The greatest difference between this wilderness drama and the dramas that human beings see upon a stage is that one was reality and the other is pretense. The players were beasts, not men. The only human being anywhere in the near vicinity was the old trapper, Hudson, following down his trap line on the creek margin on the way to his camp. It is true that two other men, with a rather astounding similarity of purpose, were at present coming down two of the long trails that led to the region; but as yet the drama was hidden from their eyes. One of these two was Bruce, coming from Linda's cabin. One was Dave Turner, approaching from the direction of the Ross estates. Turner was much the nearer. Curiously, both had business with the trapper Hudson. The action of the play was calm at first. Mostly the forest creatures were still in their afternoon sleep. Brother Bill, the great stag elk, had a bed in the very center of a thick wall of buckbush, and human observers at first could not have explained how his great body, with his vast spread of antlers, had been able to push through. But in reality his antlers aided rather than hindered. Streaming almost straight back they act something like a snow-plow, parting the heavy coverts. The bull elk is in some ways the master of the forest, and one would wonder why he had gone to such an out-of-the-way place to sleep. Unless he is attacked from ambush, he has little to fear even from the Tawny One, the great cougar, and ordinarily the cougar waits until night to do his hunting. The lynx is just a source of scorn to the great bull, and even the timber wolf--except when he is combined with his relatives in winter--is scarcely to be feared. Yet he had been careful to surround himself with burglar alarms,--in other words, to go into the deep thicket that no beast of prey could penetrate without warning him--by the sound of breaking brush--of its approach. It would indicate that there was at least one living creature in this region--a place where men ordinarily did not come--that the bull elk feared. The does and their little spotted fawns were sleeping too; the blacktail deer had not yet sought the feeding grounds on the ridges. The cougar yawned in his lair, the wolf dozed in his covert, even the poison-people lay like long shadows on the hot rocks. But these latter couldn't be relied upon to sleep soundly. One of the many things they can do is to jump straight out of a dream like a flicking whiplash, coil and hit a mark that many a good pistol shot would miss.