more carefully and found bits of moss and 



212 



fish-scales, and the pugs of some animal, too 

 faint in the gravel to make out what the 

 beast was that made them. I followed the 

 faint traces for a hundred yards or more into 

 the woods till they led me to a great spruce 

 tree, under which every sign disappeared 

 utterly, as if the creature had suddenly flown 

 away net and all, and I gave up the trail 

 without any idea of what had made it. 



For two weeks that theft bothered me. It 

 was not so much the loss of my two trout 

 and net, but rather the loss of my woodcraft 

 on the trail that had no end, which kept me 

 restless. The net was a large one, altogether 

 too large and heavy for trout fishing. At 

 the last moment before starting on my trip I 

 found that my trout net was rotten and use- 

 less, and so had taken the only thing at hand, 

 a specially made forty-inch net which I had 

 last used on a scientific expedition for collect- 

 ing specimens from the lakes of northern 

 New Brunswick. The handle was long, and 

 the bow, as I had more than once tested, was 

 powerful enough to use instead of a gaff for 



