Then slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer, until at last he was sniffing at the threshold.  No sound or smell of life came from inside, but he could smell the old smell of McTaggart.  Then he faced the wilderness—­the direction in which the trap line ran back to Lac Bain.  He was trembling.  His muscles twitched.  He whined.  Pictures were assembling more and more vividly in his mind—­the fight in the cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm’s edge—­even the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had caught him in the rabbit snare.  In his whine there was a great yearning, almost expectation.  Then it died slowly away.  After all, the scent in the snow was of a thing that he had hated and wanted to kill, and not of anything that he had loved.  For an instant nature had impressed on him the significance of associations—­a brief space only, and then it was gone.  The whine died away, but in its place came again that ominous growl.

Slowly he followed the trail and a quarter of a mile from the cabin struck the first trap on the line.  Hunger had caved in his sides until he was like a starved wolf.  In the first trap house McTaggart had placed as bait the hindquarter of a snowshoe rabbit.  Baree reached in cautiously.  He had learned many things on Pierrot’s line:  he had learned what the snap of a trap meant.  He had felt the cruel pain of steel jaws; he knew better than the shrewdest fox what a deadfall would do when the trigger was sprung—­and Nepeese herself had taught him that he was never to touch a poison bait.  So he closed his teeth gently in the rabbit flesh and drew it forth as cleverly as McTaggart himself could have done.  He visited five traps before dark, and ate the five baits without springing a pan.  The sixth was a deadfall.  He circled about this until he had beaten a path in the snow.  Then he went on into a warm balsam swamp and found himself a bed for the night.

The next day saw the beginning of the struggle that was to follow between the wits of man and beast.  To Baree the encroachment of Bush McTaggart’s trap line was not war; it was existence.  It was to furnish him food, as Pierrot’s line had furnished him food for many weeks.  But he sensed the fact that in this instance he was lawbreaker and had an enemy to outwit.  Had it been good hunting weather he might have gone on, for the unseen hand that was guiding his wanderings was drawing him slowly but surely back to the old beaver pond and the Gray Loon.  As it was, with the snow deep and soft under him—­so deep that in places he plunged into it over his ears—­McTaggart’s trap line was like a trail of manna made for his special use.