Page:Such Is Life.djvu/203

Rh "'Yes,' says Bob. 'I'll run them up, while you fetch the other fellows. Somebody look after my horse.' And by the time the last word was out of his mouth, he was twenty yards away along the little track. No trouble in following it, for she was running the track of somebody that had rode out that way a few days before—thinking it was her father's horse, poor little thing!

"Apparently she had kept along the inside of Dan's fence—the way she had generally seen him going out—till she came to the corner, where there was a gate. Then she had noticed this solitary horse's track striking away from the gate, out to the left; and she had followed it. However, half-a-mile brought us to a patch of hardish ground, where she had lost the horse's track; and there Bob lost hers. Presently he picked it up again; but now there was only her little boot-marks to follow."

"A goot dog would be wort vivty men dere, I tink," suggested Helsmok.

"Same thought struck several of us, but it did n't strike Bob," replied Thompson. "Fact, the well-sinkers had brought a retriever with them in the buggy; a dog that would follow the scent of any game you could lay him on; but they could n't get him to take any notice of the little girl's track. Never been trained to track children—and how were they going to make him understand that a child was lost? However, while two of the well-sinkers were persevering with their retriever, the other fellow drove off like fury to fetch Dan's sheep-dog; making sure that we would only have to follow him along the scent. In the meantime, I walked behind Bob, leading both our horses.

"Give him his due, he's a great tracker. I compare tracking to reading a letter written in a good business hand. You must'nt look at what's under your eye; you must see a lot at once, and keep a general grasp of what's on ahead, besides spotting each track you pass. Otherwise, you'll be always turning back for a fresh race at it. And you must no more confine yourself to actual tracks than you would expect to find each letter correctly formed. You must just lift the general meaning as you go. Of course, our everyday tracking is not tracking at all.

"However, Bob run this little track full walk, mile after mile, in places where I would 'n't see a mark for fifty yards at a stretch, on account of rough grass, and dead leaves, and so forth. One thing in favour of Bob was that she kept a fairly straight course, except when she was blocked by porcupine or supple-jack; then she would swerve off, and keep another middling straight line. At last Bob stopped.

"'Here's where she slept last night,' says he; and we could trace the marks right enough. We even found some crumbs of bread on the ground, and others that the ants were carrying away. She had made twelve or fourteen mile in the day's walk.

"By this time, several chaps had come from about Dan's place; and they were still joining us in twos and threes. As fast as they came, they scattered out in front, right and left, and one cove walked a bit behind Bob, with a frog-bell, shaking it now and then, to give the fellows their latitude. This would be about two in the afternoon, or half-past; and we