ANIMAL RENEGADES. 



169 



Upon another occasion a company of hunters had 

 cornered him on a treeless ridge and opened fire as 

 they contracted their circle, but when they had all but 

 surrounded him he leaped down a cliff of twenty feet 

 into the gorge of the Font-au-Loup Creek and disap- 

 peared among the broken crags. One deponent averred 

 that he had watched him in the act of uprooting the 

 bushes and weeds on a promontory he wanted to use 

 as an observatory point ; another had seen him drive 

 a stray cow from his hill-pasture for fear that her ab- 

 sence would lead to a chase ; and many other stories 

 of that sort proved that we thought him capable of 

 almost anything. That he was bullet-proof nobody ven- 

 tured to question : it would have been an insult to all 

 the foresters of the Sambre Valley. The antecedents 

 of the old bushwhacker were somewhat obscure, but 

 it was known that he had once been in charge of a 

 farmer who kept a pasture for the saddle-horses of the 

 Alleville hotel, and I suppose that the contrast between 

 the green wilderness and the dusty pony-track so im- 

 pressed his manly soul that he decided to secede. His 

 forage-excursions were too well planned to get him into 

 trouble, but at certain seasons of the year he was in the 

 habit of visiting the lowlands on more risky business, 

 and that habit finally proved his ruin. He thrice stam- 

 peded the mares of a large stock-farm, whose owner at 

 last offered a prize of sixty francs for his skin. That 

 started a hue and cry, and two weeks after the bidet 



