“I’m the kid of the camp, I know; but I’ll be the first fellow to bring any decent meat into it.  Hooray!” he whooped again.  “Shouldn’t wonder if these moccasins brought me wonderful luck; one can steal about so quietly in them.”

He had hit upon the supreme advantage which the Indian footwear possesses over every other for the woodsman.  A little later he was to learn its disadvantage, having, with foreign inexperience, disdained the extra soles because they were not “Indian” enough for his taste; for the soft buckskin could not protect from roots and stones a wearer whose flesh was not hardened to every kind of forest travelling.

But at present Dol bepraised his moccasins; for they had enabled him to sneak upon his birds, the wildest of the duck tribe, who generally, at a single hoarse “Quack!” from their leader, will cease their antics in lake or stream, and disappear like a skimming breeze before a sportsman can get a fair shot at them.

For a quarter of an hour Dol Farrar sat by this forest pond engaged in the cheerful occupation of “booming himself,” as his friend Cyrus would have said.  He told himself that he had made a pretty smart beginning, not alone in shooting a brace of black ducks, but in successfully following a difficult trail on his fourth day in the woods.  Henceforth, he thought, there would be little reason for him to dread the unknown in this great wilderness.

He reclothed his legs, gathered the stiffening claws of the defunct quackers in his left hand, picked up his empty “ole fuzzee,” which had done such good service despite its age, and set forth on his return to camp.

Retracing his steps along the bank, after some searching he found the beginning of the trail, and started along it with a know-it-all, cheerful confidence in the little bit of wood-lore which he had acquired.  Hence he now found it considerably more difficult to follow the spotted trees.  His brain was excited and preoccupied; and when once in fancied security he suffered his eyes and thoughts to stray for a minute from the trail, every unfamiliar woodland sight and sound tempted them to wander farther.

First it was an old fox, which poked its sharp, inquisitive nose out of a patch of undergrowth near at hand.  Dol uttered a mad “Whoop-ee!” and heedlessly dashed off a few steps in pursuit.  Reynard whisked his brush as much as to say, “You can’t get the better of me, stranger!” and defiantly trotted away.

Recovering his senses, the boy managed to recover the trail too, and was keeping to it carefully when a second temptation beset him.  A chattering squirrel, seated on the low bough of a maple-tree, with his fore paws against his white breast, his eyes like twinkling beads, and his restless little head playing bo-peep with the intruding boy, began to scold the latter for venturing into his forest playground.

Dol’s first thought was full of delighted interest.  His second was a sanguinary one; namely, that a pair of ducks would only be one meal for four campers who were “camp-hungry,” and that Uncle Eb had spoken of squirrels as “fust-rate eatin’.”  He handled his gun uncertainly, deliberating whether or not he would load it, and try a shot at the bright-eyed chatterbox.