208 INTO THE TRAP. 
There were only the tracks of big snowshoes, 
which had come and gone, and said no word— 
taking the hare with them. 
But no! What was this ? 
The mink dropped his white nose to the 
ground. He could have sworn he had killed 
that hare. And who ever heard of a dead 
hare running away ? 
Yet it had—or, at least, there was its scent 
leading away, true and strong, on the same 
route as the snowshoes had taken; but never 
before had he known a hare leave a track like 
this—a deep, regular groove, instead of the 
quadruple tracks, with the imprint of the hind- 
feet in front of that of the forefeet, as every- 
body knows. 
However, there was the scent. And there 
was the mink, ravenous, starving for want of 
food. At no ordinary time would he have 
risked the madness, but now hunger had made 
him mad enough to risk anything. 
Two hours later, in the ghostly darkness of 
the wood, the mink came up with his hare. 
It was lying at the foot of a tree, inside a 
little palisade of saplings, to the narrow 
entrance of which led, in a diminishing vista, 
a sort of passage of twigs stuck in the snow. 
The trail of the snowshoes, he ascertained, 
went on alone. 
