"I don't really know," said McCarty. "I have never hunted far from camp out here, but, I fancy, straight ahead is as good as any. I climbed way up on the machine's boom the other day and took a good look over the country. Say, it's the craziest looking country you ever saw. It's a regular Chinese puzzle of stretches of prairie, ponds, bits of flat woods, hummocks, and even little hills rising up suddenly from the prairie. It's a queer country, all right. Looks as though there might be any kind of game in it. Hang it, there goes that fool, dog again. Won't he ever learn a lesson?"
Bob, barking madly, had dashed into a little thicket a few paces ahead.
"Hold on!" McCarty cried, as Walter started forward with cocked gun. "Bob, Bob," he yelled. "Come here; come here, you fool."
But the dog did not instantly obey. Instead, from the thicket came the sound of a fierce struggle.
"What can be in there?" Walter asked anxiously. "It sounds as though Bob was getting the worst of it."
"He is, and he isn't," grinned the other. "Just wait a minute and you will see what I mean."
Walter did not have long to wait. Soon a few short barks announced that Bob had triumphed, and a moment later the dog emerged from the bushes, but not before a villainous odor had reached the boys' nostrils. So strong and sickening it was, that the lads retreated in haste.
"Get out of here; go home," ordered McCarty angrily. "Go home, you fool."
Bob stopped and eyed him reproachfully; then, as if in obedience to an oft-repeated lesson, he turned around and trotted back to camp.
McCarty chuckled as he gazed after him. "That's Bob's one failing," he said. "He will go out of his way to tackle a pole-cat. As soon as the scent of one battle wears off he goes out and seeks another. Seems like a regular mania with him. I sure hope he will not do as he did last time—when he went back to camp, sneaked into my tent and went to sleep on my cot. Whew! I had to burn my blankets and fumigate my tent before I could sleep in it again, but I guess I had better shut up. If we talk as we go along, we will never get near a deer."