Читать книгу Forest Patrol - Jim Kjelgaard - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Lew crouched silently in the corner of the seat, looking steadily past the right front fender of the little truck. The snow that the plow had swept out of the road had fallen over the bank, and what was left had been packed hard and smooth by hunters' cars.

The road wound around a long curve down a hill, and the truck skidded. John heard Lew gasp as he let the truck ease itself out of the skid back into the road. Then they were on the level in the bottom of the valley. Lew sat up and heaved a long sigh.

"I'm sure glad that's over!"

John grinned. "Anybody would think you'd never travelled these roads before."

Lew wagged his head.

"It ain't that. It ain't that a'tall. But some things is best not tinkered with. They's good medicine an' bad. Now don't go gettin' me wrong. I ain't like some o' them ol' wash wimmen in Pine Hill as take stock in 'most any kind of a ha'nt. I only believe in a few."

"Ha'nts?"

"Yes, ha'nts," Lew said belligerently. "White bucks is ha'nts. But if he was gonna do anythin' about you shootin' at him, he'd o' done it on that stretch o' road we jest come over. I was jest a-holdin' my breath, wonderin' if we'd git over it."

"Oh, I see," John said seriously.

They came to the end of the road where Soonie Creek, a snow-banked little rill, flowed into Big Kettle River. Here twenty cars were lined up in front of a cluster of hunting cabins. Blue wood smoke curled from the cabins' chimneys, and dead bucks hung by their horns from the porches of three of them. A party of hunters came single-file down the trail from the mountain in back of the cabins.

"Did ya see anythin'?" Lew called amiably.

The leader of the party, a middle-aged office worker, shook his head. "We didn't see a buck."

"Oh shucks. That's too bad," Lew said. His glance strayed toward a cluster of pine trees a thousand feet up the creek, and he took his rifle in the crook of his arm. "Go ahead an' tend yore business here, Ranger. I ain't goin' far."

Lew ambled up the creek and John turned to the hunters. They were all city men, spending their vacation on a deer hunt, and all were tired. But in spite of that there was a sparkle in their eyes and a healthy glow in their cheeks from vigorous outdoor exercise.

"Was there something you wanted?" the middle-aged business man asked courteously.

"I just want to check your camps," John said. "I'm the Ranger from Pine Hill."

The man extended his hand. "I'm glad to know you. My name's Cartwright, and this is our first trip into the Rasca. Our camp's the one on this end, but I'm sure you'll find everything in order. We brought our own firewood. However, you're welcome to inspect us."

Together they walked over to the camp, and John glanced inside. It was well kept and orderly, a good camp. John copied the names, addresses, and hunting license numbers of the camp's occupants from the roster tacked on the door, and went from it to the other camps. Behind the third one he found the raw stump of a freshly cut young spruce. John knocked on the camp's door, and a fat man with a white apron about his middle opened it.

"Who cuts the firewood around here?" John asked.

"I do. But I'm not huntin'. They brought me along to cook--and a thankless job it is. I can't get a hot fire."

John pointed to the stump. "Did you cut that tree?"

"Yes. It don't burn very good."

"Did you know it's a red spruce, and there's a twenty-five dollar fine for cutting it?"

"No, I didn't." The cook's fat face paled. "Wood is wood to me."

"Come out here," John said.

He took an axe from the back porch and led the way into the woods. The cook followed meekly behind him. John cut notches in three dead chestnut stubs, more than enough wood to last the camp through deer season, and beckoned the cook to his side.

"That's dead wood," he explained. "There's no harm in cutting it, and it will burn. You couldn't get a fire because you tried to burn green wood. The next time take any of these stubs."

"I wish I'd known that," the cook said wistfully. "Twenty-five dollars is a lot of money to me."

"We'll forget the fine this time. But don't cut any more spruce."

"I won't," the cook said gratefully. "Thanks a lot."

John went on to the other camps, whose occupants were out hunting. He copied the roster on the doors and inspected the wood boxes on the porches. The last camp in the line had no roster and the door was locked. John went back to where Cartwright's friends were discussing the hunt they would have that afternoon.

