Verily, this was no beast—­he would have taped four feet and a quarter from tip to tip, if you had worn chain-mail and dared to measure him—­no beast, I say, to handle with white-kid ball gloves.  Things were possible from him, one felt, that were not possible of any other living creature—­awful things.

Suddenly he looked up.  The branches above him had stirred uneasily, as if an army were asleep there.  And an army was—­of wood-pigeons.  Thousands upon thousands of wood-pigeons were asleep above his head, come from Heaven knows where, going to—­who could tell in the end?

All at once one fell.  Without apparent reason or cause, it fell.  And the wolverine, with his quick, intelligent eyes, watched it fall, from branch to branch, turning over and over—­oh! so softly—­to the ground.  When he had poked his way to it—­walking flat-footed, like a bear or a railway porter—­it was dead.  Slain in a breath!  Without a flutter, killed!  By what?  By disease—­diphtheria.  But not here would the terrible drama be worked out.  This was but an isolated victim, first of the thousands that would presently succumb to the fell disease far, far over there, to the westward, hundreds of miles away, in England and Wales, perhaps, whither they were probably bound.

But the poor starved corpse, choked to death in the end maybe, was of no use to the wolverine.  As he sniffed it he found that out.  The thing was wasted to the bones even.  And turning away from it—­he suddenly “froze” in his tracks where he stood.

One of those little wandering eddies which seem to meander about a forest in an aimless sort of way, coming from and going now hither, as if the breeze itself were lost among the still aisles, had touched his wet muzzle; and its touch spelt—­“Man!”

If it had been the taint of ten thousand deaths it could not have affected him more.  He became a beast cast in old, old bronze, and as hard as bronze; and when he moved, it was stiffly, and all bristly, and on end.

Animals have no counting of time.  In the wild, things happen as swiftly as a flash of light; or, perhaps, nothing happens at all for a night, or a day, or half a week.  Therefore I do not know exactly how long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a certain spot—­himself unseen.  All animals, almost, can do that, but none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine.  He is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only—­a name to conjure with.

He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there had been.  He found—­showing himself again now—­that a man—­a hunter, a trapper, one after fur—­had made himself here a cache, a store under the earth; and—­well, the wolverine’s great, bear-like claws seemed made for digging.

He dug—­and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have known it.  He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches, and, with humped shoulders, stare—­scowl, I mean—­round in his lowering, low-browed fashion.