38 ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS 
men. Turning, he went back to the fence and 
made sure of a place where he could leap it from 
this side in case of need. Then, stealthily, craft- 
ily, keeping covered by shrubs and undergrowth, 
he stalked back, impelled by his hunger, and his 
curiosity. 
It was dawn now. But though he heard dis- 
tant shots, very far away, there was no gun fired 
on this side of the wire fence. Once or twice a 
deer went past him, but he didn’t dare give chase, 
because the men were always somewhere about. 
Dodging them, keeping them to windward, he 
finally got near the water—a small pond, half 
frozen, half open. On the frozen side, inside a 
wire fence which stretched out over part of the 
ice, were the wild geese, the very same birds he 
knew from his early days in the far north. Fat 
and good they were, too! His mouth watered at 
the smell of them—but here they came in and out 
of a strange, box-like structure evidently built by 
the man creature, and only two hundred yards 
away, over a knoll, smoke was rising, with that 
pungent smell which comes from the fires the man 
creature makes, 
