“Well, we’ll soon be in camp,” remarked Ned. “We’ve got plenty to eat there. We would have started searching for you long before this, but we supposed you had taken some grub, and would stay all day. But when it got dark, and you didn’t show up, we feared something had happened.”
“Something had,” observed Frank earnestly.
“We had tramped about for some time before we saw the puff of the explosion,” went on Bart. “You had a great head on you, Frank, to think of that.”
“I had to think of something,” was the response. “Wow! but that beast was a savage one!”
They reached camp in due time, and Frank was provided with a good meal, and plenty of hot coffee.
The warm weather continued for the next two days, and the air was almost like spring. The boys thoroughly enjoyed it, and went on long tramps through the woods. They were on the lookout for the mate of the wildcat, but saw no further traces of the ugly beasts.
There was a stream, not far from camp, and there the chums went one day, cut a hole through the ice, which was too thick to melt much, and fished for pickerel, with such good luck that they had a fish dinner that day. Then on several succeeding days they went hunting, getting some wild turkeys, and some wild ducks, which gave them a variety of food for their larder.
For a week they lived this way, and Bart was in hopes of bagging a deer, since the snow had disappeared, and it was lawful to shoot them. But, though he tramped far and near he did not see any. Once he descried one on top of a distant hill, but it was too far off for a successful shot, and when he started on the trail the animal dashed into a thick forest, and was soon lost. Bart returned to camp, somewhat dispirited.