It was in January that McTaggart caught his first glimpse of Baree.  He had placed his rifle against a tree, and was a dozen feet away from it at the time.  It was as if Baree knew, and had come to taunt him.  For when the factor suddenly looked up Baree was standing out clear from the dwarf spruce not twenty yards away from him, his white fangs gleaming and his eyes burning like coals.  For a space McTaggart stared as if turned into stone.  It was Baree.  He recognized the white star, the white-tipped ear, and his heart thumped like a hammer in his breast.  Very slowly he began to creep toward his rifle.  His hand was reaching for it when like a flash Baree was gone.

This gave McTaggart his new idea.  He blazed himself a fresh trail through the forests parallel with his trap line but at least five hundred yards distant from it.  Wherever a trap or deadfall was set this new trail struck sharply in, like the point of a V, so that he could approach his line unobserved.  By this strategy he believed that in time he was sure of getting a shot at the dog.

Again it was the man who was reasoning, and again it was the man who was defeated.  The first day that McTaggart followed his new trail Baree also struck that trail.  For a little while it puzzled him.  Three times he cut back and forth between the old and the new trail.  Then there was no doubt.  The new trail was the fresh trail, and he followed in the footsteps of the factor from Lac Bain.  McTaggart did not know what was happening until his return trip, when he saw the story told in the snow.  Baree had visited each trap, and without exception he had approached each time at the point of the inverted V. After a week of futile hunting, of lying in wait, of approaching at every point of the wind—­a period during which McTaggart had twenty times cursed himself into fits of madness, another idea came to him.  It was like an inspiration, and so simple that it seemed almost inconceivable that he had not thought of it before.

He hurried back to Post Lac Bain.

The second day after he was on the trail at dawn.  This time he carried a pack in which there were a dozen strong wolf traps freshly dipped in beaver oil, and a rabbit which he had snared the previous night.  Now and then he looked anxiously at the sky.  It was clear until late in the afternoon, when banks of dark clouds began rolling up from the east.  Half an hour later a few flakes of snow began falling.  McTaggart let one of these drop on the back of his mittened hand, and examined it closely.  It was soft and downy, and he gave vent to his satisfaction.  It was what he wanted.  Before morning there would be six inches of freshly fallen snow covering the trails.