Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/95

 ito-Kinibic the Rattlesnake were able to follow the trail of the chestnut stallion all the way from the eastern slope of the Overhills to the Low Country of the Atlantic coast, more than two hundred miles as the white man reckons distance. Certain circumstances aided the pursuers. Nearly always Northwind kept to the game paths. Until he was well out of the mountains he followed the buffalo road. For many miles through the upper foothills he used the narrow paths trodden out by the deer. Always he chose those paths which led him south or southeast, following the slope of the land.

When he passed from the foothills into the rolling country where the forest was more open and where many prairie-meadows lay embosomed in the woods, the Raven's problem was somewhat harder; and in the Low Country of the coastal plain, so utterly unlike his mountain home, there were moments when the young warrior saw defeat staring him in the face. Yet it was evident that the wild stallion himself was not at home in this land of dense cypress swamps and towering pinewoods, of vast canebrakes and wide wastes of rushes, of dark sluggish rivers winding silently through mossdraped mysterious forests.

If this was the land which some deep-seated instinct had impelled him to seek, it was evidently not what he had expected it to be—not a land like