Ted sought the aspen grown aisles between the thickets. He hung a strip of red cloth on a wind whipped branch, walked fifty yards and hung another. The night lifted and daylight came, and an hour later Ted tied his last strip of cloth to a twig. Carrying no rifle--but Pythias couldn't possibly know that--he put his hands in his pockets to warm them. Now he had to flush the big buck. He and his guest had left the great animal in one of the larger thickets last night, but it was almost certain that he hadn't passed the whole night there. Ted circled the thicket, found Pythias' unmistakable tracks and followed to where the big buck had nibbled tender young aspen shoots and pawed the snow to get at the dried grass beneath it. Thereafter Pythias had done considerable wandering. Ted worked out the trail and discovered where his quarry had gone to rest in another thicket. He tracked him in, and he'd done this so many times that he knew almost exactly what to expect. The big buck would wait until he was sure someone was again on his trail, then he'd get up and sneak away. There would be nothing except tracks in the snow to mark his going. A man could not travel silently through the thickets, but a deer could. Deep within the thicket, Ted found the bed, a depression melted in the snow, to which Pythias had retired when his wandering was done. The tracks leading away were fresh and sharp, no more than a couple of minutes old, but they were not the widely spaced ones of a running buck. Knowing very well what he was doing, aware of the fact that he could not be seen while there, Pythias always walked in the thickets. However, when he decided to leave this thicket, he had leaped through the scrub aspen separating it from the next one. It could have taken him no more than a second or so. If a hunter had been watching, he would have had just a fleeting shot and only a lucky marksman would have connected. Ted followed fast. There were no cloth strips in these aspens. But when he came to where Pythias had intended to leave the next thicket, he discovered where the big buck had set himself for the first leap then wheeled to slip back into the laurel. Ten feet to one side, the strip of cloth that had turned him still whipped in the wind. Pythias had tried again to leave the thicket, been turned a second time by another fluttering cloth and leaped wildly out at a place where Ted had hung no ribbons. The buck's pattern changed completely. He was safe in the thickets, knew it, and had never deigned to run while sheltered by friendly brush. Now he was running, either in great leaps that placed his bunched feet six yards apart or at a nervous trot. Ted began to have hopes.