From Buck to Bear and Back
The sunny, weather-beaten, comfortable little house, with its grey sheds and low grey barn half enclosing its bright, untidy farmyard, stood on the top of the open hill, where every sweet forest wind could blow over it night and day.
Fields of oats, buckwheat, and potatoes came up all about it over the slopes of the hill; and its only garden was a spacious patch of cabbages and “garden sass” three or four hundred yards down toward the edge of the forest, where a pocket of rich black loam had specially invited an experiment in horticulture.
Like most backwoods farmers, Sam Coxen had been wont to look with large scorn on such petty interests as gardening; but a county show down at the Settlement had converted him, and now his cabbage patch was the chief object of his solicitude. He had proud dreams of prizes to be won at the next show–now not three weeks ahead.
It was his habit, whenever he harnessed up the team for a drive into the Settlement, to turn his head the last thing before leaving and cast a long, gratified look down over the cabbage patch, its cool, clear green standing out sharply against the yellow-brown of the surrounding fields. On this particular morning he did not turn for that look till he had jumped into the wagon and gathered up the reins. Then, as he gazed, a wave of indignation passed over his good-natured face.
There, in the middle of the precious cabbages, biting with a sort of dainty eagerness at first one and then another, and wantonly tearing open the crisp heads with impatient strokes of his knife-edged fore hoofs, was a tall wide-antlered buck.
Sam Coxen dropped the reins, sprang from the wagon, and rushed to the bars which led from the yard to the back field; and the horses–for the sake of his dignity he always drove the pair when he went into the Settlement–fell to cropping the short, fine grass that grew behind the well. In spite of having grown up in the backwoods, Sam was lacking in backwoods lore. He was no hunter, and he cared as little as he knew, about the wild kindreds of the forest. He had a vague, general idea that all deer were “skeery critters”; and if any one had told him that the buck, in mating season, was not unlikely to develop a fine militant spirit, he would have laughed with scorn.
Climbing upon the bars, he yelled furiously at the marauder, expecting to see him vanish like a red streak. But the buck merely raised his beautiful head and stared in mild surprise at the strange, noisy figure on the fence. Then he coolly slashed open another plump cabbage, and nibbled at the firm white heart.
Very angry, Coxen yelled again with all the power of healthy lungs, and waved his arms wildly over his head. But the vaunted authority of the human voice seemed in some inexplicable way to miss a connexion with the buck’s consciousness. The waving of those angry arms, however, made an impression upon him. He appeared to take it as a challenge, for he shook his beautiful antlers and stamped his forefeet defiantly–and shattered yet another precious cabbage.
Wrath struggled with astonishment in Sam Coxen’s primitive soul. Then he concluded that what he wanted was not only vengeance, but a supply of deer’s meat to compensate for the lost cabbages.
Rushing into the house, he snatched down his old muzzle-loader from the pegs where it hung on the kitchen wall. After the backwoods fashion, the gun was kept loaded with a general utility charge of buckshot and slugs, such as might come handy in case a bear should try to steal the pig. Being no sportsman, Coxen did not even take the trouble to change the old percussion-cap, which had been on the tube for six months. It was enough for him that the weapon was loaded.
Down the other slope of the hill, where the buck could not see him, Coxen hurried at a run, and gained the cover of the thick woods. Then, still running, he skirted the fields till the cabbage patch came once more in sight, with the marauder still enjoying himself in the midst of it.
At this point the long-dormant instinct of the hunter began to awake in Sam Coxen. Everything that he had ever heard about stalking big game flashed into his mind, and he wanted to apply it all at once. He noted the direction of the wind, and was delighted to find that it came to his nostrils straight from the cabbage patch.
He went stealthily, lifting and setting down his heavy-booted feet with a softness of which he had never guessed himself capable. He began to forget his indignation and think only of the prospect of bagging the game–so easily do the primeval instincts spring to life in a man’s brain. Presently, when within about a hundred yards of the place where he hoped to get a fair shot, Coxen redoubled his caution. He went crouching, keeping behind the densest cover. Then, growing still more crafty, he got down and began to advance on all fours.
Now it chanced that Sam Coxen’s eyes were not the only ones which had found interest in the red buck’s proceedings. A large black bear, wandering just within the shelter of the forest, had spied the buck in the open, and being curious, after the fashion of his kind, had sat down in a thicket to watch the demolition of the cabbages.
