“Wild dogs?” repeated the lads, incredulously.
“Yes, there’s been a pack of them down in the country around Big Otter Pond for several years. Now that they’ve driven most of the game out of there, they’ve moved up into this country. We’ll make it too all-fired hot for them! Wait till Bill hears of it, then you’ll smell gunpowder,” Ben declared, angrily.
The babel from the outlaw pack grew gradually fainter, till at last it ceased, for they had chased their doomed victim out of ear-shot.
“Will they get the deer?” George asked.
“Yes, they’ll get it, all right,” replied Ben. “Nothing escapes them when once they’re hot on the trail. They’re as savage as wolves, and a lot more cunning. That’s why nobody can kill them off.”
When they reached the cabin the guide began the story of the four-footed renegades.
“Some few years ago there was an old half-breed trapper who came down into this country from somewhere up in Canada. With him he brought three dogs which he used on bear. Two of them were great long-eared hounds—mostly bloodhound stock, I guess, savage as lions. The other was a three-quarter Eskimo dog which looked for all the world like a big gray timber-wolf.
“Jean Beaupoy—that was the name of the old trapper—kept the dogs tied to stout posts near his cabin. He could do anything he pleased with them, but no one else dared go near where they were. I’ve heard men who chanced to pass say that the dogs would growl and bark long before any one could get near the place. Then old Jean would run out, rifle in hand, and ask who was coming and what they wanted. We sort of got suspicious of the old fellow, and thought maybe he’d run away from the law, and had brought the three half-wild dogs to give him warning and protection.
“Well, one day early in the spring the queer old man was drowned. He had tried to come down through ‘Crazy Man Riffs’ in his canoe. We found the canoe turned bottom side up in the pool at the end of the rapids, but we never found old Jean.
“First we thought his dogs had been drowned with him, ’cause we knew he had them along. But several weeks later a trapper saw them chase a buck deer into a pond. He called them; but at the sound of his voice they snarled like wolves and bounded away before he thought of shooting.