Page:They who walk in the wilds, (IA theywhowalkinwil00robe).pdf/48

 an adept in the wisdom of the wilderness, he was quite at a loss when he found that the calf had disappeared. His efforts to trail the fugitive were a failure, and he came to the conclusion that a hungry bear had broken in and carried off the tender prize. Thereafter he hunted bears with inplacable hostility, though with very scant success, and those wary beasts soon came to know far more about him than he was ever able to learn about them. They sensed his enmity, and kept him under unsuspected observation.

The cow moose, travelling slowly to allow for the weakness of her adopted young, worked her way far past her old range and took up a new one at a safer distance from the clearing. Suspecting that the man-creature might come searching for the calf, she forsook the valley of the Wassis altogether, crossed the ridge, and established herself in a region of small, shallow lakes and wooded knolls drained by one of its wildest tributaries, Burnt Brook. It was a region undisturbed by the lumbermen, because the timber was small and hard to get out, and it lay somewhat aside from the trails of hunter and fisherman.

In this invigorating environment, with abundant food, and exercise exactly fitted to his needs, the red calf throve amazingly. At first it seemed to him that he and his tall new mother were the only dwellers in the wilderness; for his strange