"Tell those fellows in the red cabin they'd better get a roster up, will you?" he asked. "They ..."

The spiteful smash of a rifle sounded in the pines up the creek. Five minutes later Lew appeared, dragging a buck by one antler. He drew near and let his kill, a small buck with two prongs on each horn, fall limply in the snow.

"How the devil did you get him, almost right in our camp?" Cartwright exclaimed in admiration.

"I jest put two an' two together," Lew said simply. "Take a man now, does he like to walk in snow in his bare feet? Nope. A deer don't neither, when he can git out of it. 'Bout the only place there ain't no snow is in the pines. So's I figgered there oughta be a deer thar."

Cartwright laughed ruefully.

"A man that can walk in and take a buck from under the noses of forty other men must know what he's talking about. I'm going to hunt the pines this afternoon."

"You might pick a side hill to watch, 'long 'bout an hour before night," Lew remarked. "It gits cold on top long before it does in the valleys, an' any deer up thar are purty likely to amble down when the wind gets to cuttin'."

Lew and John put the little buck in the truck, and started back up the road.

"Deer hunter!" John jibed. "Over on Spatterdown Creek they have field mice bigger than that."

"I pick my deer for eatin'," Lew said complacently, "an' there ain't no better eatin' than a four point. Sport is aw right, I guess. But freezin' yerself on a deer runway ain't my idea o' sport. I got my venison, an' now by gummy I can leave my rifle at home."

"How about the other side of it?" John challenged. "That's a young buck. If you'd let him go, he might have lived a long while and helped produce a good many fawns. In six or eight years his usefulness would be gone and he'd have a head of horns a hunter could be proud of instead of that dinky little rack."

"In six or eight years he'd be so tough you'd have to cut him up with a hack saw."

"The trouble with you guys is that you want to kill a deer in the morning and have venison steak the same night," John said sarcastically. "Hang an old buck two weeks and he'll be as tender as any young one."

"I kil't young bucks fer the past twenty years, an' I'll kill 'em as long's I hunt," Lew asserted stubbornly. "Young bucks is the only ones fitten to eat. As far's lettin' 'em live to breed, they'll be deer here as long's I'm here."

"How about those who come after you?"

"They'll have to rustle for themselfs, same's I allus did."

John subsided. There was no use in trying to talk conservation to a man like Lew Bangorst. Old, and set in his ways, Lew would continue to do things just as he had always done them.

At six o'clock that night, after checking more camps, John drove the little truck back into Pine Hill. He took Lew to his little one-room log cabin on the outskirts of the village, and left the old woodsman skinning his buck. John went home, put the truck in the garage, and stamped wearily into his cold house. For a bit he was tempted to eat a cold supper, read a little while, and go to bed. But it was too easy for a man living alone to fall into slipshod habits. He forced himself to prepare a hot supper. Eating that refreshed him so that even doing the dishes was not the task it would have been had he taken only a cold snack.

For the next ten days he checked camps. Then most of the hunters already there left the Rasca, and few new ones came in. John was startled to realize that there were only two days of deer season left and he hadn't killed his own buck. A deer would, as Lew had said, "help out considdible on the meat bills."

The following morning, with the thirty-thirty in the pick-up's seat beside him, he started up a side road where there were two camps he hadn't checked. There were no tire tracks in the light sifting of snow that had fallen three days before, which seemed evidence enough that there was nobody in the camps. If there had been, they would have been down to Pine Hill at least once or twice for the impromptu party that was held in the store every night.

But, it was a Ranger's job to check every camp in his district. Of course, John thought with satisfaction, if he arrived at the camps and found them empty, it would give him a chance for a deer hunt.

He reached the camps, two tar-paper-covered shacks set a little apart from the road, and found them with locks on the doors and windows boarded up. John grinned, picked up his rifle, and plunged into the woods. A succession of warm days had melted some of the snow so that he didn't need snowshoes.

