The windfall was a blazing furnace, and suddenly Le Beau ran back a dozen steps so that he could see on the farther side.  A hundred yards away he saw Miki making for the deeper forest.

It was a clear shot.  At that distance Le Beau would have staked his life that it was impossible for him to miss.  He did not hurry.  One shot, and it would be over.  He raised his rifle, and in that instant a wisp of smoke came like the lash of a whip with the wind and caught him fairly in the eyes, and his bullet passed three inches over Miki’s head.  The whining snarl of it was a new thing to Miki.  But he recognized the thunder of the gun—­and he knew what a gun could do.  To Le Beau, still firing at him through the merciful cloud of smoke, he was like a gray streak flashing to the thick timber.  Three times more Le Beau fired.  From the edge of a dense clump of spruce Miki flung back a defiant howl.  He disappeared as Le Beau’s last shot shovelled up the snow at his heels.

The narrowness of his escape from the man-beast did not frighten Miki out of the Jackson’s Knee country.  If anything, it held him more closely to it.  It gave him something to think about besides Neewa and his aloneness.  As the fox returns to peer stealthily upon the deadfall that has almost caught him, so the trapline was possessed now of a new thrill for Miki.  Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger.  And he welcomed it.  His wits were sharpened.  The fascination of the trapline was deadlier than before.

From the burned windfall he made a wide detour to a point where Le Beau’s snowshoe trail entered the edge of the swamp; and here, hidden in a thick clump of bushes, he watched him as he travelled homeward half an hour later.

From that day he hung like a grim, gray ghost to the trapline.  Silent-footed, cautious, always on the alert for the danger which threatened him, he haunted Jacques Le Beau’s thoughts and footsteps with the elusive persistence of a were-wolf—­a loup-garou of the Black Forest.  Twice in the next week Le Beau caught a flash of him.  Three times he heard him howl.  And twice he followed his trail until, in despair and exhaustion, he turned back.  Never was Miki caught unaware.  He ate no more baits in the trap-houses.  Even when Le Beau lured him with the whole carcass of a rabbit he would not touch it, nor would he touch a rabbit frozen dead in a snare.  From Le Beau’s traps he took only the living things, chiefly birds and squirrels and the big web-footed snowshoe rabbits.  And because a mink jumped at him once, and tore open his nose, he destroyed a number of minks so utterly that their pelts were spoiled.  He found himself another windfall, but instinct taught him now never to go to it directly, but to approach it, and leave it, in a roundabout way.

Day and night Le Beau, the man-brute, plotted against him.  He set many poison-baits.  He killed a doe, and scattered strychnine in its entrails.  He built deadfalls, and baited them with meat soaked in boiling fat.  He made himself a “blind” of spruce and cedar boughs, and sat for long hours, watching with his rifle.  And still Miki was the victor.