“No; it isn’t easy. But it is work for a man. Go to a school of engineering for three or four years when you are older, and then come and help me to build bridges. All this energy of yours—all this hatred of defeat—this—well, you have the whole outfit, as we say in the Rockies, but it is no good unless you know how to do things. The fellows that know and have no steam, I don’t care about. Now, we want that bear, don’t we?”
“Rather!”
“And first, we know how to get him, and then we want him so tremendously that torn breeches, scratched legs, and the like, make no kind of difference. Just patent that combination, and, as my friends down in Carolina say, ‘there you are.’”
The small skeptic returned, “But we aren’t there yet.”
“We will be. The wind is up the gorge. See those ferns, how they sway up-hill. He can get no scent of us.”
“That’s so. I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“It is intelligence against mere instinct. Are you easily lost in the woods, Jack? I am. I have no resource except incessant observation of landmarks.”
Jack looked up in surprise. “I—lost? No, I never get lost.”
“But is that really so?”
“Yes. I wander off anywhere. It is easy to find your way here; but in Maine it is harder. I was up with father two years ago, at the Parmaccini lakes, and he almost always had to ask me the way.”