Deer tracks were everywhere. After nearly every camp in the Rasca, including Cartwright's, had killed its legal quota of six bucks, it hardly seemed possible that there could be this many left. John strode along the top of a rugged hill, his eyes to the ground, trying to select the track of a buck from among the many in the snow. But most of the tracks were the little, oval, sharply pointed ones of does.

"There must have been a big kill of bucks," John murmured to himself. "If it keeps up this way, they'll have to open a doe season to even things up. If they don't, half the does in the Rasca won't have fawns."

Then, emerging from a pine thicket, he found the big, round tracks of two bucks. John stopped to study them. The bucks had not scented him and taken alarm; they were walking. His heart thrilled with hunter's ecstasy. If the tracks were anything to judge by, either of the bucks should be worth having--provided they hadn't lost their horns.

One finger on the safety of his rifle, ready to shoot in an instant, he started along the trail. He walked very slowly, stopping every few feet for a thorough inspection of the woods ahead of and around him. It was an old deer hunter's axiom that, "When you're huntin' a deer, walk as slow's you can, then cut that speed in half."

The two sets of tracks entered a stand of beech trees on the side of a hill, directly across from him, and there were great patches of scuffed leaves where they had dug for beech nuts. John walked even slower, and stopped more frequently. Obviously the two bucks had come here to feed, and could not be very far away. Yet, though he could see nothing, John had a curious feeling that something was watching him.

He turned to search steadily in every direction. But all he saw were the gray trunks of the beeches. A chill ran up his spine, and he tried to shake off the sensation of being watched. He was, he told himself, as bad as Lew Bangorst with his nonsense about "ha'nts." Determinedly he continued on the buck's tracks.

He was in the center of the beech forest when something ahead of him moved. John stopped, his gaze fixed on the place where he had seen the motion.

Presently he saw something that was the color of one of the beech trees, and yet was not a tree. John turned his gaze away, and looked back. The gray shape took form now. It was a deer that had scented or heard some slight sign of danger, and like John was standing still in his tracks until he placed it. Then came another slight motion, and he saw the glint of light on polished antlers.

Very slowly, in order not to alarm the watching deer, he brought his rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and shot. At the report of the gun, the deer went down. John ran forward to find a mighty buck with great antlers, seven points to a side, kicking in the snow. He shot again, through the neck, then pulled out his hunting knife and knelt beside his prize.

"You pick 'em big, don't you?"

John rose, and whirled, knife in hand. Not forty feet away, standing behind him, was a solidly built man dressed in a stag shirt, breeches, and leather shoes with rubber bottoms. His face was hard, but kindly.

"I never heard you come," John said.

The man smiled, and took off his hat to scratch a shock of red hair.

"I don't think I'd hear or see anything else either, if I was on the track of a fellow that size. But I've been watching you from the other hill since you started. My name's Lambertson, Harvey Lambertson. I'm the State Game Warden in this county."

John extended his hand. "One of the first things I intended to do was come down to Jack Run and get acquainted with you. But somehow I just didn't have time. I'm John Belden, the Ranger from Pine Hill."

Harvey Lambertson shook the extended hand, but there was a reserve in his greeting. John felt that he was under examination, and would be approved of when he had shown his own worth. It took more than a chance meeting in the woods to make a friend of Harvey Lambertson.

"I was coming up to see you, too," the Game Warden said. "But, like you, I've been hustling since deer season started. Did you run across any game law violations?"

"None outstanding. But this is really the first chance I've had to get out in the woods. A few of the camps I checked didn't have rosters, and a couple of hunters had forgotten to sign their licenses. I told them all to fix things up, but hardly thought they deserved arrest and fine."

The Warden nodded. "That's right. The only time I ever fine a petty violator is when I know that he's a habitual law-breaker. I did arrest two fellows for digging up small spruces in the Ganny Creek Plantation, though. I told 'em to stop, and the next time I went by they were at it again. They said it was public land, and that they had a right to the trees. Didn't seem to realize that they weren't the entire public. The fines will be credited to your department."

