KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 277 



All day long, Koot goes from hedge to hedge, from runway to 

 runway, choosing always the places where natural barriers compel 

 the rabbit to take this path and no other, travelling if he can in a 

 circle from his cabin so that the last snare set will bring him back 

 with many a zigzag to the first snare made. If rabbits were plenti- 

 ful — as they always were in the fur country of the North except 

 during one year in seven when an epidemic spared the land from a 

 rabbit pest — Koot's circuit of snares would run for miles through 

 the swamp. Traps for large game would be set out so that the 

 circuit would require only a day ; but where rabbits are numerous, 

 the foragers that prey — wolf and wolverine and lynx and bob- 

 cat — will be numerous, too; and the trapper will not set out more 

 snares than he can visit twice a day. Noon — the Indian's hour 

 of the short shadow — is the best time for the first visit, nightfall, 

 the time of no shadow at all, for the second. If the trapper has no 

 wooden door to his cabin, and in it — instead of caching in a tree 

 — keeps fish or bacon that may attract marauding wolverine, he will 

 very probably leave his dogs on guard while he makes the round 

 of the snares. 



Finding tracks about the shack when he came back for his 

 noonday meal, Koot shouted sundry instructions into the mongrel's 

 ear, emphasized them with a moccasin kick, picked up the sack 

 in which he carried bait, twine, and traps, and set out in the even- 

 ing to make the round of his snares, unaccompanied by the dog. 

 Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and white, hanging stiff and 

 stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in the twine snares. 

 Snares were set anew, the game strung over his shoulder, and Koot 

 was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin when that 

 strange sense of feel told him that he was being followed. What was 

 it ? Could it be the dog ? He whistled — he called it by name. 



In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly 

 quiet as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just 

 at nightfall. By day, the grouse may utter a lonely cluck-cluck, 

 or the snow-buntings chirrup and twitter and flutter from drift to 



