Oh! what a glorious sunset he saw that day on Kennedy's Plain, with the snow dyed pink and the poplar woods aglow in red and gold. What a glorious tramp through the darkening woods as the shadows fell and the yellow moon came up!
"These are the best days of my life," he said. "These are my golden days!"
And as he neared the great Spruce Hill, Yan yelled a long hurrah! "In case they are still there," he told himself, but really for very joy of feeling all alive.
As he listened for the improbable response, he heard a faint howling of wolves away over Kennedy's Plain. He mimicked their cry and quickly got response, and noticed that they were gathering together, doubtless hunting something, for now it was their hunting cry. Nearer and nearer it came, and his howls brought ready answers from the gloomy echoing woods, when suddenly it flashed upon him: "It's my trail you are on. You are hunting me."
The road now led across a little open plain. It would have been madness to climb a tree in such a fearful frost, so he went out to the middle of the open place and sat down in the moonlit snow—a glittering rifle in his hands, a row of shiny brass pegs in his belt, and a strange new feeling in his heart. On came the chorus, a deep, melodious howling, on to the very edge of the woods, and there the note changed. Then there was silence. They must have seen him sitting there for the light was like day, but they went around in the edge of the woods. A stick snapped to the right and a low 'woof' came from the left. Then all was still. Yan felt them sneaking around, felt them watching him from the cover and straining his eyes in vain to see some form that he might shoot. But they were wise, and he was wise, for had he run he would soon have seen them closing in on him. They must have been but few, for after their council of war they decided he was better let alone, and he never saw them at all. For twenty minutes he waited, but hearing no more of them arose and went homeward. And as he tramped he thought, "Now I know how a deer feels, when the grind of a moccasined foot or the click of lock are heard in the trail behind him."
In the days that followed he learned those sandhills well, for many a frosty day and bitter night he spent in them. He learned to follow fast the faintest trail of deer. He learned just why that trail went never past a tamarac-tree and why it pawed the snow at every oak, and why the buck's is plainest and the fawn's down wind. He learned just what the club-rush has to say, when its tussocks break the snow. He came to know how the muskrat lives beneath the ice and why the mink slides down a hill, and what the ice says when it screams at night. The squirrels taught him how best a fir-cone can be stripped, and which of toad-stools one might eat. The partridge, why it dives beneath the snow, and the fox, just why he sets his feet so straight, and why he wears so huge a tail.
He learned the ponds, the woods, the hills and a hundred secrets of the trail, but—he got no deer.