"That's good," John said. "I like this method of the forestry department and game commission working together, helping each other. It beats being at each other's throats, the way they used to be."

Harvey Lambertson grunted approval. "Come on. I'll help you get your buck out to the road."

John dressed the buck, and fastened a length of rope that he carried in his pocket about its legs. A short stick was tied cross-ways on the end of the rope. John taking one side of the stick, and the Warden the other, they dragged the buck over the snow to the road, and put it in the pick-up. With a pencil John filled out the big game tag that came with his license, and attached it to the buck's front leg.

"Well, I'll be on my way," the Warden said. "I came cross country from the Beech Top road. I'll be seeing you, Belden. So long."

"So long, and thanks."

John watched the Warden enter the woods and begin his seven-mile trip back toward the Beech Top road. Then he started the truck toward Pine Hill.

Lew Bangorst was in his yard, splitting wood, as John pulled up and leaned out of the window.

"Hey, Lew! Come on over and I'll show you what a buck looks like."

The old woodsman sank his axe in a block of wood and came shuffling around the house. He looked at the buck, and stepped back with his hands on his hips.

"Huh," he snorted. "You might just as well eat a hunk o' sole leather."

"Go on," John jeered. "You're mad because you couldn't get one this big. Come down to supper in about two weeks and I'll serve you venison that'll melt in your mouth. Any meat's tender if you know how to cure it."

"I'll come," Lew said. "But I'll fetch my own vittles. I wouldn't take a chanst o' bustin' any o' the three teeth I got left on that ol' veteran. You goin' to the shindig Thursday night?"

"What shindig?"

"A ruckus at the store. The hunters'll all be gone, an' Pine Hill's gonna git together fer a winter party."

"Why--yes. I think I might."

"Do ya good," Lew said. "O' course I know the Ranger business is almighty important, an' ever'thin' like that. But a young feller like you should ought to do somethin' else wunst in a while. I'll see ya thar, Ranger. They'll be lots o' purty gals to dance with, but don't go gittin' yerself married off."

The night of the party he got home early, shaved, took a bath, and put on his best red plaid shirt, freshly washed puttees, and new knee-length leather shoes. At eight o'clock he went over to the store.

The little building was thronged with every resident of Pine Hill who was not bed-ridden, and many had come in from surrounding hill farms and trapping cabins. An old man, who had walked ten miles over the hills to get here, was dancing a jig to the tunes of a battered but lively fiddle in the hands of Clem Hawes, Pine Hill's musician. He was ringed about by a group of applauding Pine Hillers. Babies slept or wailed on chairs and tables in the back room of the store. Children played their own games in corners. The old man stopped his jigging and a caller mounted the counter while old and young alike joined in a square dance. John saw Lew Bangorst dancing with a sixteen-year-old girl. The old woodsman, going by John, reached forth a hand to grasp him by the shoulder and pull him into the dance.

"Dance, Ranger, dance!" he said. "Can't have no slackers in this outfit!"

"Ice cream and lem-on-ade. Pick your honey and pro-men-ade," the caller chanted.

John found himself paired off with a pretty brunette girl about his own age. They laughed at each other as they started through the dances the man on the counter called for. Then suddenly John was seized by the shoulder and whirled around to come face to face with Poley Harris. Poley's face was flushed, his sullen eyes bloodshot.

"No baby-faced Ranger is danshin' with my girl," he hiccupped.

"It was only a dance, Poley," the girl said nervously.

"You keep out of this," Poley flared. He turned again to John. "I've a good mind to wipe up the floor with you."

"Why don't you?"

Poley took a short step forward. It would have been a long step, John saw, if Poley's bluff had not been called. But he hadn't expected even a show of resistance. However, he had challenged John to a fight, and must go through with it now if only to save his face. He raised his arm to strike.

Then four burly Pine Hillers walked between them. Jubal Crassman, a lumberman with muscles like an ox, placed a hand on Poley's shoulder.

