I took a careful aim at his chest as he stood facing me. I either shot too low or underestimated the distance, for he immediately jumped round and disappeared in the thicket. We landed and found blood on the tracks which led straight up the steep hillside, and out into a very broken and rugged country covered with rocks, long heather, little swamps and patches of pines and birch thickets. For two hours we followed the trail on which the drops of blood became less and less, till they ceased alto¬ gether. I now noticed several young pines on which an elk had recently cleaned his horns, and suspected that others were not far off. Pasop soon became as keen as he ever was, though he was never a hard dog to hold, and led us towards a dense thicket which covered both sides of a narrow rocky ridge, where the elk might very likely have waited. As Elias thought it was unwise to follow him into this, we went round down-wind and climbed up to a good spying point from which I could see a lot of country. After a good look we saw a bull elk come out of the covert and lie down on the bank of a little pond a quarter of a mile away, but as his horns seemed smaller than those of the bull I had wounded, and he was not watching his tracks as a wounded one would have done, I suspected that it was a fresh elk. I could easily have approached and shot him, and Elias urged me to do so; but as I did not want to lose my right on this farm, where the laws against killing two on the same ground are strictly kept, I went back to the place where we had left the track, and after a little casting around found that the wounded beast had passed on through the thicket and gone down towards another lake. An hour afterwards we found a new track keeping company with the one we were following, and not distinguishable by their size, so it was clear that our quarry had found a new companion. The tracks soon led straight down to the lake and entered the water together, and we had to go two miles along the shore to cross the river and get to the other side. Following the shore we eventually found the place where the two elk had left the water, and then the tracks separated. It was impossible to tell which was the hunted animal and which the fresh one, so Elias just let Pasop smell them both and take his own choice. As it turned out he chose right, and we could soon see, by the way the elk behaved, that he knew he was being followed, for he stopped more than once on the top of ridges where he could see his back-tracks, and then went on down-wind without ever giving us the chance to see him. About three o’clock we came to a ridge which over¬ looked a great marshy flat, a mile wide, on the other side of which was a long thick birch wood covering the side of a hill which rose up towards the open field, and beyond which there was no more forest or brushwood for a great distance.
After spying the ground carefully in the direction the tracks led, which pointed towards the up-wind end of the birchwood, which was perhaps a mile long and three or four hundred yards wide, I was sure that he had gone into it, and I was nearly sure that he would turn down-wind when he entered it and that it would be impossible to approach him. I suggested to Elias that I should go along to the down-wind end of the covert, and take my chance of the elk coming out within shot, whilst he followed on the tracks through the covert with Pasop.
