y when Miller and Kemp tucked up their sleeves and unsheathed their
knives in preparation for unpleasant but necessary details.

But they worked like lightning; and in exactly seven minutes the heavy
beast was drawn, washed out with snow, roped, and hung to a tree well
out of reach of any four-footed forest marauders that might prowl that
way before night.

Geraldine, smiling her deprecation of their praise, waited with the
others until the two guides were ready. Then, in the same order as
before, they moved forward, descended the slope, and came into a strange
wilderness of stark gray alders that stretched away in every direction.
And threading, circling, crossing each other everywhere among the alders
ran the trails of deer and wild boar, deep and fresh in the powdery
snow.

At intervals, as they advanced, hard-wood ridges crossed the bewildering
alder labyrinths. Twice, while ascending these ridges, Rosalie's heart
jumped as a grouse thundered up. Once three steel-gray deer started out
of the scrub and went bounding off, displaying enormous white flags;
once a young buck, hunting for trouble, winded it, whistled, and came
leaping past Rosalie so close that she shrank aside with a half-stifled
cry of apprehension and delight.

Half a mile farther on Delancy, labouring along on his snow-shoes,
suddenly halted, detaining Geraldine with a quick touch on the shoulder.

"There's something in that clearing," he whispered.

Miller had seen it, too; Duane motioned Rosalie forward to join
Delancy, and, side by side, they crept ahead, keeping a clump of scrub
hemlock between them and the edge of the clearing. It was the Green Pass
feed-ground, a rocky strip of pasture climbing upward toward Lynx Peak;
and there, clean cut against the snowy background, three dark objects
were moving, trotting nervously here and there, nosing, nuzzling,
tunnelling the snow with long, sharp muzzles.

Duane and Geraldine silently unslung their field-glasses.

"They're boar," he said.

"Two-year-olds," she nodded. "I do hope they will get one each. Duane,
ought I to have shot that other one?"

"Of course, you generous child! Otherwise he'd have gone clear away.
That was a cracking shot, too--clean through the backbone at the base of
the skull.... Look at Rosalie! She's unstrapped her snow-shoes and she
and Delancy are crawling on all-fours!"

Kemp had now joined the stalkers; he was a wise old hunter, and Duane
and Geraldine, keeping ve