“I tell you I’m glad I’ve got as fine a woodsman along as you are,” he remarked, after a little while; “because, if I had been alone, while I might be able to locate north by means of the compass, I declare I could not tell whether home lay to the north, east, west, or south. So what good would a compass be to such a greenhorn, I’d like to know?”
Bluff liked to hear such talk; any boy would when he set up to be an authority on woodcraft.
“We’re going to hit the place right soon now,” he assured his companion soberly and with a manner that showed that Bluff did not think he was doing anything so very wonderful in leading the way back to the scene of the previous afternoon’s double adventure.
Three minutes later he spoke again.
“There, you can see the leaning pine right now. That was only twenty feet or so away from where we dropped our moose.”
“I don’t see anything that looks like a camp,” hinted Jerry.
“No; seems as though they must have cleared out,” he was told; “but they couldn’t take the moose along with ’em, of course.”
“What became of it, then?”
“We’ll find that out soon enough. Just follow me, will you? Looks as though there had been a banquet around here, seems to me. Hi! see the bones, would you? And the snow’s all trampled down, with patches of red showing through it here and there.”
“Bluff, the wolves struck this place after we chased ’em away; or else this may have been another lot of them. They cleaned up our moose, hide and all. But, tell me, isn’t that the skull and the horns over there?”