



Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Steven desJardins
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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[Illustration: The Trail of the Sandhill Stag]




[Illustration: "The Track of a Mother Blacktail was suddenly joined by
two Little Ones' Tracks."]




THE TRAIL OF THE SANDHILL STAG
AND 60 DRAWINGS

[Illustration]

BY
ERNEST THOMPSON SETON
[Illustration]
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

[Illustration]

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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]


    To the Reader:

      These are the best days of my life.
      These are my golden days.




     In this Book the designs for title-page, cover, and
     general make-up, and also the literary revision, were
     done by Mrs. Grace Gallatin Thompson Seton.

[Illustration]




List of full-page Drawings

[Illustration]

"The Track of a Mother Blacktail
was suddenly joined by two Little
Ones' Tracks"                        frontispiece

The Trail Spring                          page 14

"Wingless Birds"                               22

"Sat down in the Moonlit Snow"                 37

"Seven Deer,... their Leader a wonderful
Buck"                                          56

"The Doe was walking slowly"                   63

"Scanned the White World for his foe"          80

The Stag                                       89




[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration]

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."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

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 end,
and rightly guessed that that was the toe; also he noticed that the
spaces shortened in going up hill, and at last a clear imprint in a
sandy place ended all doubt. Away he went with a new fire in his
blood, and an odd prickling in his hair; away on a long, hard follow
through interminable woods and hills, with the trail growing fres