Those were days of suppressed excitement for the two;
they could see the buffalo and wild horses moving here and there, but
fortune was still perverse and the trap was not approached. Before its
occupation by them, the place where they had dug had appeared the
favorite feeding-place; now, with all perversity, the wild horses and
other animals grazed elsewhere, and the boys began to fear that they had
left some traces of their work which revealed it to the wily beasts. On
one day, for an hour or two, their hearts were in their mouths. There
issued from the forest to the westward the stately Irish elk. It moved
forward across the valley to the waters on the other side, and, after
drinking its fill, began feeding directly toward the tree clump. It
reached the immediate vicinity of the pitfall and stood beneath the
trees, fairly outlined against the opening beyond, and affording
to the almost breathless couple a splendid spectacle. A magnificent
creature was the great elk of the time of the cave men, the Irish elk, as
those who study the past have named it, because its bones have been found
so frequently in what are now the preserving peat bogs of Ireland. But
the elk passed beyond the sight of the watchers, and so their bright
hopes fell.
The crispness of full autumn had come, one morning, when Ab and Oak met
as usual and looked out across the valley to learn if anything had
happened in the vicinity of the pitfall.
Pages:
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69