The year went by. Another season came, and Yan felt in his heart the
hunter fret once more. Even had he not, the talk he heard would have
set him all afire.
[Illustration: The doe was walking slowly, with hanging head and
ears.—Page 201.]
It told of a mighty buck that now lived in the hills—the Sandhill Stag
they called him. It told of his size, his speed, and the crowning glory
that he bore on his brow, a marvellous growth like sculptured bronze
with gleaming ivory points.
So when the first tracking snow came, Yan set out with some comrades who
had caught a faint reflected glow of his ardor. They drove in a sleigh
to the Spruce Hill, then scattered to meet again at sunset. The woods
about abounded in hares and grouse, and the powder burned all around.
But no deer-track was to be found, so Yan quietly left the woods and set
off alone for Kennedy's Plain, where last this wonderful buck had been
seen.
After a few miles he came on a great deer-track, so large and sharp and
broken by such mighty bounds that he knew it at once for the trail of
the Sandhill Stag.
With a sudden rush of strength to his limbs he led away like a wolf on
the trail. And down his spine and in his hair he felt as before, and
yet as never before, the strange prickling that he knew was the same as
makes the wolf's mane bristle when he hunts. He followed till night was
near and he must needs turn, for the Spruce Hill was many miles away.
He knew that it would be long after sunset before he could get there,
and he scarcely expected that his comrades would wait for him, but he
did not care; he gloried in the independence of his strength, for his
legs were like iron and his wind was like a hound's. Ten miles were no
more to him than a mile to another man, for he could run all day and
come home fresh, and always when alone in the lone hills he felt within
so glad a gush of wild exhilaration that his joy was full.
[Illustration]
So when his friends, feeling sure that he could take care of himself,
drove home and left him, he was glad to be left. They seemed rather to
pity him for imposing on himself such long, toilsome tramps. They had
no realization of what he found in those wind-swept hills. They never
once thought what they, and all their friends and every man that ever
lived has striven for and offered his body, his brain, his freedom
and his life to buy; what they were vainly wearing out their lives in
fearful, hopeless drudgery to gain, that boy was daily finding in those
hills. The bitter, biting, blizzard wind was without, but the fire of
health and youth was within; and at every stride in his daily march, it
was _happiness_ he found, and he knew it. And he smiled such a gentle
smile when he thought of them driven home in the sleigh shivering and
miserable, yet pitying him.
[Illustration]
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._"
[Illustration]
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."
[Illustration]
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_.
And though many a score of crooked frosty miles he coursed, and sometimes
had a track to lead and sometimes none, he still went on, like Galahad
when the Grail was just before him. For more than once, the guide that
led was the trail of the Sandhill Stag.
[Illustration: The track of a mother blacktail was suddenly joined by
two little ones' tracks.—Page 201.]