David’s eyes followed the direction of the two trails.  A hundred yards upstream he could see where gravel and rock were replaced entirely by sand, quite a wide, unbroken sweep of it, across which those clawed and moccasined feet must have travelled if they had followed the creek.  He was not interested in the bear, and Baree was not interested in the Indian boy; so when they came to the sand one followed the moccasin tracks and the other the claw tracks.  They were not at any time more than ten feet apart.  And then, all at once, they came together, and David saw that the bear had crossed the sand last and that his huge paws had obliterated a part of the moccasin trail.  This did not strike him as unusually significant until he came to a point where the moccasins turned sharply and circled to the right.  The bear followed.  A little farther—­and David’s heart gave a sudden thump!  At first it might have been coincidence, a bit of chance.  It was chance no longer.  It was deliberate.  The claws were on the trail of the moccasins.  David halted and pocketed his pipe, on which he had not drawn a breath in several minutes.  He looked at his rifle, making sure that it was ready for action.  Baree was growling.  His white fangs gleamed and lurid lights were in his eyes as he gazed ahead and sniffed.  David shuddered.  Without doubt the claws had overtaken the moccasins by this time.

It was a grizzly.  He guessed so much by the size of the spoor.  He followed it across a bar of gravel.  Then they turned a twist in the creek and came to other sand.  A cry of amazement burst from David’s lips when he looked closely at the two trails again.

The moccasins were now following the grizzly!

He stared, for a few moments disbelieving his eyes.  Here, too, there was no room for doubt.  The feet of the Indian boy had trodden in the tracks of the bear.  The evidence was conclusive; the fact astonishing.  Of course, it was barely possible....

Whatever the thought might have been in David’s mind, it never reached a conclusion.  He did not cry out at what he saw after that.  He made no sound.  Perhaps he did not even breathe.  But it was there—­under his eyes; inexplicable, amazing, not to be easily believed.  A third time the order of the mysterious footprints in the sand was changed—­and the grizzly was now following the boy, obliterating almost entirely the indentures in the sand of his small, moccasined feet.  He wondered whether it was possible that his eyes had gone bad on him, or that his mind had slipped out of its normal groove and was tricking him with weirdly absurd hallucinations.  So what happened in almost that same breath did not startle him as it might otherwise have done.  It was for a brief moment simply another assurance of his insanity; and if the mountains had suddenly turned over and balanced themselves on their peaks their gymnastics would not have frozen him into a more speechless stupidity than did the Girl who