68 HUNTING CAMPS. 



a moment later was gazing sadly at the tracks of what 

 must have been a very startled bear. 



I followed the trail, which soon showed that its 

 maker had slowed, but evidently with no intention of 

 stopping. This led me out on to a high barren, from 

 which I searched in vain for any patch of black, moving 

 or stationary. The sun was going down behind the 

 mountains. As I watched, it sank almost visibly from 

 view, leaving behind it a cold, milk-white twilight, which 

 slowly darkened to night. The bear had led me in 

 something of a circle, so that I came out hardly a mile 

 from camp. The wind had died away, and every sound 

 was audible. A splash in the lake, or so I fancied, as 

 Jack drew water for the evening meal, was followed by 

 the desolate cry of a mother loon, who, doubtless terrified 

 by his appearance, circled and screamed at an immense 

 height above the half-grown feathery balls which repre- 

 sented her brood, and which would one day be great 

 northern divers weighing 9 Ibs. apiece, and capable of 

 killing the largest trout and ounaniche. 



Presently her cries ceased, and the splash of her 

 plunge into the lake came quite clearly. Then it 

 seemed to grow rapidly darker, the wild had gone to its 

 rest, the circle of sight narrowed, darkness seemed to 

 lie in pools in every hollow, and, long before I saw Jack 

 crouched beside the open fire, the stars had come out 

 and the owls were calling in the green timber on the 

 shores of the lake. 



Making Igloo Camp our headquarters, we spent the 

 next and following days in long rovings about the 

 surrounding country. Once we found a fortnight-old 

 track of a caribou stag, and twice a young spruce tree 

 stripped of its bark, but the stags which had rubbed the 



