pad, and a sip nearer the brook. Finally
she meandered a long way up the shore out of sight, and when I picked
up the paddle to go, she came back again. Truly a _Wandergeist_ of the
woods, like the plover of the coast, who never knows what he wants,
nor why he circles about so, nor where he is going next.

If you follow the herds over the barrens and through the forest in
winter, you find the same wandering, unsatisfied creature. And if you
are a sportsman and a keen hunter, with well established ways of
trailing and stalking, you will be driven to desperation a score of
times before you get acquainted with Megaleep. He travels enormous
distances without any known object. His trail is everywhere; he is
himself nowhere. You scour the country for a week, crossing
innumerable trails, thinking the surrounding woods must be full of
caribou; then a man in a lumber camp, where you are overtaken by
night, tells you that he saw the herd you are after 'way down on the
Renous barrens, thirty miles below. You go there, and have the same
experience,--signs everywhere, old signs, new signs, but never a
caribou. And, ten to one, while you are there, the caribou are
sniffing your snowshoe track suspiciously back on the barrens that you
have just left.

Even in feeding, when you are hot on their trail and steal forward
expecting to see them every moment, it is the same exasperating story.
They dig a hole through four feet of packed snow to nibble the
reindeer lichen that grows everywhere on the barrens. Before it is
half eaten they wander off to the next barren and dig a larger hole;
then away to the woods for the gray-green hanging moss that grows on
the spruces. Here is a fallen tree half covered with the rich food.
Megaleep nibbles a bite or two, then wanders away and away in search
of another tree like the one he has just left.

And when you find him at last, the chances are still against you. You
are stealing forward cautiously when a fresh sign attracts attention.
You stop to examine it a moment. Something gray, dim, misty, seems to
drift like a cloud through the trees ahead. You scarcely notice it
till, on your right, a stir, and another cloud, and another--The
caribou, quick, a score of them! But before your rifle is up and you
have found the sights, the gray things melt into the gray woods and
drift away; and the stalk begins all over again.

The reason for this restlessness is not far to seek. Megaleep's
ancestors follow