles through the swamp. Traps for large game would be set
out so that the circuit would require only a day; but where rabbits are
numerous, the foragers that prey--wolf and wolverine and lynx and
bob-cat--will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more
snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon--the Indian's hour of the
short shadow--is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, the time
of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no wooden door
to his cabin, and in it--instead of caching in a tree--keeps fish or
bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will very probably leave
his dogs on guard while he makes the round of the snares.

Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his noonday meal,
Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's ear, emphasized them
with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack in which he carried bait,
twine, and traps, and set out in the