It was for a wonder a lovely morning, and I felt bitterly the hard luck which had pursued us all the way, and which now compelled us to turn back just as we had reached a game country. We went up a fine valley running from the east of the lake—the most open forest we had yet come to. It was timbered with magnificent spruce-trees, some of which I should say were at least 180 feet in height. There was but little undergrowth, it was the first ideal hunting ground we had struck. We worked all the morning without finding anything but two-day-old tracks. After lunch we suddenly came on quite fresh tracks of a good bull, possibly the one Lansdown had seen the day before.
Taking up the tracks, we followed steadily on and must have come close enough to disturb him, though we neither heard nor saw anything. We came, however, on the spot where he had been lying down and had jumped up and gone off at a gallop.
We tracked that bull till dusk and never came up with him. Fortunately he took us down the valley to the lake where we were camped, and we got home at nightfall.
OUT OF THE FOREST
