During the next three weeks our hunters employed their time in much the same way that they had employed it during the three days the incidents of which we have so minutely described. They had come out there to hunt and trap; and they went about their business as regularly as a carpenter or a book-keeper goes about his daily work.
Oscar passed one day in stalking some of the numerous herds of elk that roamed in the upper end of the valley, and the next in visiting traps he had set along the banks of the brook.
Good luck attended all his efforts except in two, or, we may say, three instances. He never went out after the elk that he did not succeed in bringing down one; and, whenever he made the round of his traps, he always brought to the cabin at least half a dozen, and sometimes more, valuable fur-bearing animals.
He had secured another mule-deer—a doe—which was a fit companion for the buck he had killed; he had prepared for mounting several fine specimens of the beaver, otter, mink, and marten tribes; he had knocked over two or three gray foxes, and a common wolf which he found feasting on a deer he had slain; he had bagged some representatives of all the game-birds with which the woods were inhabited; and the pile of furs he intended to sell, and which grew larger every day, satisfied him that he could refund every dollar of the committee’s money that he had advanced to assist Leon Parker and his brother Tom, and have a handsome surplus left to put into his own pocket.
These things made his heart light and his sleep sound; but he became nervous and impatient when he reflected that, with all his careful stalking, he had not been able to get a shot at that big elk with the splendid antlers; that he could not obtain so much as a glimpse of the thieving wolverine which was making a business of robbing his traps, or of the panther which serenaded him and his companion nearly every night.
The guide, who had heard so much about that big elk that he became as anxious to secure him as Oscar was, advised the boy to run him down on horseback; and at last Oscar consented to try it.
Then he found that he had missed a good deal of sport during the time he had devoted to still-hunting.
An elk, when he is disturbed by a hunter, makes off at a trot which is the very poetry of easy and vigorous motion.
So rapid is his pace, and so long-winded is he, that the hunter who would overtake him must be mounted on a fleet and enduring horse; and, furthermore, he must push him hard enough at the start to make him “break his trot”—that is, compel him to change his gait to a gallop.
Although he can trot twenty miles without showing any signs of fatigue, going up the side of a mountain, or through a dense forest, where the way is obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, with as much ease, apparently, as he would pass over an open prairie, a short gallop—even on the smoothest ground—exhausts him; and then the hunter can ride close enough to him to use his rifle or revolver.