The Trail of the Sandhill Stag   By: Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946)

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

THE TRAIL OF THE SANDHILL STAG AND 60 DRAWINGS

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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

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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.

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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.

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List of full page Drawings

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"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.

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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."

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