Cornmeal and potatoes, with tea and apples, three times a day, are apt to lose their charm. Even fish did not entirely satisfy the craving for flesh meat. So Quonab and Rolf set out one morning on a regular hunt for food. The days of big game were over on the Asamuk, but there were still many small kinds and none more abundant than the woodchuck, hated of farmers. Not without reason. Each woodchuck hole in the field was a menace to the horses' legs. Tradition, at least, said that horses' legs and riders' necks had been broken by the steed setting foot in one of these dangerous pitfalls: besides which, each chuck den was the hub centre of an area of desolation whenever located, as mostly it was, in the cultivated fields. Undoubtedly the damage was greatly exaggerated, but the farmers generally agreed that the woodchuck was a pest. Whatever resentment the tiller of the soil might feel against the Indian's hunting quail on his land, he always welcomed him as a killer of woodchucks. And the Indian looked on this animal as fair game and most excellent eating. Rolf watched eagerly when Quonab, taking his bow and arrows, said they were going out for a meat hunt. Although there were several fields with woodchucks resident, they passed cautiously from one to another, scanning the green expanse for the dark-brown spots that meant woodchucks out foraging. At length they found one, with a large and two small moving brown things among the clover. The large one stood up on its hind legs from time to time, ever alert for danger. It was a broad, open field, without cover; but close to the cleared place in which, doubtless, was the den, there was a ridge that Quonab judged would help him to approach. Rolf was instructed to stay in hiding and make some Indian signs that the hunter could follow when he should lose sight of the prey. First, “Come on” (beckoning); and, second, “Stop,” (hand raised, palm forward); “All right” (hand drawn across level and waist high); forefinger moved forward, level, then curved straight down, meant “gone in hole.” But Rolf was not to sign anything or move, unless Quonab asked him by making the question sign (that is waving his hand with palm forward and spread fingers). Quonab went back into the woods, then behind the stone walls to get around to the side next the ridge, and crawling so flat on his breast in the clover that, although it was but a foot high, he was quite invisible to any one not placed much above him. In this way he came to the little ridge back of the woodchuck den, quite unknown to its occupants. But now he was in a difficulty. He could not see any of them.