THE TRAIL OF THE SANDHILL STAG

AND 60 DRAWINGS

BY
ERNEST THOMPSON SETON
Naturalist to the Government of Manitoba

Author of

Wild Animals I Have Known
Art Anatomy of Animals
Mammals of Manitoba
Birds of Manitoba

Published by Charles Scribner's Sons New York City A.D. 1914

Copyright, 1899, by
Ernest Seton-Thompson

First
Impression
October
12
1899

Second
Impression
February
16
1900

Third
Impression
December
20
1900

Fourth
Impression
July
16
1901

Fifth
Impression
August
18
1902

Sixth
Impression
October
29
1904

Seventh
Impression
November
30
1908

Eighth
Impression
November
1
1910

Ninth
Impression
April
10
1913

Tenth
Impression
December
10
1913

THE SCRIBNER PRESS

This Book is dedicated to the Old-timers of the Big Plain of Manitoba.

List of full-page Drawings

The Trail Spring.

I

It was a burning hot day. Yan was wandering in pursuit of birds among the endless groves and glades of the Sandhill wilderness about Carberry. The water in the numerous marshy ponds was warm with the sun heat, so Yan cut across to the trail spring, the only place in the country where he might find a cooling drink. As he stooped beside it his eye fell on a small hoof-mark in the mud, a sharp and elegant track.

He had never seen one like it before, but it gave him a thrill, for he knew at once it was the track of a wild deer.

"There are no deer in those hills now," the settlers told Yan. Yet when the first snow came that autumn he, remembering the hoof-mark in the mud, quietly took down his rifle and said to himself, "I am going into the hills every day till I bring out a deer." Yan was a tall, raw lad in the last of his teens. He was no hunter yet, but he was a tireless runner, and filled with unflagging zeal. Away to the hills he went on his quest day after day, and many a score of long white miles he coursed, and night after night he returned to the shanty without seeing even a track. But the longest chase will end. On a far, hard trip in the southern hills he came at last on the trail of a deer—dim and stale, but still a deer-trail—and again he felt a thrill as the thought came, "At the other end of that line of dimples in the snow is the creature that made them; each one is fresher than the last, and it is only a question of time for me to come up with their maker."

At first Yan could not tell by the dim track which way the animal had gone. But he soon found that the mark was a little sharper at one