He had no serious thought of hunting the big buck, knowing that he would be hard to catch and troublesome if caught. But he was in that investigating, pugnacious, meddlesome mood which is apt to seize an old male bear in the autumn.
When the bear caught sight of Sam Coxen’s crawling, stealthy figure, not two paces from his hiding-place, his first impulse was to vanish, to melt away like a big, portentous shadow into the silent deeps of the wood. His next, due to the season, was to rush upon the man and smite him.
Then he realized that he himself was not the object of the man’s stealthy approach. He saw that what the hunter was intent upon was that buck out in the field. Thereupon he sank back on his great black haunches to watch the course of events. Little did Sam Coxen guess of those cunning red eyes that followed him as he crawled by.
At the point where the cover came nearest to the cabbage patch, Coxen found himself still out of range. Cocking his gun, he strode some twenty paces into the open, paused, and took a long, deliberate aim.
Catching sight of him the moment he emerged, the buck stood for some moments eyeing him with sheer curiosity. Was this a harmless passer-by, or a would-be trespasser on his new domain of cabbages? On second glance, he decided that it looked like the noisy figure which had waved defiance from the top of the fence. Realizing this, a red gleam came into the buck’s eye. He wheeled, stamped, and shook his antlers in challenge.
At this moment, having got a good aim, Coxen pulled the trigger. The cap refused to explode. Angrily he lowered the gun, removed the cap and examined it. It looked all right, and there was plenty of priming in the tube. He turned the cap round, and again took careful aim.
Now these actions seemed to the buck nothing less than a plain invitation to mortal combat. He was in just the mood to accept such an invitation. In two bounds he cleared the cabbages and came mincingly down to the fray.
This unexpected turn of affairs so flustered the inexperienced hunter that he altogether forgot to cock his gun. Twice he pulled desperately on the trigger, but with no result. Then, smitten with a sense of impotence, he hurled the gun at the enemy and fled.
Over the fence he went almost at a bound, and darted for the nearest tree that looked easy to climb. As his ill luck would have it, this tree stood just on the edge of the thicket wherein the much-interested bear was keeping watch.
A wild animal knows when a man is running away, and rarely loses a chance to show its appreciation of the fact. As Sam Coxen sprang for the lowest branch and swung himself up, the bear lumbered out from his thicket and reared himself menacingly against the trunk.
The buck, who had just cleared the fence, stopped short. It was clearly his turn now to play the part of spectator.
When Coxen looked down and saw his new foe his heart swelled with a sense of injury. Were the creatures of the wilderness allied against him? He was no coward, but he began to feel distinctly worried. The thought that flashed across his mind was: “What’ll happen to the team if I don’t get back to unharness them?” But meanwhile he was climbing higher and higher, and looking out for a way of escape.
About halfway up the tree a long branch thrust itself forth till it fairly overhung a thick young spruce. Out along this branch Coxen worked his way carefully. By the time the bear had climbed to one end of the branch, Coxen had reached the other. Here he paused, dreading to let himself drop.
The bear came on cautiously; and the great branch bent low under his weight, till Coxen was not more than a couple of feet from the top of the young fir. Then, nervously letting go, he dropped, caught the thick branches in his desperate clutch, and clung secure.
The big branch, thus suddenly freed of Coxen’s substantial weight, sprang back with such violence that the bear almost lost his hold. Growling angrily, he scrambled back to the main trunk, down which he began to lower himself, tail foremost.
From the business-like alacrity of the bear’s movements, Coxen realized that his respite was to be only temporary. He was not more than twelve feet from the ground, and could easily have made his escape while the bear was descending the other tree. But there below was the buck, keeping an eye of alert interest on both bear and man. Coxen had no mind to face those keen antlers and trampling hoofs. He preferred to stay where he was and hope for some unexpected intervention of fate. Like most backwoodsmen, he had a dry sense of the ridiculous, and the gravity of his situation could not quite blind him to the humour of it.
While Coxen was running over in his mind every conceivable scheme for getting out of his dilemma, the last thing he would have thought of actually happened. The buck lost interest in the man, and turned all his attention to the bear, which was just now about seven or eight feet from the ground, hugging the great trunk and letting himself down carefully, like a small boy afraid of tearing his trousers.