"You don't want to fight in here," he said. "If you have to settle it, come on outside." He turned to John. "Is that all right, Ranger?"

"No," John said, "it isn't. In the first place I'm not having any alley brawls with anyone. In the second place, this man is half drunk. Any time he's sober, and still thinks he has to fight me, he'll find me at the Ranger's headquarters. If he feels that he must take a sock at me now, he's welcome to go right ahead and do it."

"No trouble in dansh hall," Poley Harris muttered thickly. "Don't want no trouble in dansh hall. But I'll see you again, Baby Face." He whirled on the girl. "After thish wa'sh out who you dansh with."

"I will, Poley," she said placatingly.

John walked slowly out of the store. Knowing grins on at least half the men showed that they thought he was afraid to fight Poley. The other half--maybe--had understood why he hadn't fought.

John spent most of the rest of December marking firewood for Pine Hillers who wanted to cut their wood on state land. He chose yellow birch, a tree that has little commercial value. When he could find no birch, he selected crooked and deformed trees that were useless for timber.

The last day of the month he swung out of the woods onto the road, and glanced up to see a man approaching. It was Professor Crandall, bending under the weight of a huge camera. John waited.

"Mr. Belden!" the Professor exclaimed. "Fancy meeting you in this lonely spot! I have been down to your house three times, and each time you were away. I've been having such exciting times, following hunters about, photographing the quarries they ran to earth, and even watching them dress their kills. The primitive in man comes to the fore at such times, doesn't it? I'm beginning to feel like a savage. But it does me a world of good after five years of scholastic work. I have decided to remain in your beautiful Rasca until late summer."

He heaved a long sigh and set the camera down.

"I've spent the entire day stalking a rabbit, Lepus sylvaticus. It was such a thrill to approach the little beast in his brush patch and try to make him pose for pictures. But I have what should be an excellent series of color plates. Would you believe that I had to set the camera along one of his trails, camouflage it with twigs, and spring it with a string from a distance of fifty feet? Who would imagine that a rabbit could be so sagacious?"

John looked at him respectfully. Obviously the little Professor belonged in a schoolroom, and not in the Rasca. But anyone who had the patience and persistence to spend a whole day taking pictures of a rabbit, and the ingenuity to contrive a method of getting such pictures, certainly had a lot to recommend him.

"I'm going out with a blister rust crew the second of January," John said. "Would you like to come along and bring your camera?"

"What in the name of Heaven is a blister rust crew?"

"Blister rust attacks white pine, and kills the tree unless it's checked. Its spores grow on gooseberry and currant bushes. We have a very fine white pine plantation here, and we're going to check the trees for blister rust, and mark any gooseberry or currant bushes we find for later removal."

"I'd be delighted to accompany you!" Professor Crandall cried. "The operations of your crew should be a fascinating subject for pictures. Shall I come to your house so I will be able to start out with you?"

"That will be fine, Professor. But be there early."

John spent New Year's, a holiday, in resting and making out reports. At four o'clock the following morning he was awakened by a banging on the back door. He got out of bed, hastily donned warm clothing, and went to the door to find Professor Crandall, a camera case dangling from his right shoulder. The little Professor blinked into the flash light John held.

"I trust I'm early enough," he said. "I was so afraid I'd miss you that I set three alarm clocks to ring at five-minute intervals. However, I arose at the sound of the first."

"You're early enough," John said drily. "Come on in while I get some breakfast."

John built a fire in the kitchen stove and the little Professor perched on a chair while John set about making breakfast. Professor Crandall, who had already breakfasted, sipped a cup of coffee while John ate pancakes and sausage and packed a lunch. Breakfast finished, John looked at his watch. It was five o'clock, three hours before the sun would rise, and more than two hours before he could pick up Lew Bangorst, Mel Crane, Wash Jampel, and Tom Rooney, his blister rust crew. John took a chair next to the little Professor and looked at the camera case on the floor.

"What kind of a camera is that?" he asked.

