anything so good. He turned his head to question me with his
eyes. Slowly his nose came down, searching for the bread. "If he
would only eat!-that is a truce which I would never break," I
kept thinking over and over, and stopped eating in my eagerness
to have him share with me the hunter's crust. His nose touched
it; then through his hunger came the smell of the man--the danger
smell that had followed him day after day in the beautiful
October woods, and over white winter trails when he fled for his
life, and still the man followed. The remembrance was too much.
He raised his head with an effort and bounded away.

I followed slowly, keeping well out to one side of his trail, and
sitting quietly within sight whenever he rested in the snow. Wild
animals soon lose their fear in the presence of man if one avoids
all excitement, even of interest, and is quiet in his motions.
His fear was gone now, but the old wild freedom and the intense
desire for life--a life which he had resigned when I appeared
suddenly before him, and the pack broke out behind--were coming
back with renewed force. His bounds grew longer, firmer, his
stops less frequent, till he broke at last into a deer path and
shook himself, as if to throw off all memory of the experience.

From a thicket of fir a doe, that had been listening in hiding to
the sounds of his coming and to the faint unknown click, which
was the voice of my snowshoes, came out to meet him. Together
they trotted down the path, turning often to look and listen, and
vanished at last, like gray shadows, into the gray stillness of
the March woods.