Of course everyone said that they would stop and fix the camp; but eventually it was arranged that Wharton and the Judge should take one beat to the west of the camp, while Snap, with young Towzer under his wing, should go towards the east; the other two staying in camp.
The youngest Winthrop begged so hard to go that Snap took compassion on him, although he would infinitely rather have gone out alone.
The course which Snap and Towzer took led them along a fair-sized stream, which joined the main river not far from camp. Towzer had on his first pair of mocassins, and, as the forest was open and the boy light, he made very little noise as he went. Now and then, though, you might have seen him flinch and almost come down with an expression of agony upon his face. He had not yet learnt to feel with his feet, as it were, before putting them down, and had suddenly thrown all his weight on some sharp-pointed snag of dead wood, or merciless flint, which reminded him that an English shooting-boot, although noisy, has its advantages.
Stooping down by the river, Snap looked long and fixedly at a track.
'The cattle have been along here, haven't they, Snap?' asked Towzer. 'Whose cattle would they be?'
'Cattle don't eat fish, as a rule, Towzer,' replied Snap in a whisper, for some of the tracks were pretty fresh; 'and look here, the beasts which made these tracks picked these bones,' and, so saying, he held up the backbone of a large salmon, picked as clean as if it had been prepared as an anatomical specimen.
All along the bank of the stream a regular road was beaten down, one track on another, until at last all was so confused and level that Towzer's mistake was an easy one to make. But on one side of the main path Snap had been able to distinguish a few distinct and separate tracks, and it was as he looked up from one of these that he said:
'No, these aren't cattle, young 'un; these are bears, and a rare big gang of them, too.'
Towzer's first expression of delight rather faded away as he looked behind and round him, where the great bull pines stood grey and silent on all sides, and the further you peered into them the darker looked the gloom of the forest. It was not a pleasant idea that the gloomy, quiet forest might be full of unseen grizzlies.
'Are they grizzlies, do you think, Snap?' asked the boy.