Dick was afoot after a few hours' sleep. He aroused Sam and went about the preparation of breakfast. May-may-gwán attempted to help, but both she and her efforts were disregarded. She brought wood, but Dick rustled a supply just the same, paying no attention to the girl's little pile; she put on fresh fuel, but Dick, without impatience,--indeed, as though he were merely rearranging the fire,--contrived to undo her work; she brought to hand the utensils, but Dick, in searching for them, always looked where they had originally been placed. His object seemed not so much to thwart the girl as to ignore her. When breakfast was ready he divided it into two portions, one of which he ate. After the meal he washed the few dishes. Once he took a cup from the girl's hand as she was drying it, much as he would have taken it from the top of a stump. He then proceeded to clean it as though it had just been used.
May-may-gwán made no sign that she noticed these things. After a little she helped Sam roll the blankets, strike the shelter, construct the packs. Here her assistance was accepted, though Sam did not address her. After a few moments the start was made.
The first few hours were spent as before, wading the stream. As she could do nothing in the water, May-may-gwán kept to the woods, walking stolidly onward, her face to the front, expressionless, hiding whatever pain she may have felt. This side of noon, however, the travellers came to a cataract falling over a fifty-foot ledge into a long, cliff-bordered pool.
It became necessary to portage. The hill pinched down steep and close. There existed no trails. Dick took the little camp axe to find a way. He clambered up one after the other three ravines--grown with brush and heavy ferns, damp with a trickle of water,--always to be stopped near the summit by a blank wall impossible to scale. At length he found a passage he thought might be practicable. Thereupon he cut a canoe trail back to the water-side.
In clearing this trail his attention turned to making room for a canoe on a man's back. Therefore the footing he bothered with not at all. Saplings he clipped down by bending them with the left hand, and striking at the strained fibres where they bowed. A single blow would thus fell treelets of some size. When he had finished his work there resulted a winding, cylindrical hole in the forest growth some three feet from the ground. Through this cylinder the canoe would be passed while its bearer picked a practised way among slippery rocks, old stubs, new sapling stumps, and undergrowth below. Men who might, in later years, wish to follow this Indian trail, would look not for footprints but for waist-high indications of the axe.
When the canoe had been carried to the top of the bluff that marked the water-fall, it was relaunched in a pool. In the meantime May-may-gwán, who had at last found a use for her willingness, carried the packs. Dick re-embarked. His companion perceived that he intended to shove off as soon as the other should have taken his place. Sam frustrated that, however, by holding fast to the gunwale. May-may-gwán stepped in amidships, with a half-deprecating glance at the young man's inscrutable back. At the end of the brief paddling the upper pool allowed them, she was first ashore.
Late that afternoon the travel for a half mile became exceedingly difficult. The stream took on the character of a mountain brook. It hardly paid to float the canoe in the tiny holes among the rocks, miniature cascades, and tortuous passages. The forest grew to the very banks, and arched over to exclude the sun. Every few feet was to be avoided a tree, half clinging to the bank, leaning at a perilous slant out over the creek. Fortunately the spring freshets in this country of the great snows were powerful enough to sweep out the timber actually fallen, so the course of the stream itself was clear of jams. At length the travellers reached a beaver-dam, and so to a little round lake among the hills. They had come to the head waters of the Mattawishguia.
In the lake stood two moose, old and young. Dick succeeded in killing the yearling, though it took two shots from his Winchester. It was decided to camp here over one day in order that the meat might be saved.
A circle of hills surrounded the little body of water. On them grew maples and birches, among which scattered a few hemlocks and an occasional pine. At the edge of the water were cedars leaning out to look at their reflections. A deep and solemn peace seemed to brood over the miniature lake. Such affairs as bird songs, the slap of a paddle, the shots from Dick's rifle could not break this strange stillness. They spoke hastily, and relapsed to silence, like the rare necessary voices in a room where one lies dead. The hush, calm and primal, with the infinity of the wilderness as its only measure of time, took no account of the shock of a second's interruption. Two loons swam like ghosts. Everywhere and nowhere among the trees, in the hills, over the water, the finer senses were almost uneasily conscious of a vast and awful presence. It was as yet aloof, unheeding, buddhistic, brooding in nirvanic calm, still unawakened to put forth the might of its displeasure. Under its dreaming eyes men might, fearfully and with reverence, carry on their affairs,--fearfully and with reverence, catching the breath, speaking low, growing silent and stern in the presence of the North.
At the little camp under the cedars, Dick Herron and Sam Bolton, assisted by the Ojibway girl, May-may-gwán, cut the moose-meat into thin strips, salted, and dried it in the bright sun. And since the presence of loons argued fish, they set their nets and lines. Several days thus passed.
In their relations the three promptly settled back into a species of routine. Men who travel in the Silent Places speedily take on the colour of their surroundings. They become silent also. A band of voyageurs of sufficient strength may chatter and sing; they have by the very force of numbers created an atmosphere of their own. But two are no............