The fish-hawk's nest was in the crotch of the old, half-dead rock-maple2 on the shore of the desolate3 little lake which lay basking4 in the flat-lands about a mile back, behind Brine's Rip Mills.
As the fish-hawk is one of the most estimable of all the wilderness5 folk, both brave and inoffensive, troubling no one except the fat and lazy fish that swarmed6 in the lake below, and as he is protected by a superstition7 of the backwoodsmen, who say it brings ill-luck to disturb the domestic arrangements of a fish-hawk, the big nest, conspicuous8 for miles about, was never disturbed by even the most amiable9 curiosity.
But Woolly Billy, not fully10 acclimatized to the backwoods tradition and superstition, and uninformed as to the firmness and decision with which the fish-hawks are apt to resent any intrusion, had long hankered to explore the mysteries of that great nest. One morning he made up his mind to try it.
Tug11 Blackstock, Deputy-Sheriff of Nipsiwaska County, was away for a day or two, and old Mrs. Amos, his housekeeper12, was too deaf and rheumatic to "fuss herself" greatly about the "goings-on" of so fantastic a child as Woolly Billy, so long as she knew he had Jim to look after him. This serves to explain how a small boy like Woolly Billy, his seven-years-and-nine-months resting lightly on his amazingly fluffy13 shock of pale flaxen curls, could be trotting14 off down the lonely backwoods trail with no companion or guardian15 but a big, black dog.
Woolly Billy was familiar with the mossy old trail to the lake, and did not linger upon it. Reaching the shore, he wasted no time throwing sticks in for Jim to retrieve16, but, in spite of the dog's eager invitations to this pastime, made his way along the dry edge between undergrowth and water till he came to the bluff17. Pushing laboriously
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