210 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



had gone out accompanied by only the mongrel dog 

 that had drawn his provisions from the fort on a sort 

 of toboggan sleigh. 



The snow is a white page on which the wild crea 

 tures write their daily record for those who can read. 

 All over the white swamp were little deep tracks; here, 

 holes as if the runner had sunk; there, padded marks 

 as from the bound bound bound of something soft; 

 then, again, where the thicket was like a hedge with 

 only one breach through, the footprints had beaten a 

 little hard rut walled by the soft snow. Koot s dog 

 might have detected a motionless form under the 

 thicket of spiney shrubs, a form that was gray almost 

 to whiteness and scarcely to be distinguished from the 

 snowy underbrush but for the blink of a prism light 

 the rabbit s eye. If the dog did catch that one tell 

 tale glimpse of an eye which a cunning rabbit would 

 have shut, true to the training of his trapper master 

 he would give no sign of the discovery except perhaps 

 the pricking forward of both ears. Koot himself pre 

 served as stolid a countenance as the rabbit playing 

 dead or simulating a block of wood. Where the foot 

 prints ran through the breached hedge, Koot stooped 

 down and planted little sticks across the runway till 

 there was barely room for a weasel to pass. Across 

 the open he suspended a looped string hung from a 

 twig bent so that the slightest weight in the loop 

 would send it up with a death jerk for anything caught 

 in the tightening twine. 



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 



