Hunted hard every day, he hadn't let himself be chased from the top of Burned Mountain. Staying there, he knew what he was doing. Sparsely forested, the top of the mountain was given over to a devil's tangle of twining laurel and snarled rhododendron. Some of the stems from which the latter evergreen grew were thick as tree trunks, and some of the winding, snaking branches were thirty feet long. It was heartbreaking work just to go through one, and impossible for a man to do so without making as much noise as a running horse. Once within the laurel or rhododendron, and some thickets were a combination of both, it was seldom possible to see seven yards in any direction. Often, visibility was restricted to seven feet.
Pythias haunted those thickets that varied from an eighth of an acre to perhaps eighty acres. Chased out of one, he entered another, flitting like a gray ghost through the scrub aspen that separated them. Then he lingered until the hunters came and entered another thicket. Only when going through the aspens, where he knew very well he could be seen, did he run. In the thickets he walked or slunk, and he never made a foolish move.
Every day there'd been snow--and John Wilson and Ted had had tracking snow for seventeen of the twenty days--they'd found Pythias' bed and his fresh tracks. His hoofmarks were big and round, and they indicated him as surely as a robe of ermine or a scepter marks a king. But except for the first day, when he'd been hopelessly out of range, the two hunters hadn't seen him even once. Pythias could never conceal the fact that he had walked in the snow. But he could hide himself.
Methodically, Ted continued to tear strips from his bolt of red cloth and lay them on the table. Tammie, grown fat and lazy during the three weeks he'd been confined to the house--even though Ted had let him out for a run every night--raised his head and blinked solemnly at the fireplace. Bone tired, John Wilson turned in his chair and grinned.
"You have enough of those red ribbons so you could fasten one on half the deer in the Mahela. Think they'll work?"
"I don't know of anything else. We've tried everything."
"It's been a good hunt," John Wilson said contentedly, "and a most instructive one. I don't have to have a buck."