“No wonder you squirm and shout all night, then, until sane people with good digestions feel ready to blow your head off,” laughed Cyrus, who was one of the laggards; but he disposed of the last mouthfuls of his own meal with little regard for his digestive canal.
In rather less than twenty minutes the four were scanning with wide eyes certain fresh foot-marks, plainly printed on a patch of soft oozing clay, midway on the boggy tract.
“Whew! Bless me! Those caribou-tracks?” Cyrus caught his breath with amazement while he crouched to examine them. “Why, they’re bigger than any moose-tracks we’ve seen!”
“Isn’t that great?” gasped Dol.
“Well, come to think of it, it is,” answered the guide, in the stealthy tones of an expectant hunter; “for a full-grown bull-caribou don’t stand so high as a full-sized moose by two or three feet, and he don’t weigh more’n half as much. Still, for all that, caribou deer beat every other animal of the deer tribe, so far’s I know, in the size of their hoofs, as you’ll see bime-by if luck’s with us! And my stars! how they scud along on them big hoofs. I’d back ’em in a race against the smartest of your city chaps that ever spun through Maine on his new-fangled ‘wheel,’ that he’s so sot on.”
Garst, who was an enthusiastic cyclist, with a gurgle of unbelieving mirth, prepared to dispute this. There might have ensued a wordy sparring about caribou versus bicycle, had not the guide been impressed with the necessity for prompt action at the expense of speech.
“We must quit our talk and get a move on,” he whispered, and led the forward march across the bog, his eyes every now and again narrowing into two gleaming slits, as if he were debating within himself, while he studied the ground or some bush which showed signs of being nibbled or trampled. Then he would sweep the horizon with long-range vision.
But not a tuft of hair or glancing horn hove in sight.
The marsh was left behind. The hoof-marks were lost in a wide meadowy sweep of open ground, bounded at a distance by an irregular line of hills, sparsely covered with spruce-trees.
Towards these Herb headed, leaving Katahdin away back in the rear.