He followed in the factor’s snowshoe tracks, and in the third trap killed a rabbit.  When he had finished with it nothing but the hair and crimson patches of blood lay upon the snow.  Starved for many days, he was filled with a wolfish hunger, and before the day was over he had robbed the bait from a full dozen of McTaggart’s traps.  Three times he struck poison baits—­venison or caribou fat in the heart of which was a dose of strychnine, and each time his keen nostrils detected the danger.  Pierrot had more than once noted the amazing fact that Baree could sense the presence of poison even when it was most skillfully injected into the frozen carcass of a deer.  Foxes and wolves ate of flesh from which his supersensitive power of detecting the presence of deadly danger turned him away.

So he passed Bush McTaggart’s poisoned tidbits, sniffing them on the way, and leaving the story of his suspicion in the manner of his footprints in the snow.  Where McTaggart had halted at midday to cook his dinner Baree made these same cautious circles with his feet.

The second day, being less hungry and more keenly alive to the hated smell of his enemy, Baree ate less but was more destructive.  McTaggart was not as skillful as Pierre Eustach in keeping the scent of his hands from the traps and “houses,” and every now and then the smell of him was strong in Baree’s nose.  This wrought in Baree a swift and definite antagonism, a steadily increasing hatred where a few days before hatred was almost forgotten.

There is, perhaps, in the animal mind a process of simple computation which does not quite achieve the distinction of reason, and which is not altogether instinct, but which produces results that might be ascribed to either.  Baree did not add two and two together to make four.  He did not go back step by step to prove to himself that the man to whom this trap line belonged was the cause of all hit, griefs and troubles—­but he did find himself possessed of a deep and yearning hatred.  McTaggart was the one creature except the wolves that he had ever hated.  It was McTaggart who had hurt him, McTaggart who had hurt Pierrot, McTaggart who had made him lose his beloved Nepeese—­and McTAGGART was here on this trap line!  If he had been wandering before, without object or destiny, he was given a mission now.  It was to keep to the traps.  To feed himself.  And to vent his hatred and his vengeance as he lived.

The second day, in the center of a lake, he came upon the body of a wolf that had died of one of the poison baits.  For a half-hour he mauled the dead beast until its skin was torn into ribbons.  He did not taste the flesh.  It was repugnant to him.  It was his vengeance on the wolf breed.  He stopped when he was half a dozen miles from Lac Bain, and turned back.  At this particular point the line crossed a frozen stream beyond which was an open plain, and over that plain came—­when the wind was right—­the smoke and smell of the Post.  The second night Baree lay with a full stomach in a thicket of banksian pine; the third day he was traveling westward over the trap line again.