They raced forward, until they came to the place where they had seen the black object, and then they noticed a curious thing. For there were two sets of marks—human footprints, and the broad-toed tracks of the bear.
“Look at that!” cried Jack. “Was that a man we saw, or the bear?”
No one could say for certain. But this much was sure. The bear’s tracks led in one direction, and the man’s in another.
Was the bear chasing the man, or was the man hunting the bear, was another phase of the question.
“Look here!” said Tom, who had been carefully examining the two sets of impressions in the snow. “Here’s how I size this up. The bear’s tracks go in a straight line, or nearly so, as you can easily see. But the man’s tracks are in the form of a letter V and we are at the angle right here. The angle comes up right close to the trail of the bear, too.
“Now I think the man was walking through the woods, approaching the bear. He didn’t know it until he was almost on the beast and then the man saw it. Of course he turned away at once and ran back. You can tell that the footprints that approach the bear’s trail are made more slowly than the others—going away. In the last case the man was running away from the bear. But the bear wasn’t afraid, and kept straight on, paying no attention to the man.”
“That’s good argument,” observed Bert.
“Can you tell us who the man was?” demanded George.
“I’m not detective enough for that,” Tom confessed. “But I don’t believe the man was a hunter with a gun.”
“Why not?” Jack wanted to know.