Young Dan drew two blanks and then a fine big lynx. He skinned the lynx before going on. The fourth trap was empty, but the bait which had been placed on and around it so artfully had been snatched away even more artfully. He rebaited with frozen trout. The fifth trap was snapped tight on the forepaws of a skunk. The skunk itself was gone but Young Dan soon discovered odds and ends of hair and bone scattered in the snow in the immediate vicinity. Something with an amazing appetite had beaten the trapper to that trap, for certain. Young Dan set these things to rights and passed on, wondering at the driving power of hunger.
Two more blanks, a red fox and a skunk followed. The last trap on the line was empty and evidently undisturbed. The bait was covered with snow. Young Dan felt for it with a small stick and twitched a bit of it to the surface. He replaced it with a frozen trout, left it lying on the snow as an extra lure and turned away. He even took a step away; and then he turned back sharply and with the stick drew closer the piece of bait which he had twitched out of the snow. He took it up in his mittened hands and examined it closely. His eyes rounded and his lips parted with astonishment. Then his face took on an expression of blank bewilderment. He gazed all around at the crowding underbrush and soaring spires of the forest, then straight up at the clear sky, then down again at the lump of frozen bait in his hand.
“That’s queer,” he said. “Andy was here last, and that was before we went fishing—yes, and before the last snow. We were baiting with porcupine that day. I wonder where he got this from.”
He tossed the thing back into the snow and, still wondering, went his way. His way now was not by the back trail, but sharp to the right, and then more to the right, until his course lay southeast. He traveled by the sun. The way was rough and tangled, and the “going” was heavy. He struggled over blow-downs and through cedar-twined fastnesses of swamp. After a couple of miles of it he sat down to rest and eat his lunch. After that he came to a patch of open barren, desolate and flat under the colorless sun. He held to his course straight across the level, a distance of about two miles, and made good time. Beyond the barren he entered a forest of big timber and crossed a wide ridge of maples and yellow birches; and far beyond the ridge he came at last to the locality of the southernmost trap of the southern line.