Since his experience in the canyon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not fared particularly well.  Caution had kept him near the pond, and he had lived almost entirely on crayfish.  This new aroma that came with the night wind roused his hunger.  But it was elusive:  now he could smell it—­the next instant it was gone.  He left the dam and began questing for the source of it in the forest, until after a time he lost it altogether.  McTaggart had finished frying his bacon and was eating it.

It was a splendid night that followed.  Perhaps Baree would have slept through it in his nest on the top of the dam if the bacon smell had not stirred the new hunger in him.  Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night.  But this night was like a pale, golden day.  It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light.  A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops.  Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was Puskowepesim—­the Molting Moon—­and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their voice, the foxes slunk with the silence of shadows, and even the beavers had begun to cease their labors.  The horns of the moose, the deer, and the caribou were in tender velvet, and they moved but little and fought not at all.  It was late July, Molting Moon of the Cree, Moon of Silence for the Chipewyan.

In this silence Baree began to hunt.  He stirred up a family of half-grown partridges, but they escaped him.  He pursued a rabbit that was swifter than he.  For an hour he had no luck.  Then he heard a sound that made every drop of blood in him thrill.  He was close to McTaggart’s camp, and what he had heard was a rabbit in one of McTaggart’s snares.  He came out into a little starlit open and there he saw the rabbit going through a most marvelous pantomime.  It amazed him for a moment, and he stopped in his tracks.

Wapoos, the rabbit, had run his furry head into the snare, and his first frightened jump had “shot” the sapling to which the copper wire was attached so that he was now hung half in mid-air, with only his hind feet touching the ground.  And there he was dancing madly while the noose about his neck slowly choked him to death.

Baree gave a sort of gasp.  He could understand nothing of the part that the wire and the sapling were playing in this curious game.  All he could see was that Wapoos was hopping and dancing about on his hind legs in a most puzzling and unrabbitlike fashion.  It may be that he thought it some sort of play.  In this instance, however, he did not regard Wapoos as he had looked on Umisk the beaver.  He knew that Wapoos made mighty fine eating, and after another moment or two of hesitation he darted upon his prey.

Wapoos, half gone already, made almost no struggle, and in the glow of the stars Baree finished him, and for half an hour afterward he feasted.