snares, Koot smiled and walked on.
Then it came again, that _feel_ of something coursing behind the
underbrush in the gloom of the gathering darkness. Koot stopped
short--and listened--and listened--listened to a snow-muffled silence,
to a desolating solitude that pressed in on the lonely hunter like the
waves of a limitless sea round a drowning man.

The sense of _feel_ that is akin to brute instinct gave him the
impression of a presence. Reason that is man's told him what it might be
and what to do. Was he not carrying the snared rabbits over his
shoulder? Some hungry flesh-eater, more bloodthirsty than courageous,
was still hunting him for the food on his back and only lacked the
courage to attack. Koot drew a steel-trap from his bag. He did not wish
to waste a rabbit-skin, so he baited the spring with a piece of fat
bacon, smeared the trap, the snow, everything that he had touched with a
rabbit-skin, and walked home through the deepening dark to the little
log cabin where a sharp "woof-woof" of welcome awaited him.

That night, in addition to the skins across the doorway, Koot jammed
logs athwart; "to keep the cold out" he told himself. Then he kindled a
fire on the rough stone hearth built at one end of the cabin and with
the little clay pipe beneath his teeth sat down on the stump chair to
broil rabbit. The waste of the rabbit he had placed in traps outside the
lodge. Once his dog sprang alert with pricked ears. Man and dog heard
the sniff--sniff--sniff of some creature attracted to the cabin by the
smell of broiling meat, and now rummaging at its own risk among the
traps. And once when Koot was stretched out on a bear-skin before the
fire puffing at his pipe-stem, drying his moccasins and listening to the
fusillade of frost rending ice and earth, a long low piercing wail rose
and fell and died away. Instantly from the forest of the swamp came the
answering scream--a lifting tumbling eldritch shriek.

"I should have set two traps," says Koot. "They are out in pairs."

* * * * *

Black is the flag of danger to the rabbit world. The antlered shadows of
the naked poplar or the tossing arms of the restless pines, the rabbit
knows to be harmless shadows unless their dapple of sun and shade
conceals a brindled cat. But a shadow that walks and runs means to the
rabbit a foe; so the wary trapper prefers to visit his snares at the
hour of the short shadow.

It did not surprise the trap