The  snow  is  a  white  page  on  which  the  wild  creatures  write
their  daily  record  for  those  who  can  read.  All  over  the  white
swamp  were  little  deep  tracks ;  here,  holes  as  if  the  runner  had
sunk ;  there,  padded  marks  as  from  the  bound  —  bound  —  bound
of  something  soft ;  then,  again,  where  the  thicket  was  like  a  hedge
with  only  one  breach  through,  the  footprints  had  beaten  a  little  I
hard  rut  walled  by  the  soft  snow.  Koot's  dog  might  have  detected
a  motionless  form  under  the  thicket  of  spiny  shrubs,  a  form  that
was  gray  almost  to  whiteness  and  scarcely  to  be  distinguished  from  J
the  snowy  underbrush  but  for  the  blink  of  a  prism  light  —  the
rabbit's  eye.  If  the  dog  did  catch  that  one  telltale  glimpse  of  an
eye  which  a  cunning  rabbit  would  have  shut,  true  to  the  training
of  his  trapper  master  he  would  give  no  sign  of  the  discovery  except
perhaps  the  pricking  forward  of  both  ears.  Koot  himself  pre-
served as  stolid  a  countenance  as  the  rabbit  playing  dead  or  simu-
lating a  block  of  wood.  Where  the  footprints  ran  through  the
breached  hedge,  Koot  stooped  down  and  planted  little  sticks  across
the  runway  till  there  was  barely  room  for  a  weasel  to  pass.  Across
the  open  he  suspended  a  looped  string  hung  from  a  twig  bent  so
that  the  slightest  weight  In  the  loop  would  send  it  up  with  a  death
jerk  for  anything  caught  in  the  tightening  twine.
