Now business began to get quite lively, and we were seldom in camp until after dark, and we were up early and had breakfast over and our lunch packed in our knapsacks. The lunch usually consisted of a good big hunk of boiled venison and a couple of doughnuts and a few crackers, occasionally the breast of a partridge, fried in coon or bear oil. Sometimes the lunch would freeze in the knapsacks and it would be necessary to gather a little paper bark from a yellow birch and a little rosin from a hemlock, black birch or hard maple tree and build a little fire to thaw the lunch. This, however, was quickly done, and was a pleasure rather than a hardship. I have delighted in eating the lunch in this manner for many a winter on the trap line or trail, as have many other hunters and trappers. Bill and I always had our lunch packed and ready to take up the trail at the first peep of day. Sometimes when we would get in late, tired and wet and our clothes frozen, I would suggest to Bill that we shut up camp and take a wood job, just to see what Bill would have to say. He would say that there would be time to take a wood job in the spring or after he had killed a certain large buck which is usually called "Old Golden." There were but a few days but what we either caught some fur or killed a deer, though sometimes we would have a bad streak of luck by wounding a deer, or having some animal take a foot off and escape, but this would make us all the more eager to follow the trail or trap line. [Illustration: WOODCOCK ON THE TRAP LINE.] As we had gotten by this time several deer and had caught three bear (one in one of the deadfalls that I had built the fall before, that Will Howard called that "dashed dinged riggin'," when he found the bear in it) we wanted to get them out to Kane, that being the nearest point to a railroad. We started early one morning, Bill taking an axe and I carrying the saw, so that if we found any large trees across the trail that we had cut out the year before we would have the saw to do it with. After carrying the saw some distance and not finding any trees of much size across the road, we left it and only took the axe. We found but very little in the trail to cut out. We got to Kane in time to engage a man with team to come to camp the next day and take out the venison and bear and bring in some necessary commissaries that we were getting short of. It was only a few days after this that I found that a bear got in one of the traps. The trap chain having a swivel that was pretty well worn, broke, and the bear went off with the trap. I followed the trail until the middle of the afternoon, when I became satisfied that Bruin was disgusted with that locality, as he had continued his course nearly due east without a stop. I could see no signs that led me to think that Bruin intended to stop for the next fifty miles.