Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/88

 trodden deep and hard through many centuries by thousands of hoofs.

The buffalo were far less abundant now on the eastern side of the mountains. Although the white men's settlements were still confined to a strip along the coast, white hunters sometimes penetrated the foothills and white traders encouraged the taking of pelts. The deer still abounded in almost incredible numbers, but the eastern buffalo herds were withdrawing gradually across the Appalachians. Small droves, however, still ranged the eastern foothills and kept open the deep-worn paths; and the main buffalo roads across the mountain barrier, wider than the narrow buffalo ruts of the western plains, were still highways for wild creatures of many kinds. It was one of these main roads that the chestnut stallion and his mares were following; a road which would lead them with many windings down from the mountains into the hills and through the hills to the broad belt of rolling lands beyond which lay the swamps and savannahs of the Atlantic plain.

All that forenoon the Raven trailed his quarry. Both to the roan stallion and to his rider the trail was a plain one; and when the tracks of the wild horses turned into the buffalo path, the Raven knew that he had only to follow that highway through the woods. With a guttural word he re-