The dog growled below and rushed into the forest.  Venters ran down the declivity to enter a zone of light shade streaked with sunshine.  The oak-trees were slender, none more than half a foot thick, and they grew close together, intermingling their branches.  Ring came running back with a rabbit in his mouth.  Venters took the rabbit and, holding the dog near him, stole softly on.  There were fluttering of wings among the branches and quick bird-notes, and rustling of dead leaves and rapid patterings.  Venters crossed well-worn trails marked with fresh tracks; and when he had stolen on a little farther he saw many birds and running quail, and more rabbits than he could count.  He had not penetrated the forest of oaks for a hundred yards, had not approached anywhere near the line of willows and cottonwoods which he knew grew along a stream.  But he had seen enough to know that Surprise Valley was the home of many wild creatures.

Venters returned to camp.  He skinned the rabbits, and gave the dogs the one they had quarreled over, and the skin of this he dressed and hung up to dry, feeling that he would like to keep it.  It was a particularly rich, furry pelt with a beautiful white tail.  Venters remembered that but for the bobbing of that white tail catching his eye he would not have espied the rabbit, and he would never have discovered Surprise Valley.  Little incidents of chance like this had turned him here and there in Deception Pass; and now they had assumed to him the significance and direction of destiny.

His good fortune in the matter of game at hand brought to his mind the necessity of keeping it in the valley.  Therefore he took the axe and cut bundles of aspens and willows, and packed them up under the bridge to the narrow outlet of the gorge.  Here he began fashioning a fence, by driving aspens into the ground and lacing them fast with willows.  Trip after trip he made down for more building material, and the afternoon had passed when he finished the work to his satisfaction.  Wildcats might scale the fence, but no coyote could come in to search for prey, and no rabbits or other small game could escape from the valley.

Upon returning to camp he set about getting his supper at ease, around a fine fire, without hurry or fear of discovery.  After hard work that had definite purpose, this freedom and comfort gave him peculiar satisfaction.  He caught himself often, as he kept busy round the camp-fire, stopping to glance at the quiet form in the cave, and at the dogs stretched cozily near him, and then out across the beautiful valley.  The present was not yet real to him.

While he ate, the sun set beyond a dip in the rim of the curved wall.  As the morning sun burst wondrously through a grand arch into this valley, in a golden, slanting shaft, so the evening sun, at the moment of setting, shone through a gap of cliffs, sending down a broad red burst to brighten the oval with a blaze of fire.  To Venters both sunrise and sunset were unreal.