It is possible that that particular buck may have had some old score against the bears. If so, this must have seemed an excellent chance to collect a little on account. The bear’s awkward position and unprotected hind quarters evidently appealed to him. He ambled forward, reared half playfully, half vindictively, and gave the bear a savage prodding with the keen tips of his antlers. Then he bounded back some eight or ten paces, and waited, while the bear slid abruptly to the ground with a flat grunt of fury.
Sam Coxen, twisting with silent laughter, nearly fell out of his fir-tree.
The bear had now no room left for any remembrance of the man. He was in a perfect ecstasy of rage at the insolence of the buck, and rushed upon him like a cyclone. Against that irresistible charge the buck had no thought of making stand. Just in the nick of time he sprang aside in a bound that carried him a full thirty feet. Another such, another and another, and then he went capering off frivolously down the woody aisles, while the bear lumbered impotently after him.
Before they were out of sight Sam Coxen slid down from his tree and made all haste over the fence. In the open field he felt more at ease, knowing he could outrun the bear, in case of need. But he stopped long enough to pick up the gun.
Then, with one pathetic glance at the ruined cabbages, he strode hastily on up the hill, glancing backward from time to time to assure himself that neither of his late antagonists was returning to the attack.
In the Deep of the Snow
I
Around the little log cabin in the clearing the snow lay nearly four feet deep. It loaded the roof. It buried the low, broad, log barn almost to the eaves. It whitely fenced in the trodden, chip-littered, straw-strewn space of the yard which lay between the barn and the cabin. It heaped itself fantastically, in mounds and domes and pillars, over the stumps that dotted the raw, young clearing. It clung densely on the drooping branches of the fir and spruce and hemlock. It mantled in a kind of breathless, expectant silence the solitude of the wilderness world.
Dave Patton, pushing down the blankets and the many-coloured patchwork quilt, lifted himself on one elbow and looked at the pale face of his young wife. She was sleeping. He slipped noiselessly out of the bunk, lightly pulled up the coverings again, and hurriedly drew on two pairs of heavy, home-knit socks of rough wool. The cabin was filled with the grey light of earliest dawn, and with a biting cold that made the woodsman’s hardy fingers ache. Stepping softly as a cat over the rude plank floor, he made haste to pile the cooking-stove with birch-bark, kindling, and split sticks of dry, hard wood. At the touch of the match the birch-bark caught and curled with a crisp crackling, and with a roar in the strong draught the cunningly piled mass burst into blaze. Dave Patton straightened, and his grey eyes turned to a little, low bunk with high sides in the farther corner of the cabin.
Peering over the edge of the bunk with big, eager, blue eyes, was a round little face framed in a tousled mop of yellow hair. A red glare from the open draught of the stove caught the child’s face. The moment she saw her father looking at her she started to climb out of the bunk; but Dave was instantly at her side, kissing her and tucking her down again into the blankets.
“You mustn’t git out o’ bed, sweetie,” he whispered, “till the house gits warmed up a bit. An’ don’t wake mother yet.”
The child’s eyes danced with eagerness, but she restrained her voice as she replied.
“I thought mebbe ’twas Christmis, popsie!” she whispered, catching his fingers. “’T first, I thought mebbe you was Sandy Claus, popsie. Oh, I wish Christmis ’ld hurry up!”
A look of pain passed over Dave Patton’s face.
“Christmas won’t be along fer ’most a week yit, sweetie!” he answered, in the soft undertone that took heed of his wife’s slumbers. “An’ anyways, how do you s’pose Sandy Claus is goin’ to find his way, ’way out into these great woods, through all this snow?”
“Oh, popsie!” cried the child, excitedly. Then, remembering, she lowered her voice again to a whisper. “Don’t you know Sandy Claus kin go anywheres? Snow, an’ cold, an’ the–the–the big, black woods–they don’t bother him one little, teenty mite. He knows where to find me out here, jest’s easy’s in at the Settlements, popsie!”
The mother stirred in her bunk, wakened by the little one’s voice. She sat up, shivering, and pulled a red shawl about her shoulders. Her eyes sought Dave’s significantly and sympathetically.
