“Tell you what I do believe it is,” said Yan, not noticing this terrifying description; “it’s a Skunk.”

“Little Beaver, my son!  I thought I would tell you, then I sez to meself, ’No; it’s better for him to find out by his lone.  Nothing like a struggle in early life to develop the stuff in a man.  It don’t do to help him too much,’ sez I, an’ so I didn’t.”

Here Sam condescendingly patted the Second War Chief on the head and nodded approvingly.  Of course he did not know as much about the track as Yan did, but he prattled on: 

“Little Beaver! you’re a heap struck on tracks—­Ugh—­good!  You kin tell by them everything that passes in the night.  Wagh!  Bully!  You’re likely to be the naturalist of our Tribe.  But you ain’t got gumption.  Now, in this yer hunting-ground of our Tribe there is only one place where you can see a track, an’ that is that same mud-bank; all the rest is hard or grassy.  Now, what I’d do if I was a Track-a-mist, I’d give the critters lots o’ chance to leave tracks.  I’d fix it all round with places so nothing could come or go ‘thout givin’ us his impressions of the trip.  I’d have one on each end of the trail coming in, an’ one on each side of the creek where it comes in an’ goes out.”

“Well, Sam, you have a pretty level head.  I wonder I didn’t think of that myself.”

“My son, the Great Chief does the thinking.  It’s the rabble—­that’s you and Sappy—­that does the work.”

But all the same he set about it at once with Yan, Sappy following with a slight limp now.  They removed the sticks and rubbish for twenty feet of the trail at each end and sprinkled this with three or four inches of fine black loam.  They cleared off the bank of the stream at four places, one at each side where it entered the woods, and one at each side where it went into the Burns’s Bush.

“Now,” said Sam, “there’s what I call visitors’ albums like the one that Phil Leary’s nine fatties started when they got their brick house and their swelled heads, so every one that came in could write their names an’ something about ’this happy, happy, ne’er-to-be-forgotten visit’—­them as could write.  Reckon that’s where our visitors get the start, for all of ours kin write that has feet.”

“Wonder why I didn’t think o’ that,” said Yan, again and again.  “But there’s one thing you forget,” he said.  “We want one around the teepee.”

This was easily made, as the ground was smooth and bare there, and Sappy forgot his limp and helped to carry ashes and sand from the fire-hole.  Then planting his broad feet down in the dust, with many snickers, he left some very interesting tracks.

“I call that a bare track” said Sam.

“Go ahead and draw it,” giggled Sappy

“Why not?” and Yan got out his book.

“Bet you can’t make it life-size,” and Sam glanced from the little note-book to the vast imprint.

After it was drawn, Sam said, “Guess I’ll peel off and show you a human track.”  He soon gave an impression of his foot for the artist, and later Yan added his own; the three were wholly different.