Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/173

 greater significance in the light of this new knowledge.

She saw a bunch of cow elk feeding along the edge of an opening in the spruce. She no longer wondered why there was not a single calf with so large a band of cows. She knew that the calves were lying motionless far back in the timber. This was one of the curious things Moran had told her.

For a calf elk gives off no scent. The coyote, the keenest nosed animal of all the wild, will pass a few feet downwind from a new born calf and never know; and a coyote can scent a mouse for a hundred yards downwind!

When moving, the lamb of the mountain sheep looms up whitely against the green meadows of his lofty home above timberline but when the old ewe leaves her offspring she caches him with an eye for details. Even the piercing eye of the circling eagle can not pick the motionless sleeping lamb from among the white rocks of a bowlder field.

The sun dapples down spottedly through the leaves of the trees and mingles with the spotted coat of the blacktail fawn. In later life this changes with the deer.