This time he gained southern
Oregon before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he
received his liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He
was possessed of an obsession that drove him north. The homing
instinct, Irvine called it, after he had expended the selling price
of a sonnet in getting the animal back from northern Oregon.
Another time the brown wanderer succeeded in traversing half the
length of California, all of Oregon, and most of Washington, before
he was picked up and returned "Collect." A remarkable thing was
the speed with which he travelled. Fed up and rested, as soon as
he was loosed he devoted all his energy to getting over the ground.
On the first day's run he was known to cover as high as a hundred
and fifty miles, and after that he would average a hundred miles a
day until caught. He always arrived back lean and hungry and
savage, and always departed fresh and vigorous, cleaving his way
northward in response to some prompting of his being that no one
could understand.
But at last, after a futile year of flight, he accepted the
inevitable and elected to remain at the cottage where first he had
killed the rabbit and slept by the spring.
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