One day nothing came along this highway and I looked at the tracks in the wide, dusty trail. The multitude of tracks in it overlapped and overlaid each other. A grizzly track, like the footprint of a shoeless primitive man, was stamped with deer tracks, stitched and threaded with mice tails and tracks and scalloped with wolf toes. But its individuality was there. For three days I had been a bump on a log by this place and no big travellers had passed. The birds, chipmunks, and a squirrel were entertaining as ever, but I had hoped for something else. I had just started for camp when dimly through the trees I saw something coming down the trail. [Illustration: _Photo. by E. R. Warren_ _The Prairie Dog_] [Illustration: _Photo. by E. R. Warren_ _The Cony_] [Illustration: _Drawing by Will James_ _Looking for Small Favours_] A dignified grizzly and a number of pompous, stiff-necked rams met and were so filled with curiosity that everyone forgot reserve and good form. They stopped and turned for looks at one another and thus merged a rude, serious affair into a slowly passing, successful meeting. I sometimes sat at a point on this ridge trail so that the passing animal was in silhouette. The background was a lone black spruce against the shifting sky scenery. Horns and whiskers, coats of many colours, and exhibits of leg action went by. Horned heads, short-arched necks, and held-in chins abundantly told of pride and pomposity. But the character topography was in each back line. From nose tip to tail, plateau, cañon, hill, and slope stories stood against the sky. The tail, though last, was the character clue to the passing figure. Regardless of curve, kink, or incline, it ever was story revealing: sometimes long and flowing, but the short tail attitude incited most imaginative interest in the attached individual. From treetop I watched one trail where it was crossed by a stream. Generally deer and sheep went through the stream without a stop. In it bears often rolled. Sometimes they used the wilderness bridge--the beaver dam, and occasionally they splashed through the pond. Coyotes, porcupine, squirrels, rabbits, and lynx used the dam. A porcupine backed a lynx off this into the water, the lynx threatening and spitting. But the lynx met a rabbit near the other end and the rabbit went back with the lynx. A grizzly was about to cross when three fun-loving grizzly cubs appeared. He stood aside and watched, perhaps enjoyed, their pranks in the water before coming across. On the bank the cubs hesitated for a moment before passing a sputtering squirrel who was denouncing them for youthful pranks. A few inches of the first snow was on the ground. I went back along the trail and examined tracks. At one point a lion had come out of the woods and given the cubs a scare; and still farther back they had stood on hind feet one behind the other, evidently watching a black bear go well around them.