216 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



oh! I ll be on to you in just one minute!&quot; Koot 

 kicked the dog hard with plain anger; and his anger 

 was at himself &quot;because his eyes and his ears failed to 

 localize, to real-ize, to visualize what those little pricks 

 and shivers tingling down to his finger-tips meant. 

 Then the civilized man came uppermost in Koot and 

 he marched off very matter of fact to the next snare. 



But if Koot s vision had heen as acute as his sense 

 of feel and he had glanced up to the topmost spreading 

 bough of a pine just above the snare, he might have 

 detected lying in a dapple of sun and shade something 

 with large owl eyes, something whose pencilled ear- 

 tufts caught the first crisp of the man s moccasins 

 over the snow-crust. Then the ear-tufts were laid 

 flat back against a furry form hardly differing from 

 the dapple of sun and shade. The big owl eyes closed 

 to a tiny blinking slit that let out never a ray of tell 

 tale light. The big round body mottled gray and 

 white like the snowy tree widened stretched flat 

 tened till it was almost -a part of the tossing pine 

 bough. Only when the man and dog below the tree had 

 passed far beyond did the pencilled ears blink forward 

 and the owl eyes open and the big body bunch out like 

 a cat with elevated haunches ready to spring. 



But by-and-bye the man s snares began to tell on 

 the rabbits. They grew scarce and timid. And the 

 thing that had rifled the rabbit snares grew hunger- 

 bold. One day when Koot and the dog were skimming 

 across the billowy drifts, something black far ahead 

 bounced up, caught a bunting on the wing, and with 

 another bounce disappeared among the trees. 



Koot said one word &quot; Cat ! &quot; and the dog was off 

 full cry. 



