Early on this morning Bush McTaggart started out to gather his catch, and where he crossed the stream six miles from Lac Bain he first saw Baree’s tracks.  He stopped to examine them with sudden and unusual interest, falling at last on his knees, whipping off the glove from his right hand, and picking up a single hair.

“The black wolf!”

He uttered the words in an odd, hard voice, and involuntarily his eyes turned straight in the direction of the Gray Loon.  After that, even more carefully than before, he examined one of the clearly impressed tracks in the snow.  When he rose to his feet there was in his face the look of one who had made an unpleasant discovery.

“A black wolf!” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders.  “Bah!  Lerue is a fool.  It is a dog.”  And then, after a moment, he muttered in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper, “Her dog.”

He went on, traveling in the trail of the dog.  A new excitement possessed him that was more thrilling than the excitement of the hunt.  Being human, it was his privilege to add two and two together, and out of two and two he made—­Baree.  There was little doubt in his mind.  The thought had flashed on him first when Lerue had mentioned the black wolf.  He was convinced after his examination of the tracks.  They were the tracks of a dog, and the dog was black.  Then he came to the first trap that had been robbed of its bait.

Under his breath he cursed.  The bait was gone, and the trap was unsprung.  The sharpened stick that had transfixed the bait was pulled out clean.

All that day Bush McTaggart followed a trail where Baree had left traces of his presence.  Trap after trap he found robbed.  On the lake he came upon the mangled wolf.  From the first disturbing excitement of his discovery of Baree’s presence his humor changed slowly to one of rage, and his rage increased as the day dragged out.  He was not unacquainted with four-footed robbers of the trap line, but usually a wolf or a fox or a dog who had grown adept in thievery troubled only a few traps.  But in this case Baree was traveling straight from trap to trap, and his footprints in the snow showed that he had stopped at each one.  There was, to McTaggart, almost a human devilishness to his work.  He evaded the poisons.  Not once did he stretch his head or paw within the danger zone of a deadfall.  For apparently no reason whatever he had destroyed a splendid mink, whose glossy fur lay scattered in worthless bits over the snow.  Toward the end of the day McTaggart came to a deadfall in which a lynx had died.  Baree had torn the silvery flank of the animal until the skin was of less than half value.  McTaggart cursed aloud, and his breath came hot.

At dusk he reached the shack Pierre Eustach had built midway of his line, and took inventory of his fur.  It was not more than a third of a catch; the lynx was half-ruined, a mink was torn completely in two.  The second day he found still greater ruin, still more barren traps.  He was like a madman.  When he arrived at the second cabin, late in the afternoon, Baree’s tracks were not an hour old in the snow.  Three times during the night he heard the dog howling.