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Tom kicked into his snowshoes and began to run. He held the axe in his hand, gripped near the haft. A couple of hundred yards, perhaps, lay between him and camp, which was just over the brow of a small hill. The bushes flew past as he swung to his stride. Never had he skimmed the crust faster, but his feet seemed to be weighted with lead.
But it is done, not by sight, sound, or scent, but by touch the feel of the foot. In winter time man, too, follows a trail in the same way, notwithstanding that he is generally handicapped by a pair of snowshoes. Some unseen trails are not hard to follow even a blind man could follow them.
Miles tied two of the dogs on a leash while the men put on their snowshoes, then he carefully drew their sledge inside the door of the store, which was afterwards securely barred. "Katherine, what is the matter? Why did you and Miles go stealing off in that fashion to bring the stores home without telling me?
Once, in such a mood, I saw him charge a little wiry guide, who went up a spruce tree with his snowshoes on; and never a bear did the trick quicker, spite of the four-foot webs in which his feet were tangled. We were pushing upstream, late one afternoon, to the big lake at the headwaters of a wilderness river.
They looked back as if to see whether anything was following, or perhaps to look again at what had frightened them. I thought it was a mountain lion. Soon afterward I took my snowshoes and went up that way and found the track of a mountain lion. From the size of the track it seemed as if the animal must have been enormous.
The wolves had not broken their traveling rank, and for this reason he guessed that Bram had paused only long enough to put on his snowshoes. After this Philip could measure quite accurately the speed of the outlaw and his pack. Bram's snow-shoe strides were from twelve to sixteen inches longer than his own, and there was little doubt that Bram was traveling six miles to his four.
The summer outing made the boys hungry for more, and as soon as the winter holidays were at hand they made arrangements to go into the woods again, this time taking their outfits on sleds. They had with them their snowshoes, and found the latter articles very useful when out after game. They fixed up a comfortable camp, and rescued a half-frozen tramp.
Seizing a large axe, and calling another Indian to do likewise, Memotas rushed out with his comrade and speedily cut down that tree, causing it to fall directly from the camp. Then taking his queer-looking rolls of gunpowder in his arms, and slipping his snowshoes on his feet, he hurried back to the place where the top of the tree now lay upon the ground.
"Oh! keep a naggin' at me!" sez he. But I see he wuz a gittin' kinder sick of the idee. "What you mean by puttin' 'em on at all is more than I can say," sez I, "a tryin to walk on snowshoes right in dog-days." "I put 'em on," Samantha, sez he, a beginnin' to unstrap 'em, "I put 'em on because I wanted to feel like a savage."
He took three steps, and then, forgetting that the snowshoes were rather large, he tried to walk as though he did not have them on. The result was he tripped, and came down head first in a deep drift, and there he remained, buried to his shoulders while his feet were up in the air, wildly kicking about. He was probably saying things, but they could not be heard, for his head was under the snow.
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