Seth tapped the huge old maples with a gouge, and the sap, dripping from spouts of sumac wood, was caught in rough-hewn troughs. From these it was carried in buckets on a neck-yoke to the boiling place, an open-fronted shanty. Before it the big potash kettle was hung on a tree trunk, so balanced on a stump that it could be swung over or off the fire at will. Sugaring brought pleasure as well as hard labor to Nathan. There were quiet hours spent in the shanty with his father, with little to do but mend the fire and watch the boiling sap walloping and frothing, half hidden beneath the clouds of steam that filled the woods with sweet odor. Sometimes Job joined them and told of his lonely scouts in the Ranger service, and of bush fights with Indians and their French allies, and of encounters with wild beasts, tales made more impressive in their relation by the loneliness of the campfire, with the circle of wild lights and shadows leaping around it in the edge of the surrounding darkness, out of which came, perhaps from far away, the howl of a wolf or the nearer hoot of the great horned owl. Sometimes Martha spent part of a day in camp with her brother, helping in womanly ways that girls so early acquired in the training of those times, when every one of the household must learn helpfulness and self-reliance. But the little sister enjoyed most the evenings when the syrup was taken to the house and sugared off. The children surfeited themselves with sugar “waxed” on snow, and their parents, and Job, if he chanced to be there, shared of this most delicious of the few backwoods luxuries, and the five made a jolly family party. One morning, when the surface of the coarse-grained old snow was covered with one of the light later falls, known as “sugar snow,” as Seth and his son were on their way to the sugar place, the latter called his father’s attention to a large track bearing some resemblance to the imprint of a naked human foot, and tending with some meandering in the same direction that they were going. “Why,” said Seth, at the first glance, “it’s a bear, an’ if he’s been to the camp, I’m afraid he’s done mischief, for they’re meddlesome creatur’s. But there wa’n’t much left there for him to hurt,” he added, after taking a brief mental inventory of the camp’s contents. “I can’t think of nothing but the hunk of pork we had to keep the big kittle from b’ilin’ over,” said Nathan, “and a little mite of syrup that we left in the little kittle ’cause there was more’n we could carry home in the pails.” “He’s welcome to that if he’s left the pork; we hain’t no pork to feed bears.”