The fires of his hatred burned fiercer as the weeks passed, until at last he would snap and tear with his long fangs at the snow where McTaggart’s feet had passed.  And all of the time, away back of his madness, there was a vision of Nepeese that continued to grow more and more clearly in his brain.  That first Great Loneliness—­the loneliness of the long days and longer nights of his waiting and seeking on the Gray Loon, oppressed him again as it had oppressed him in the early days of her disappearance.  On starry or moonlit nights he sent forth his wailing cries for her again, and Bush McTaggart, listening to them in the middle of the night, felt strange shivers run up his spine.  The man’s hatred was different than the beast’s, but perhaps even more implacable.  With McTaggart it was not hatred alone.  There was mixed with it an indefinable and superstitious fear, a thing he laughed at, a thing he cursed at, but which clung to him as surely as the scent of his trail clung to Baree’s nose.  Baree no longer stood for the animal alone; he stood for Nepeese.  That was the thought that insisted in growing in McTaggart’s ugly mind.  Never a day passed now that he did not think of the Willow; never a night came and went without a visioning of her face.

He even fancied, on a certain night of storm, that he heard her voice out in the wailing of the wind—­and less than a minute later he heard faintly a distant howl out in the forest.  That night his heart was filled with a leaden dread.  He shook himself.  He smoked his pipe until the cabin was blue.  He cursed Baree, and the storm—­but there was no longer in him the bullying courage of old.  He had not ceased to hate Baree; he still hated him as he had never hated a man, but he had an even greater reason now for wanting to kill him.  It came to him first in his sleep, in a restless dream, and after that it lived, and lived—­the thought that the spirit of Nepeese was guiding baree in the ravaging of his trap line!

After a time he ceased to talk at the Post about the Black Wolf that was robbing his line.  The furs damaged by Baree’s teeth he kept out of sight, and to himself he kept his secret.  He learned every trick and scheme of the hunters who killed foxes and wolves along the Barrens.  He tried three different poisons, one so powerful that a single drop of it meant death.  He tried strychnine in gelatin capsules, in deer fat, caribou fat, moose liver, and even in the flesh of porcupine.  At last, in preparing his poisons, he dipped his hands in beaver oil before he handled the venoms and flesh so that there could be no human smell.  Foxes, wolves, and even the mink and ermine died of these baits, but Baree came always so near—­and no nearer.  In January McTaggart poisoned every bait in his trap houses.  This produced at least one good result for him.  From that day Baree no longer touched his baits, but ate only the rabbits he killed in the traps.