Before he had decided one way or the other, the squirrel, still scolding and playing bo-peep, scampered off his bough, and up the trunk of the maple.  Thence he quickly made good his escape from one tree to another, affording a whisking, momentary view now and again of his white breast or bushy tail.  Dol absolutely forgot the blazed trail, forgot the stories which he had heard about forest perils, forgot every earthly thing but his admiration for the pretty, tantalizing fellow; though to do the lad justice, he soon came to the conclusion that the camp must be in a worse strait for want of provisions before he could have the heart to shoot him.  He gave chase nevertheless, plunging along in a ziz-zag way over a carpet of moss and dry pine-needles, and through some dense tangles of undergrowth, uttering a welcoming screech whenever he saw the bright eyes of the little trickster peering down at him from a bough.

He had travelled farther than he knew before his interest in the game waned.  He began to feel that it was rather beneath the dignity of a fellow who wore moccasins, carried coon-skin pouch and powder-horn, and who was bound for remote solitudes in search of the lordly moose, to be interested in such an insignificant phase of forest life as the doings of a red squirrel.

Then he started back to find the trail.  He walked a considerable distance.  He searched hither and thither, straining his eyes anxiously through the bewildering gloom of the forest, but never a notched tree could he see.  Whereupon Dol Farrar called himself some pretty hard names.  He remarked that he had been a “hair-brained fool” and a “greenhorn” ever to leave the spotted track, but that he wasn’t going to be “downed;” he would search until he found it.

And he certainly was enough of a greenhorn not to know that every step he now took was carrying him away from the trail, and plunging him into a hopeless, pathless labyrinth of woods.  For Dol had lost all knowledge of directions, and was completely “turned round;” which means that he was miserably lost.

The disaster came about in this way.  The forest here was very dense, the giant trees interlocked above his head letting so little light filter through their foliage that he could scarcely see twenty yards ahead of him, and that in a puzzling, shadowy gloom resembling an English twilight.

When he ceased chasing the squirrel, he imagined that he retraced his steps directly towards the point where he had quitted the trail.  In reality, seeing nothing to aim for in this bewildering maze of endless trees, turned out of his way continually as he dodged in and out around massive trunks, he gradually worked farther and farther off the course by which he had come, drifting in random directions like a rudderless ship on mid-ocean.  This helpless state is called, in the phraseology of the northern woods, being “turned round.”

But Dol Farrar was spared for the present a thorough realization of the dreadful mishap which had befallen him.  He had a shocked, breathless, flurried feeling, as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, and he saw the dangers of the unknown as he had not before seen them.  But even in the midst of abusing himself for his rash self-confidence, he uttered a cheerful “Hurrah!”