The relief he at once experienced was natural,
though brief; for at first sight he saw in these tracks a simple
explanation of the whole matter: these big marks had surely been left by
a bull moose that, wind against it, had blundered upon the camp, and
uttered its singular cry of warning and alarm the moment its mistake was
apparent. Defago, in whom the hunting instinct was developed to the
point of uncanny perfection, had scented the brute coming down the wind
hours before. His excitement and disappearance were due, of course,
to--to his--
Then the impossible explanation at which he grasped faded, as common
sense showed him mercilessly that none of this was true. No guide, much
less a guide like Defago, could have acted in so irrational a way, going
off even without his rifle ...! The whole affair demanded a far more
complicated elucidation, when he remembered the details of it all--the
cry of terror, the amazing language, the grey face of horror when his
nostrils first caught the new odor; that muffled sobbing in the
darkness, and--for this, too, now came back to him dimly--the man's
original aversion for this particular bit of country....
Besides, now that he examined them closer, these were not the tracks of
a bull moose at all! Hank had explained to him the outline of a bull's
hoofs, of a cow's or calf s, too, for that matter; he had drawn them
clearly on a strip of birch bark.
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