rock, crossed to my side of the point, and took a sip there; then to
the end of the point, and another sip; then back to the first place. A
nibble of grass, and she waded far out from shore to sip there; then
back, with a nod to a lily pad, and a sip nearer the brook. Finally
she meandered a long way up the shore out of sight, and when I picked
up the paddle to go, she came back again. Truly a _Wandergeist_ of the
woods, like the plover of the coast, who never knows what he wants,
nor why he circles about so, nor where he is going next.

If you follow the herds over the barrens and through the forest in
winter, you find the same wandering, unsatisfied creature. And if you
are a sportsman and a keen hunter, with well established ways of
trailing and stalking, you will be driven to desperation a score of
times before you get acquainted with Megaleep. He travels enormous
distances without any known object. His trail is everywhere; he is
himself nowhere. You scour the country for a week, crossing
innumerable trails, thinking the surrounding woods must be full of
caribou; then a man in a lumber camp, where you are overtaken by
night, tells you that he saw the herd you are after 'way down on the
Renous barrens, thirty miles below. You go there, and have the same
experience,--signs everywhere, old signs, new signs, but never a
caribou. And, ten to one, while you are there, the caribou are
sniffing your snowshoe track suspiciously back on the barrens that you
have just left.

Even in feeding, when you are hot on their trail and steal forward
expecting to see them every moment, it is the same exasperating story.
They dig a hole through four feet of packed snow to nibble the
reindeer lichen that grows everywhere on the barrens. Before it is
half eaten they wander off to the next barren and dig a larger hole;