“Mother’s girl must try an’ not think so much about Sandy Claus,” she pleaded. “I don’t want her to go an’ be disappointed. Sandy Claus lives in at the Settlements, an’ you know right well, girlie, he couldn’t git ’way out here, Christmas Eve, without neglecting all the little boys an’ girls at the Settlements. You wouldn’t want them all disappointed, just so’s he could come to our little girl ’way off here in the woods, what’s got her father an’ mother anyways!”
The child sat up straight in her bunk, her eyes grew very wide and filled with tears, and her lips quivered. This was the first really effective blow that her faith in Christmas and in Santa Claus had ever received. But instantly her faith recovered itself. The eager light returned to her face, and she shook her yellow head obstinately.
“He won’t have to ’lect the children in the Settlements, will he, popsie?” she cried. And without waiting for an answer, she went on: “He kin be everywheres to oncet, Sandy Claus can. He’s so good an’ kind, he won’t forget one of the little boys an’ girls in the Settlements, nor me, out here in the woods. Oh, mumsie, I wisht it was to-night was Christmas Eve!” And in her happy anticipation she bounced up and down in the bunk, a figure of fairy joy in her blue flannel nightgown.
Dave turned away with a heavy heart and jammed more wood into the stove. Then, pulling on his thick cowhide “larrigans,” coat and woollen mittens, he went out to fodder the cattle. With that joyous roar of fresh flame in the stove the cabin was already warming up, but outside the door, which Dave closed quickly behind him, the cold had a kind of still savagery, edged and instant like a knife. To a strong man, however, it was a tonic, an honest challenging to resistance. In spite of his sad preoccupation, Dave responded to the cold air instinctively, pausing outside the door to fill his deep lungs and to glance at the thrilling mystery of the sunrise before him.
The cabin stood at the top of the clearing against a background of dense spruce forest which sheltered it on the north and north-east. Across the yard, on the western side of the cabin, the log barn and the “lean-to” thrust up their laden roofs from the surrounding snow. In front, the cleared ground sloped away gently to the woods below, a snow-swathed, mystically glimmering expanse, its surface tumbled by the upthrust of the muffled stumps. From the eastern corner of the clearing, directly opposite the doorway before which Dave was standing, the Settlements trail led straight away, a lane of miraculous glory, into the very focus of the sunrise.
For miles upon miles the slow slope of the wilderness was towards the east, so that the trail was like an open gate into the great space of earth and sky. The sky, from the eastern horizon to the zenith–and that was all that Dave Patton had eyes for–was filled with a celestial rabble of rose-pink vapours, thin aërial wisps of almost unimaginable colour. Except the horizon! The horizon, just where the magic portals of the trail revealed it, was an unfathomable radiance of intense, transparent, orange-crimson flame, so thrilling in its strangeness that Dave seemed to feel his spirit striving to draw it in as his lungs were drawing in the vital air. From that fount of living light rushed innumerable streams of thin colour, making threads and stains and patches of mystical red among the tops of the lower forest, and dyeing the snowy surface of the clearing with the tints of mother-of-pearl and opal. Dave turned his head to glance at the cabin, the barn, and the woods behind them. All were bathed in that transfiguring rush of glory. The beauty of it gave him a curious pang, which turned instantly, by some association too obscure for him to trace, into an ache of grief at the disappointment that was hanging over his little one’s gaily trusting heart. The fairylike quality of the scene before him made him think, by a mingling of sympathy and far-off, dim remembrance, of the fairy glamour and unreal radiance of beauty that Christmas tree and Christmas toys stood for in the child’s bright anticipations. He reminded himself of the glittering delights with which, during the past three Christmases, Lidey’s kinsfolk in the Settlement had lovingly surrounded her. Now he, her father, could do nothing to make her Christmas different from all these other days of whose shut-in monotony she was wearying. Hope, now, and excited wonder were giving the little one new life. Dave Patton cringed within at the thought of the awakening, the disillusionment, the desolation of sorrow that would come to the baby heart with the dawn of Christmas. He was overwhelmed with self-reproach, because he had not realized all this in time to make provision, before the deep snow had blocked the trail to the Settlement. Now, what could he do?
