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He didn't dare remain still, lest the hunter should creep up within shooting distance. There was only one direction in which it was safe for Lightfoot to move, and that was the direction from which the Merry Little Breezes were blowing. So long as they brought him none of the dreaded man-smell, he knew that he was safe.
The hunter might be behind him probably he was but ahead of him, so long as the Merry Little Breezes were blowing in his face and brought no man-smell, was safety. Lightfoot the Deer traveled on through the Green Forest, straight ahead in the direction from which the Merry Little Breezes were blowing.
Less than three hundred yards away they came to a thick clump of scrub spruce, and almost ran into a snow-smothered tepee. It was abandoned. Life and fire had not been there for a long time. But from the tepee had come the man-smell. With legs rigid and his spine quivering Kazan approached the opening to the tepee. He looked in.
The big cat pulled himself together with a screech, ran back, and sprang off to a rock on the bank, whence he spat impotently while the porcupine crawled by. So leisurely was the progress of the bristling little adventurer that it was a good half-hour ere he reached the farmyard bars. Here he stopped, and sniffed curiously. But it was no dread of the dreaded man-smell that delayed him.
It was one almost unknown to him, but one which he instinctively dreaded, though without any reason based directly upon experience of his own. At almost any other time, indeed, he would have taken the first whiff of that ominous man-smell as a signal to efface himself and make off noiselessly down the wind.
This they did Oo-koo-hoo explained to cleanse the old traps and to soften the temper of the new ones, thus lessening the chances of their breaking in zero weather; and also to free both old and new from all man-smell and to perfume them with the natural scent of the forest trees, of which no animal is afraid.
Painfully he began the descent into the next valley. Thor knew that he was hurt, but he could not comprehend that hurt. Once in the descent he paused for a few moments, and a little pool of blood dripped upon the ground under his foreleg. He sniffed at it suspiciously and wonderingly. He swung eastward, and a little later he caught a fresh taint of the man-smell in the air.
He caught nothing of the dreaded man-smell; and he had no reason to associate that small, harmless creature with the mate to whose calling he had sped so eagerly. But there was no doubt that the calling had come from this very place. Was it possible that the cow, more coquettish than her kind are apt to be, had hidden herself to provoke him?
No wolf or bear could lie snugger in its den than he. He put his rifle by his side, where he could reach it in a second, and was soon asleep. A prowling bear came into the far edge of the thicket, sniffed the man-smell and went away, not greatly alarmed, but feeling that it was better, in case of doubt, to avoid the cause of the doubt.
Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger. And he welcomed it. His wits were sharpened. The fascination of the trapline was deadlier than before.
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