hunt, stepped into the thongs of his snow-shoes, and started up the ridge.
The muscles of Hertel's face set stone-hard as he hurried in the direction from which had come the cry. To-night his enemy should not escape him. The beast was not more than a mile or two back in the "bush," and in the deep snow the trapper knew that he could give any four-footed creature in the North that much start and run him down before dawn, for no dog-runner from Lake Saint John to Flying Post on the Ottawa headwaters could take the trail and hold it from François Hertel. Beast or devil, whatever he was, he left tracks in the snow to follow. Beast or devil—and there had been enough in the last few days to sway a mind less balanced, to shake nerves less steady, than Hertel's—if it made tracks in the snow and howled at night, there was flesh and blood for his bullet and knife to find. If neither lead nor steel could tear its vitals, then Hertel was beaten. It was Windigo or demon, as the Cree had said, and he would slink out of the valley like a whipped husky. So ran the thoughts of the desperate Frenchman as he mounted the ridge.
At length he stood on the crest of the hill overlooking the frozen river-valley lit by the low moon, when the eerie wail lifted from the black forest in a creek-bottom below him.
Hertel glanced at the action of his rifle and broke into a run. As he swung swiftly through the soundless forest, ghostly shapes of snow-shoe rabbits faded before him into the white waste; a snowy
