Twice, while ascending these ridges, Rosalie's heart jumped as a grouse thundered up.

Once three steel-gray deer started out of the scrub and went bounding off, displaying enormous white flags; once a young buck, hunting for trouble, winded it, whistled, and came leaping past Rosalie so close that she shrank aside with a half-stifled cry of apprehension and delight.
Half a mile farther on Delancy, labouring along on his snow-shoes, suddenly halted, detaining Geraldine with a quick touch on the shoulder.
"There's something in that clearing," he whispered.
Miller had seen it, too; Duane motioned Rosalie forward to join Delancy, and, side by side, they crept ahead, keeping a clump of scrub hemlock between them and the edge of the clearing.

It was the Green Pass feed-ground, a rocky strip of pasture climbing upward toward Lynx Peak; and there, clean cut against the snowy background, three dark objects were moving, trotting nervously here and there, nosing, nuzzling, tunnelling the snow with long, sharp muzzles.
Duane and Geraldine silently unslung their field-glasses.
"They're boar," he said.
"Two-year-olds," she nodded.

"I do hope they will get one each.

Duane, ought I to have shot that other one ?" "Of course, you generous child! Otherwise he'd have gone clear away.
That was a cracking shot, too--clean through the backbone at the base of the skull....