per after he had heard the lifting wail from
the swamp woods the night before that the bacon in the trap lay
untouched. The still hunter that had crawled through the underbrush
lured by the dead rabbits over Koot's shoulder wanted rabbit, not bacon.
But at the nearest rabbit snare, where a poor dead prisoner had been
torn from the twine, were queer padded prints in the snow, not of the
rabbit's making. Koot stood looking at the tell-tale mark. The dog's
ears were all aprick. So was Koot's sense of _feel_, but he couldn't
make this thing out. There was no trail of approach or retreat. The
padded print of the thief was in the snow as if the animal had dropped
from the sky and gone back to the sky.

Koot measured off ten strides from the rifled snare and made a complete
circuit round it. The rabbit runway cut athwart the snow circle, but no
mark like that shuffling padded print.

"It isn't a wolverine, and it isn't a fisher, and it isn't a coyote,"
Koot told himself.

The dog emitted stupid little sharp barks looking everywhere and nowhere
as if he felt what he could neither see nor hear. Koot measured off ten
strides more from this circuit and again walked completely round the
snare. Not even the rabbit runways cut this circle. The white man grows
indignant when baffled, the Indian superstitious. The part that was
white man in Koot sent him back to the scene in quick jerky steps to
scatter poisoned rabbit meat over the snow and set a trap in which he
readily sacrificed a full-grown bunny. The part that was Indian set a
world of old memories echoing, memories that were as much Koot's nature
as the swarth of his skin, memories that Koot's mother and his mother's
ancestors held of the fabulous man-eating wolf called the loup-garou,
and the great white beaver father of all beavers and all Indians that
glided through the swamp mists at night like a ghost, and the monster
grisly that stalked with uncouth gambols through the dark devouring
benighted hunters.

This time when the mongrel uttered his little sharp barkings that said
as plainly as a dog could speak, "Something's somewhere! Be careful
there--oh!--I'll be _on_ to you in just one minute!" Koot kicked the
dog hard with plain anger; and his anger was at himself because his eyes
and his ears failed to localize, to _real_-ize, to visualize what those
little pricks and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. Then
the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and he ma