"A Reflex." Professor Crandall stooped, opened the case, and took the camera out. "It's a very good instrument for certain types of work. Its shutter speeds are from one-thirtieth of a second to one five-hundredth ..."

John sat, entranced, while the Professor explained his camera. Finally his glance again strayed out the window, and he leaped to his feet to look at the clock. It was half-past seven and daylight. The two hours and a half had fled in what seemed scarcely that many minutes.

"We have to be on our way," John said hastily. "I'll get the truck."

Professor Crandall half rose in his chair.

"Oh, I say, are you going in a truck?"

"It's the only way I have."

"If you aren't taking too many men with you, hadn't we best go in my car? I assure you that it will be much more comfortable than any truck."

"It's all right with me if you'd rather take your car."

John loaded pruning saws and an axe in the car, and they drove over to pick up the four men of the blister rust crew. Each man climbed in with only a muttered greeting. The Professor chatted blithely on, but John looked straight ahead as they drove up the road. A slow flush crept up the back of his neck and spread to his temples. He had been alone much of the time since the shindig. But he knew from the actions of the men in the back seat that all of them, even Lew, thought he had been afraid to fight Poley then.

Four miles up the road, John pointed to a wide place in it.

"That's as close as we can drive to the plantation. You'd better park there. It's walking from here in."

The Professor parked the long sedan. Sticking lunches into their pockets, the four Pine Hillers grasped their tools and started up a fire trail that led to the plantation. John and the Professor, who continued his amiable chatter, started up behind them. They came to the top of a hill, and looked down on the first of the pines.

"What a sight!" the Professor gasped. "What an unforgettable sight! There will be a forest here as mighty as any that existed in primeval times! You rangers do a wonderful work!"

"I didn't do it," John said. "The men who came before me planted it. All I can do is keep it growing."

The blister rust crew spread thirty feet apart and started slowly through the pines. They were not looking for blister rust cankers, but for gooseberry and currant bushes. In a plantation this size it would take a crew of twenty men half a year to give each tree the minute blister rust inspection each required. When they found a bush, they would tie a white rag on it so the crew to come through next summer could find it easily and remove it, roots and all. Then the trees within three hundred yards of the bush would be carefully inspected and every blister rust canker cut out. If the tree was too far gone it would be destroyed.

John and the Professor, who enthusiastically snapped pictures of everything, worked a mile through the plantation to a dry stream bed. John looked at it, surprised. Few streams in these mountains ever went dry.

"Let's follow this a ways," he suggested.

Together they walked up the stream bed and came to a huge beaver dam. The dam, many acres in extent and within two hundred feet of the pines, had been built where a stream divided. It was so tight and high that all the water had been diverted to the other branch. John stamped on the ice that covered the dam, and walked out on it. The wind had swept the ice clear of snow, and a straight line of bubbles could be seen, leading out from a big beaver house in the center of the dam. John pointed where the bubbles led.

"The beavers have a food cache over there."

"How do you know?"

"By that line of bubbles. You know that in the fall beavers cut down the branches and twigs they use for winter food, and pile it below the depths of winter ice. When they want something to eat, they swim from their house to the cache. It's all under water, and when the swimming beaver lets a little of the air in his lungs loose, it bubbles to the top and brings up against the ice. A trapper who set his trap at the proper depth anywhere along that line would be sure to get a beaver."

That night, having thoroughly worked the parts of the plantation assigned to them, one by one the men returned to the car. They climbed in as silently and as coldly as they had that morning, and again John felt a flush mount his cheek.

For nearly a month they worked through the plantation, and except for occasional small snow flurries had fine weather all the time. Toward the last of January the sky assumed a leaden hue that deepened almost to black. John glanced at it when they left the plantation that night, and turned to his crew.

"You'd better bring snowshoes tomorrow. Looks like we're in for a blizzard."

The four nodded.

"Goodness," the Professor said nervously. "If there's going to be a storm, perhaps I'll stay home. I wouldn't want to be a hindrance to you or your men."

"Maybe you'd better stay home tomorrow, Professor," John agreed.

