17/42 The Bostonnais might come and pass and he would not see them. He went into the forest a little way, trying to persuade himself that they were really persecuted by animals. He would find one of these annoying panthers or bears and shoot it, or he would not even hesitate to send a bullet through an owl on a bough, but he saw nothing, and, as he went back to his warriors, a hideous snapping and barking of wolves followed him. What it lacked in the earliness of coming it made up in the vigor of arrival. It had in it all the human qualities, that is, the wicked or menacing ones--hunger, derision, revenge, desire for blood and threat of death. |