Heavily Dave strode across the yard to the door of the barn. At the sound of his feet crunching the trodden and brittle snow, there came low mooings of eagerness from the expectant cattle in the barn. As he lifted the massive wooden latch and opened the door, the horse whinnied to him from the innermost stall, there was a welcoming shuffle of hoofs, and a comfortable warmth puffed steamily out in his face. From the horse’s stall, from the stanchions of the cattle, big, soft eyes all turned to him. As he bundled the scented hay into the mangers, and listened to the contented snortings and puffings as soft muzzles tossed the fodder, he thought how happy these creatures were in their warm security. He thought how happy he was, and his wife, reunited to him after three years of forced and almost continuous separation. For him, and for the young wife, now recovering health in the tonic air of the spruce land after years of invalidism, this had promised to be a Christmas of unalloyed gladness. To one only, to the little one whose happiness was his continual thought, the day would be dark with the shattering of cherished hopes. The more he thought of it, the more he felt that it was not to be borne. Faint but piteous memories from his own childhood stirred in his brain, and he realized how irremediable, how final and desperate, seem a child’s small sorrows. A sudden resolve took hold upon him. This bitterness, at least, his little one should not know. He jammed the pitchfork energetically back into the mow and left the barn with the quick step of an assured purpose.
Three years before this, Dave Patton, after a series of misfortunes in the Settlement, which had reduced him to sharp poverty, had been forced to leave his wife and three-years-old baby with her own people, while he betook himself into the remotest wilderness to carve out a new home for them on a tract of forest land which was all that remained of his possessions. The land was fertile and carried good timber, and he had begun to prosper. But his wife’s ill-health had long made it impossible for her to face the hardships and risks of a pioneer’s life two days’ journey from the nearest civilization. Not till the preceding spring had Dave dared to bring his family out to the wilderness home that he had so long been making ready for them. Then, however, it had proved a success. In that high and healing air he had seen the colour slowly come back to his wife’s pale cheeks; and as for the child, until the great snows came and cut her off from this novel and interesting world, she had been absorbingly happy in the fellowship of the wilderness.
When Dave re-entered the cabin, he found the table set over by the window, and his wife beating up the batter for the buckwheat pancakes that she was about to griddle for breakfast. Lidey, still in her little blue flannel nightgown, but with beaded deerskin moccasins on her tiny feet, and the golden wilfulness of her hair tied back demurely with a blue ribbon, was seated at one end of the table, her eager face half buried in a sheet of paper. She was laboriously inditing, for perhaps the twentieth time, an epistle to “Sandy Claus,” telling him what she hoped he would bring her.
If anything had been needed to confirm Dave Patton in his resolve, it was this. From the rapt child his eyes turned and met his wife’s inquiring glance.
“I reckon I’ve got to go, Mary!” he said quietly. “Think you two kin git along all right fer four or five days? We ain’t likely to have no more snow this moon.”
The woman let a little sigh escape her, but the look she gave her husband was one of cheerful acquiescence.
“I guess you’re right, dear! I’ll have to let you go, though five days seems an awful long time to be alone here. I’ve been thinkin’ it over,” she continued, guarding her words so that Lidey should not understand–“an’ I just couldn’t bear to see it, Dave!”
“That’s so!” assented the man. “I’ll leave heaps o’ wood an’ kindlin’ cut, an’ you’ll jest have to milk an’ look after the beasts, dear. Long’s you’re not scairt to be alone, it’s all right, I reckon!”
“When’ll you start?” asked the wife, turning to pour the batter in little, sputtering, grey-white circles on to the hot, greased griddle.
“First thing to-morrow mornin’!” answered Dave, seating himself at the table as the appetizing smell of the browning pancakes filled the room. “Snow’s jest right for snowshoein’, an’ I’ll git back easy Christmas Eve.”
“You sure won’t be late, popsie?” interrupted the child, looking up with apprehension in her round eyes. “I jest wouldn’t care one mite for Sandy Claus if you weren’t here too!”
“Mebbe I’ll git him to give me a lift in his little sleigh! Anyways, I’ll be back!” laughed Dave, gaily.
