“It is little better than a walk,” he said, “and if I run slowly, I shall gain fast.”
Running, therefore, slowly, he suddenly stopped all a-quiver, for he smelt blood. There was a little splash of it on the leaves of a young moose-wood. Sunrise considered the blood to mean this:
“Dawn,” he said, “does not go willingly, the man is forcing her to run ahead of him, and here he found it necessary to prick her with his spear. She is still fighting against him,” he said, and that surmise shot a pitiful little spasm of joy into his sick heart. He ran on.
“After a time,” he reflected, “the man will be obliged to hunt. It may be that I shall find Dawn bound to a tree waiting for his return. In that case I, too, will wait for his return. But lest he smell me out I will take up the next fresh moose dung that I find and smear myself with it.”
In the cool bottom of a valley Sunrise found a confusion of tracks. Two sets led from the valley and one set led in the reverse direction, that is, back to it.
“They passed this place and went on,” said Sunrise. “Then they came back, then they turned and went on again.”
He thought hard and when he had puzzled it out he laughed a short, harsh laugh.
“The man,” he said, “made up his mind to hunt, but, being a fool, he either did not tie Dawn to a tree or he tied her like a fool and she broke loose. As soon as he had gone, she followed the trail backward, running as hard as she could, for see these return tracks are far apart. The man, coming back from the hunt, found that she had gone, and followed. Here he caught up with her and made her turn again. But he had to prick her with his spear to make her go—see, here is more blood. I am not far behind.”
The solution proved correct, and Sunrise even found the thongs with which Dawn had been insecurely bound, and the tree which the man had selected to bind her to; the bark here and there was stained darkly.