After breakfasting on bacon and fried potatoes, they packed the sleds and started.
They traveled northward over the ice, following all the bays and indentations of the lake’s crooked shore. At noon they stopped for lunch. The cold was something awful.
“It looks as though we were going to have a hard winter,” said Jerry when they were on the march again. “It’s a good thing that we brought snowshoes, and plenty of extra blankets along.”
“I hope we don’t see anything more of that catamount,” replied Brick. “I suppose there are plenty of them in the woods, though.”
“A good many,” assented Hamp. “But they don’t often trouble hunters. This fellow was extra savage. He must have been hungry.”
“They’ve been known to follow men for days and weeks in bitter weather,” said Jerry.
The conversation shifted to another topic, and the boys trudged on for half an hour. Then Brick suddenly gave a sharp cry, and pointed to a spot on the shore, some fifty yards distant.
“I saw the catamount over there,” he declared. “It was a big, yellowish-gray animal, and it slipped past that rock into the bushes.”
“Sure?” asked Hamp, anxiously.
“Dead sure.”