Molting Moon--and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their
voice, the foxes slunk with the silence of shadows, and even the
beavers had begun to cease their labors. The horns of the moose, the
deer, and the caribou were in tender velvet, and they moved but little
and fought not at all. It was late July, Molting Moon of the Cree, Moon
of Silence for the Chipewyan.

In this silence Baree began to hunt. He stirred up a family of
half-grown partridges, but they escaped him. He pursued a rabbit that
was swifter than he. For an hour he had no luck. Then he heard a sound
that made every drop of blood in him thrill. He was close to
McTaggart's camp, and what he had heard was a rabbit in one of
McTaggart's snares. He came out into a little starlit open and there he
saw the rabbit going through a most marvelous pantomime. It amazed him
for a moment, and he stopped in his tracks.

Wapoos, the rabbit, had run his furry head into the snare, and his
first frightened jump had "shot" the sapling to which the copper wire
was attached so that he was now hung half in mid-air, with only his
hind feet touching the ground. And there he was dancing madly while the
noose about his neck slowly choked him to death.

Baree gave a sort of gasp. He could understand nothing of the part that
the wire and the sapling were playing in this curious game. All he
could see was that Wapoos was hopping and dancing about on his hind
legs in a most puzzling and unrabbitlike fashion. It may be that he
thought it some sort of play. In this instance, however, he did not
regard Wapoos as he had looked on Umisk the beaver. He knew that Wapoos
made mighty fine eating, and after another moment or two of hesitation
he darted upon his prey.