He finished the job of getting his line loose, then broke the second joint of the rod just below the top ferrule, making the fracture clean and straight across so it might appear that a whizzing missile had cut it through. By pounding it with a stone he battered the reel to bits. Where the outflung verge of the slip met the creek he tipped up as heavy a boulder as he could raise with the trunk of a snapped-off lodge-pole pine for a lever, and propped the large boulder with a smaller one. Into the cranny thus provided, he shoved the butt of the rod and the fragments of the reel; then kicked out the prop and eased the main boulder down again into its former place. The broken second section stuck out, pressed flat upon the gravel in the creek; the stout casting line held fast the rest of that section and the tip, so that they bobbed in the shore ripples, scraping on the wet pebbles. There was the marker plain enough to see. To any trained eye it would be like a signal post. The finders would pry up the big stone, but that was as far as they could go. Behind and beyond, the mass of the slide arose. They must inevitably figure him as dropping his fishing gear when the danger impended and fleeing blindly rearward, not away from but directly into the path of the avalanche. He satisfied himself that no sign of his handiwork, nothing to suggest human connivance, was left behind at the scene of this artifice. Then the refugee started climbing the wall down which less than an hour before he had descended. The trail was rocky; it would register no tell-tale retreating footprints. Even so, he took pains to leap from stone to stone, avoiding any spots of hard-packed soil. Two-thirds up he came to a flattish stretch where a vein of fine gravel and coarse quartzy sand was exposed. Coming down, he recalled having noticed that sandy streak. It presented an obstacle, being fully twenty feet broad. Immediately, though, an old Indian device for deceiving a pursuer occurred to him. As a boy in Iowa he had heard it described. So he turned the other way and backed across the strip, lifting his feet high at each step and setting them down again well apart, with the heels pressed deeply in so that the toe impressions would be the lighter. From the farther side he looked back and was well content. Anybody would be willing to swear those prints had been made by a man going down the trail, not by one returning.