SNOWED IN Until the present moment Rod had forgotten to speak of the mysterious man-trail he had encountered in the chasm.

The excitement of the past hour had made him oblivious to all other things, but now as they ate their dinner he described the strange maneuvers of the spying Woonga.

He did not, however, voice those fears which had come to him in the gorge, preferring to allow Mukoki and Wabigoon to draw their own conclusions.
By this time the two Indians were satisfied that the Woongas were not contemplating attack, but that for some unaccountable reason they were as anxious to evade the hunters as the hunters were to evade them.
Everything that had passed seemed to give evidence of this.

The outlaw in the chasm, for instance, could easily have waylaid Rod; a dozen times the almost defenseless camp could have been attacked, and there were innumerable places where ambushes might have been laid for them along the trap-lines.
So Rod's experience with the Woonga trail between the mountains occasioned little uneasiness, and instead of forming a scheme for the further investigation of this trail on the south, plans were made for locating the first fall.

Mukoki was the swiftest and most tireless traveler on snow-shoes, and it was he who volunteered to make the first search.