II
After Dave had gone, setting out at daybreak on his moose-hide snowshoes, which crunched musically on the hard snow, things went very well for a while at the lonely clearing. It was not so lonely, either, during the bright hours about midday, when the sunshine managed to accumulate something almost like warmth in the sheltered yard. About noon the two red and white cows and the yoke of wide-horned red oxen would stand basking in front of the lean-to, near the well, contentedly chewing their cuds. At this time the hens, too, yellow and black and speckled, would come out and scratch in the litter, perennially undiscouraged by the fact that the only thing they found beneath it was the snow. The vivid crossbills, red and black and white, would come to the yard in flocks, and the quaker-coloured snow-buntings, and the big, trustful, childlike, pine grosbeaks, with the growing stain of rose-purple over their heads and necks. These kept Lidey interested, helping to pass the days that now, to her excited anticipations, seemed so long. Perhaps half a dozen times a day she would print a difficult communication to Santa Claus with some new idea, some new suggestion. These missives were mailed to the good Saint of Children by the swift medium of the roaring kitchen fire; and as the draught whisked their scorching fragments upwards, Lidey was satisfied that they went straight to their destination. The child’s joy in her anticipations was now the more complete because, since her father’s departure, her mother had ceased to discourage her hopes.
On the day before Christmas Eve, however, the mother felt symptoms of a return of her old sickness. Immediately she grew anxious, realizing how necessary it was that she should keep well. This nervous apprehension hastened the result that she most dreaded. Her pain and her weakness grew worse hour by hour. Mastered by her memories of what she had been through before, she was in no mood to throw off the attack. That evening, crawling to the barn with difficulty, she amazed the horse and the cattle by coaxing them to drink again, then piled their mangers with a two-days’ store of hay, and scattered buckwheat recklessly for the hens. The next morning she could barely drag herself out of bed to light the fire; and Lidey had to make her breakfast–which she did contentedly enough–on bread and butter and unlimited molasses.
It was a weary day for the little one, in spite of her responsibilities. Muffled up and mittened, she was able, under her mother’s directions, to carry a little water to the stock in a small tin kettle, making many journeys. And she was able to keep the fire going. But the hours crept slowly, and she was so consumed with impatience that all her usual amusements lost their savour. Not even the rare delight of being allowed to cut pictures out of some old illustrated papers could divert her mind from its dazzling anticipations. But before Christmas could come, must come her father; and from noon onward she would keep running to the door every few minutes to peer expectantly down the trail. She was certain that, at the worst, he could not by any possibility be delayed beyond supper-time, for he was needed to get supper–or, rather, as Lidey expressed it, to help her get supper for mother! Lidey was not hungry, to be sure, but she was getting mortally tired of unmitigated bread and butter and molasses.
Supper-time, however, came and went, and no sign of Dave’s return. On the verge of tears, Lidey munched a little of the now distasteful food. Her mother, worn out with the pain, which had at last relaxed its grip, fell into a heavy sleep. There was no light in the cabin except the red glow from the open draught of the stove, and the intense, blue-white moonlight streaming in through the front window. The child’s impatience became intolerable.
Flinging open the door for the hundredth time, she gazed out eagerly across the moonlit snow and down the trail. The cloudless moon, floating directly above it, transfigured that narrow and lonely road into a path to wonderland. In the mystic radiance–blue-white, but shot with faint, half-imagined flashes of emerald and violet–Lidey could see no loneliness whatever. The monstrous solitude became to her eyes a garden of silver and crystal. As she gazed, it lured her irresistibly.
With a sudden resolve she noiselessly closed the door, lit the lamp, and began to put on her wraps, stealing about on tiptoe that she might not awaken her mother. She was quite positive that, by this time, her father must be almost home. As her little brain dwelt upon this idea, she presently brought herself to see him, striding swiftly along in the moonlight just beyond the turn of the trail. If she hurried, she could meet him before he came out upon the clearing. The thought possessed her. Stealing a cautious glance at her mother’s face to be sure her sleep was sound, she slipped out into the shine. A moment more and her tiny figure, hooded and muffled and mittened, was dancing on moccasined feet across the snow.
At the entrance to the trail, Lidey felt the first qualm of misgiving. The path of light, to be sure, with all its fairy-book enticement, lay straight before her. But the solemn woods, on either side of the path, were filled with great shadows and a terrible stillness. At this point Lidey had half a mind to turn back. But she was already a young person of positive ideas, not lightly to be swerved from a purpose; and her too vivid imagination still persisted in showing her that picture of her father, speeding towards her just beyond the turn of the trail. She even thought that she could hear his steps upon the daunting stillness. With her heart quivering, yet uplifted by an exaltation of hope, she ran on, not daring to glance again into the woods. To sustain her courage she kept thinking of the look of gay astonishment that would flash into her father’s face as he met her running towards him–just around the turn of the trail!