After eating the Indian scattered and covered the embers of the fire and prepared to leave the spot. He went toward the lick where the deer had been torn to pieces by the prowling animals Enoch had heard. At the edge of the clearing he halted and attracted his companion’s attention by a commanding gesture. “Harding’s father found here by the tall white man,” he said, simply.
“Yes. ’Siah Bolderwood found him,” Enoch sadly admitted.
“Then we look–see how Hawknose kill him.”
“But Crow Wing, it was four years ago—”
The Indian stopped him with a gesture of disdain. “Does my brother think we look for trail? No, no! The white man not find trail?”
“Of course not. There were only marks of the buck’s hoofs.”
Crow Wing pointed to the spoor of the dead buck made the night before. “Trail big as that?” he asked.
“Yes. It might have been this buck.”
“No buck,” declared the other, emphatically and then began to move about the open glade, examining each tree trunk as he went. Enoch did not understand his actions but he followed him. The Indian gazed upon each tree scrutinizingly, and no knothole in the rough boles escaped his attention.
When the tree proved to be hollow at its base the searcher experimented with his gun barrel, poking it into the farther extremity of the cavity and rattling out the decayed wood and the débris of squirrel nests and owl lairs. In several cases these creatures themselves were disturbed, the lively squirrels to run chattering up the higher branches, the owls lumbering away into the forest, bumping against the trees in their blindness, and hooting mournfully at the disturbers of their peace. All this time Crow Wing continued with an unmoved face. Not an interstice in the roots of the trees escaped his eye and to Enoch, who could not imagine what he was looking for, his actions seemed without reason. But he knew better than to ask him the nature of his search.