“Oh, Delancy!” she wailed, “why didn’t you ‘plug’ him as you promised? I simply couldn’t shoot; Duane tried to make me, but I was so excited and so surprised to see the creature run so fast that all my ideas went out of my head and I never thought of pulling that wretched trigger!”

“That,” said Delancy, very red, “is precisely what happened to me.”  And, turning to Geraldine, who looked dreadfully repentant:  “I heard you tell me to shoot, and I merely gawked at the beast like a rubbering jay at a ten-cent show.”

“Everybody does that at first,” said Duane cheerfully; “I’ll bet anything that you and Rosalie empty your magazines at the next one.”

“We really must, Delancy,” insisted Rosalie as she and Geraldine turned away when Miller and Kemp tucked up their sleeves and unsheathed their knives in preparation for unpleasant but necessary details.

But they worked like lightning; and in exactly seven minutes the heavy beast was drawn, washed out with snow, roped, and hung to a tree well out of reach of any four-footed forest marauders that might prowl that way before night.

Geraldine, smiling her deprecation of their praise, waited with the others until the two guides were ready.  Then, in the same order as before, they moved forward, descended the slope, and came into a strange wilderness of stark gray alders that stretched away in every direction.  And threading, circling, crossing each other everywhere among the alders ran the trails of deer and wild boar, deep and fresh in the powdery snow.

At intervals, as they advanced, hard-wood ridges crossed the bewildering alder labyrinths.  Twice, while ascending these ridges, Rosalie’s heart jumped as a grouse thundered up.  Once three steel-gray deer started out of the scrub and went bounding off, displaying enormous white flags; once a young buck, hunting for trouble, winded it, whistled, and came leaping past Rosalie so close that she shrank aside with a half-stifled cry of apprehension and delight.

Half a mile farther on Delancy, labouring along on his snow-shoes, suddenly halted, detaining Geraldine with a quick touch on the shoulder.

“There’s something in that clearing,” he whispered.

Miller had seen it, too; Duane motioned Rosalie forward to join Delancy, and, side by side, they crept ahead, keeping a clump of scrub hemlock between them and the edge of the clearing.  It was the Green Pass feed-ground, a rocky strip of pasture climbing upward toward Lynx Peak; and there, clean cut against the snowy background, three dark objects were moving, trotting nervously here and there, nosing, nuzzling, tunnelling the snow with long, sharp muzzles.

Duane and Geraldine silently unslung their field-glasses.

“They’re boar,” he said.

“Two-year-olds,” she nodded.  “I do hope they will get one each.  Duane, ought I to have shot that other one?”