Two or three times he put his ear to the earth that he might hear, as Tayoga had bade him, the rustle of leaves a mile away.
His eager spirit, always impatient for action, found relief in the continuous walking, and the steady enlargement of the circle in which he traveled, acquiring soon a radius of several hundred yards.

On the western perimeter he was beyond the deep thicket, and within a magnificent wood, unchoked by undergrowth.

Here the trees stood up in great, regular rows, ordered by nature, and the brilliant moonlight clothed every one of them in a veil of silver.

On such a bright night in summer the wilderness always had for him an elusive though powerful beauty, but he felt its danger.

Among the mighty trunks, with no concealing thickets, he could be seen easily, if prowling savages were near, and, as he made his circles, he always hastened through what he called to himself his park, until he came to the bushes, in the density of which he was well hidden from any eye fifty feet away.
It was an hour until midnight, and the radius of his circle had increased another fifty yards, when he came again to the great spaces among the oaks and beeches.