The Andastes hang on the heels of fiercer prowlers, smelling about dead bones like foxes after a battle.

Real men can not be far away." We lay watching the strange and grotesque creatures in the starlight; and truly they seemed to smell their way as beasts smell; and they were as light-footed and as noiseless, slinking from bush to bush, lurking motionless in shadows, nosing, listening, prowling on velvet pads to the very edges of our rock escarpment.
"They have the noses of wild things," whispered the Mohican uneasily.
"Somewhere they have found something that belongs to one of us, and, having once smelled it, have followed." I thought for a moment.
"Do you believe they found the charred fragments of my pouch-flap?
Could they scent my scorched thrums from where I now lie?
Only a hound could do that! It is not given to men to scent a trail as beasts scent it running perdu." The Mohican said softly: "Men of the settlement detect no odour where those of the open perceive a multitude of pungent smells." "That is true," I said.
"It is true, Loskiel.

As a dog scents water in a wilderness and comes to it from afar, so can I also.

Like a dog, too, can I wind the hidden partridge brood--though never the nesting hen--nor can a mink do that much either.

But keen as the perfume of a bee-tree, and certain as the rank smell of a dog-fox in March--which even a white man can detect--are the odours of the wilderness to him whose only home it is.
And even as a lad, and for the sport of it, have I followed and found by its scent alone the great night-butterfly, marked brown and crimson, and larger than a little bat, whose head bears tiny ferns, and whose wings are painted with the four quarters of the moon.