For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported “tracks,” Mac and the Boy would hasten to the scene of action, and set a new snare, piling brush on each side of the track that the game had run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a line of least resistance straight through the loop.

In the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying with dry pleasure: 

“Now, with luck, we may get a Xema Sabinii,” or some such fearful wildfowl.

“Good to eat?” the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere now in moments of hunger for fresh meat, when Mac, with the nearest approach to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some miserable little hawk-owl or a three-toed woodpecker to add, not to the larder, but to the “collection.”

“No, you don’t eat Sabine gulls,” Mac would answer pityingly.

But those snares never seemed to know what they were there for.  The first one was set expressly to catch one of the commonest birds that fly—­Mac’s Lagopus albus, the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or at the very least a Bonasa umbellus, which, being interpreted, is ruffed ptarmigan.  The tracks had been bird tracks, but the creature that swung in the air next day was a baby hare.  The Schoolmaster looked upon the incident as being in the nature of a practical joke, and resented it.  But the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a rooted suspicion of the soundness of the Schoolmaster’s Natural History, which nobody actually felt.  For he had never yet pretended to know anything that he didn’t know well; and when Potts would say something disparaging of Mac’s learning behind his back (which was against the unwritten rules of the game) the Colonel invariably sat on Potts.

“Knows a darned sight too much?  No, he don’t, sir; that’s just the remarkable thing about Mac.  He isn’t trying to carry any more than he can swing.”

At the same time it is to be feared that none of his companions really appreciated the pedagogue’s learning.  Nor had anyone but the Boy sympathised with his resolution to make a Collection.  What they wanted was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing the manners and customs of the particular species that was sending up appetising odours from the pot.

They even applauded the rudeness of the Boy, who one day responded to Mac’s gravely jubilant “Look here!  I’ve got the Parus Hudsonicus!”—­

“Poor old man!  What do you do for it?”

And when anybody after that was indisposed, they said he might be sickening for an attack of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that case it was a bad look-out.

Well for Mac that he wouldn’t have cared a red cent to impress the greatest naturalist alive, let alone a lot of fellows who didn’t know a titmouse from a disease.

Meanwhile work on the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward.  From the outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing.  From what were left of the precious planks out of the bottom of the best boat they had made the door—­two by four, and opening directly in front of that masterpiece, the rock fireplace.  The great stone chimney was the pride of the camp and the talk before the winter was done of all “the Lower River.”