Suddenly, without knowing why, John Hatch stopped in his stride, gripped his axe instinctively, and glanced over his shoulder. The skin of his cheeks, beneath the grizzled stubble, crept curiously. He felt that he was being followed. But there was nothing on the trail behind him, which was clear and straight to his view for a good two hundred yards back. He peered deep into the undergrowth, first on one side, then on the other. No living thing was to be seen, except a little black-and-white woodpecker, which slipped behind a hemlock trunk and peered around at him with bright, inquiring eyes.
"Guess I've got the creeps," growled Hatch, with certain unprintable expletives, which seemed to indicate annoyance and surprise. Whirling angrily on his heel, he resumed his long, loose-kneed woodsman's stride.
But he could not get rid of that sensation of being followed. For a long time he resolutely ignored it. There was nothing in the woods that he had need to fear. He knew there was no wild beast, not even the biggest bear between Old Sugar Loaf and the Miramichi, that would be so rash as to seek a quarrel with him. As for the mother-lynx, she had passed out of his mind, so ingrained and deep was his scorn of all such "varmin." But presently the insistence of that unseen presence on his trail became too strong for him, and, with a curse, he turned his head. There was nothing there. He bounded into the wood on the left of the track, parting the undergrowth furiously with both arms outstretched before his face. To his eyes, still full of the sunlight, the brown-green gloom was almost blackness, for the moment. But he seemed to see, or imagined he saw, a flitting shadow—whether darker or lighter than its surroundings he could not have told—fade into the obscurity around it.
Hatch swore softly and turned back into the homeward trail. "It's nawthin' but that lynx!" he muttered. "An' I'm a fool, an' no mistake!"
The mystery thus satisfactorily solved, he swung on contentedly for the next mile or so. Then once more that uncanny impression of being trailed began to tingle in his cheeks and stir the roots of the hair on his neck. He laughed impatiently, and gave no further heed to it. But, in spite of himself, a peculiar picture began to burn itself into his consciousness. He realized a pair of round, pale, baleful eyes, piercing with pain and vengeful fury, fixed upon him as they floated along, close to the ground, in the midst of a gliding shape of shadow. Knowing well that the beast would never dare to spring upon him, he spat upon the ground in irritated contempt. At the same time he was nettled at its presumption in thus dogging his trail. He could see no object in it. The futile menace of it angered him keenly.
"I'll bring my gun along next time I'm over to Sugar Loaf," he murmured, "an' I'll put a ball through her guts if she don't keep off my trail!"
His vexation was not mollified by the fact that, when he came out from the spruce woods into the open pastures of his clearing, and saw his farmyard below him basking in the sun, he felt a distinct sense of relief. This was an indignity that he could never have dreamed of. That a lynx should be able to cause him a moment's apprehension! It was inconceivable. Yet—he was glad of the open. He resolved to get out all his traps and snares at once, and settle scores with the beast without delay.
That night, however, he dismissed the idea of traps from his mind as making too much of the matter. As he sat by his kitchen fire, smoking comfortably, his chores all done up, the battle-scarred dog asleep beside his chair, and forgiving tabby curled up on his knee, and the twang of night-hawks in a clear sky coming in through the open window with the fresh smell of the dew, he chuckled at his own folly.