night, or a day, or half a week. Therefore I do not know exactly how
long that wolverine was encircling that scent, and pinning it down to a
certain spot--himself unseen. All animals, almost, can do that, but
none, not even the lynx or the wild cat, so well as the wolverine. He
is the one mammal that, in the wild, is a name only--a name to conjure
with.

He found, in the end, that there was no man; but there _had_ been. He
found--showing himself again now--that a man--a hunter, a trapper, one
after fur--had made himself here a _cache_, a store under the earth;
and--well, the wolverine's great, bear-like claws seemed made for
digging.

He dug--and, be sure, if there had been any danger there he would have
known it. He dug like a North-Country miner, with swiftness and
precision, stopping every now and again to sit back on his haunches,
and, with humped shoulders, stare--scowl, I mean--round in his
lowering, low-browed fashion.

Once a bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an
elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a
moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting
motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its
eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of
wood mist had broken loose and was floating about. Once a fox,
somewhere in the utter silence of the forest depths, barked a hoarse,
sharp, malicious sound; and once, hoarser still and very hollowly, a
great horned owl hooted with disconcerting suddenness. (The scream of
a rabbit followed these two, but whether fox or owl had been in at that
killing the wolverine never knew.) Twice a wood-hare turning now to