Since yesterday morning’s breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gone without eating.  To appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind was too filled with his quest of Nepeese for that.  He would have gone hungry all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to a trap in which there was a big snowshoe rabbit.  The rabbit was still alive, and he killed it and ate his fill.  Until dark he did not miss a trap.  In one of them there was a lynx; in another a fishercat.  Out on the white surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy mound under which lay the body of a red fox killed by one of Pierrot’s poison baits.  Both the lynx and the fishercat were alive, and the steel chains of their traps clanked sharply as they prepared to give Baree battle.  But Baree was uninterested.  He hurried on, his uneasiness growing as the day darkened and he found no sign of the Willow.

It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm—­cold and brilliant, with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things.  The third suggestion came to Baree now.  He was, like all animals, largely of one idea at a time—­a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governed by a single leading impulse.  And this impulse, in the glow of the starlit night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first of Pierrot’s two cabins on the trap line.  There he would find Nepeese!

We won’t call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion a process of reasoning.  Instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixed and positive faith came to Baree just the same.  He began to miss the traps in his haste to cover distance—­to reach the cabin.  It was twenty-five miles from Pierrot’s burned home to the first trap cabin, and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall.  The remaining fifteen were the most difficult.  In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and soft.  Frequently he plunged through drifts in which for a few moments he was buried.  Three times during the early part of the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves.  Once it was a wild paean of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest.  But the voice no longer called to him.  It was repellent—­a voice of hatred and of treachery.  Each time that he heard it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.

At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheater in the forest where Pierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trapline cabins.  For at least a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears very alert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed the air.  There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of the log shack.  His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there.  Again he sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest.  There was a disheartened slouch to his door.  He had traveled twenty-five miles, and he was tired.