The next morning he gathered his crew in the pick-up truck. Snowshoes strapped to their backs, and axes in their hands, they started up the trail. They were working deep in the plantation now, miles from the road. The crew separated, each going his own way.

Most of the morning John worked, marking gooseberry bushes and cutting cankers from the few infected trees he found. Toward noon the breeze freshened suddenly, and a few crisp snowflakes pattered against his cheeks. A moment later all vision was blotted out as the blizzard started in earnest.

John strapped his snowshoes on, and turned his back to the wind that was blowing straight from the north. The road was south, and as long as the wind was squarely on his back he would be walking straight toward the truck. He pulled the collar of his coat up about his neck and plodded on. The snow was falling so fast that already it was inches deep on top of the old crust. Soft and fluffy, it piled up on his snowshoes and made walking difficult. John thought of the lumber-camp language Lew Bangorst was undoubtedly using to express his opinion of the blizzard, and grinned.

In three hours he reached the road. None of the rest of the crew had come out yet. But all were able to take care of themselves. John climbed into the seat of the little truck, out of the wind. Then the snow let up for an instant and he saw a long, snow-covered object fifteen feet ahead. His heart pounding, he got out and started towards it, hoping he had seen wrong. But he hadn't. The little Professor's car was parked ahead of the truck!

John tried to peer up the trail. But the snow beating into his eyes made him blink. He shielded his eyes with his hands, and still could see no more than ten feet into the thick, swirling curtains of snow. A panic gripped him.

The blister rust crew could either get out of the blizzard, or would know what to do if they could not. But Professor Crandall wouldn't have the least idea how to go about either getting out or building a shelter. He had to be found.

Bending his head, John started up the trail. The wind lashed and bit at him, as he reached the top and tried to peer about. But he saw nothing, except the driving snow, and heard nothing except the whine of the rising wind. He tried to shout, but his words were whipped away as soon as they left his mouth.

Again he felt panic. Somewhere up here, he told himself over and over, was a little man who would die in the blizzard unless he was rescued.

But where? John plunged into the pines. The wall of trees about him broke the force of the wind, and he could see farther. But there was no sign of any other life. It was an empty world in which he alone existed. Grimly John shut his mind to the futility of the search. He had to, he must, find Professor Crandall.

He came to the dry stream bed and tried to shout, but the wind mocked him. He stood a moment, pondering. Undoubtedly the Professor had come out to take more pictures. But, in a month, he must have taken all the pictures anyone could want of the blister rust crew and the pines. He must be somewhere in the open woods.

John fought his way up the dry stream bed. He stumbled against the beaver dam, and climbed out on it to turn his back to the wind. Then something struck him in the back of the head, and almost sent him tumbling from the dam. He scrambled to regain his balance, and turned around.

The object that had struck him was a camera case, hanging on the limb of a dead tree at the edge of the dam, and blowing in the wind. So Professor Crandall had returned for more pictures of the beaver dam, and by pure luck had left a clue! John walked out on the dam, whose smooth ice was blown free of snow, and started blindly along it. The Professor must have been taking pictures when the blizzard struck, or else he wouldn't have left his camera case hanging. And certainly, when he started to flee, he would have gone with the wind instead of against it.

A thousand feet from where he found the case, John saw the camera lying on the ice. He stooped carefully over it, looking for something to indicate the direction the Professor had taken. At last he found it, a single scratch gouged in the surface of the ice. The Professor must have fallen and lost his camera. The scratch probably had been made by the compass he wore on the lapel of his coat.

Praying he was right, John sighted along the scratch and walked a perfectly straight line in the direction it pointed. He came to the edge of the dam, placed one snowshoe on the smooth bank of snow that led away from it, and lifted the other snowshoe.

Then suddenly the snow gave way and he plunged down through it, to bring up with a jarring thud. For a bit he sat dazedly.

Then his senses began to return and he reached forth an exploring hand. His fingers encountered cloth, a coat. John struck a match, and saw the huddled form of the little Professor beside him.