“See there, boys, I told you so,” said Herb, as the party reached the
ever-to-be-remembered clump of hemlocks, the beginning of the trail
which they were ready to follow up like sleuth-hounds. “There’s plenty
of hair; I guess I singed him in two places.”
He pointed to some shaggy clotted locks on the grass at his feet, and
then to a small maroon-colored stain beside them.
“Is that blood?” asked Neal.
“Blood, sure enough, though there ain’t much of it. But I’ll tell you
what! I’d as soon there wasn’t any. I wish it had been light enough
last night for me to act barber, and
only cut some hair from that moose, instead of wounding him. It might
have answered the purpose as well, and sent him walking.”
“I don’t believe it would have done anything of the kind,” exclaimed
Dol. “He was far too red-hot an old customer to bolt because a bullet
shaved him.”
“Well, I don’t set up to be soft-hearted like Cyrus here; and I’m ready
enough to bag my meat when I want it,” said the woodsman. “But sure’s
you live, boys, I never wounded a free game creature yet, and seed it
get away to pull a hurt limb and a cruel pain with it through the
woods, that I could feel chipper afterwards. It’s only your delicate
city fellows who come out here for a shot once a year, who can chuckle
over the pools of blood a wounded moose leaves behind him. Sho! it’s
not manly.”
A start was now made on the trail, Herb leading, and showing such
wonderful skill as a trailer that the English boys began to believe his
long residence in the woods had developed in him supernatural senses.
“That moose was shot through the right fore-leg,” he whispered, as the
trackers reached the edge of the forest.
“How do you know?” gasped the Farrars.
The woodsman answered by kneeling, bending his face close to the
ground, and drawing his brown finger successively round three prints on
a soft patch of earth, which the unpractised eyes could scarcely
discern.
“There’s no mark of the right fore-hoof,” he whispered again presently;
“nothing but _that_,” pointing to another dark red blotch, which the
boys would have mistaken for maroon-tinted moss.
A breathless, wordless, toiling hour followed. Through the dense woods,
which sloped steadily upward, clothing Katahdin’s highlands, Herb Heal
travelled on, now and again halting when the trail, because of freshly
fallen pine-needles or leaves, became quite invisible. Again he would
crouch close to the ground, make a circle with his finger round the
last visible print, and work out from that, trying various directions,
until he knew that he was again on the track which the limping moose
had travelled before him.
His comrades followed in single file, carrying their rifles in front of
their bodies instead of on their shoulders, so that there might be no
danger of a sudden clang or rattle from the barrels striking the trees.
Following the example of their guide, each one carefully avoided
stepping on crackling twigs or dry branches, or rustling against bushes
or boughs. The latter they would take gingerly in their hands as they
approached them, bend them out of the way, and gently release them as
they passed. Heroically they forebore to growl when their legs were
scraped by jagged bowlders or prickly shrubs, giving thanks inwardly to
the manufacturers of their stout tweeds that their clothes held
together, instead of hanging on them like streamers on a rag-bush.
It was a good, practical lesson in moose-trailing; but, save for the
knowledge gained by the three who had never stalked a moose before, it
was a failure.
The air beneath the dense foliage grew depressing—suffocating. Each one
longed breathlessly for the minute when he should emerge from this
heavy timber-growth, even to do more rugged climbing. Distant rumbles
were heard. Herb’s prophecy was being fulfilled. Pamolah was grumbling
at the trailers, and sending out his Thunder Sons to bid them back.
But it was too late for retreat. If they gave up their purpose, turned
and fled to camp, the storm, which was surely coming, would catch them
under the interlacing trees, a danger which the guide was especially
anxious to avoid. He pressed on with quickened steps, stooping no more
to make circles round the moose’s prints. Old Pamolah’s threatenings
grew increasingly sullen. At last the desired break in the woods was
reached; the trackers found themselves on the open side of Katahdin,
surrounded by a tangled growth of alders and white birches struggling
up between granite rocks; then the mountain artillery broke forth with
terrifying clatter.
A loud, long thunder-roll was echoed from crag, slide, forest, spur,
and basin. The “home of storms” was a fort of noise.
“Ha! there’ll be a big cannonading this time, I guess. Pamolah is going
to let fly at us with big shot, little shot, fire and water—all the
forces the old scoundrel has,” said Herb Heal, at last breaking the
silence which had been kept on the trail, and looking aloft towards the
five peaks guarding that mysterious basin, from which heavy, lurid
clouds drifted down.
At the same time a blustering, mighty wind-gust half swept the four
climbers from their feet. A great flash of globe lightning cut the air
like a dazzling fire-ball.
“We’ll have to quit our trailing, and scoot for shelter, I’m thinking!”
exclaimed Cyrus.
“Good land, I should say so!” agreed the guide. “The bull-moose likes
thunder. He’s away in some thick hole in the forest now, recovering
himself. We couldn’t have come up with him anyhow, boys, for them
blood-spots had stopped. I guess his leg wasn’t smashed; and he’ll soon
be as big a bully as ever. Follow me now, quick! Mind yer steps,
though! Them bushes are awful catchy!”
Undazzled by the lightning’s frequent flare, unstaggered by the
down-rushing wind, as if the mountain thunders were only the roll of an
organ about his ears, Herb Heal sprang onward and upward, tugging his
comrades one by one up many a precipitous ledge, and pulling them to
their feet again when the tripping bushes brought their noses to the
ground and their heels into the air.
“Hitch on to me, Dol!” he cried, suddenly turning on that youngster,
who was trying to get his second breath. “Tie on to me tight. I’ll tow
you up! I wish we could ha’ reached that old log camp, boys. ’Twould be
a stunning shelter, for it has a wall of rock to the back. But it’s
higher up, and off to the right. There! I see the den I’m aiming for.”
A few energetic bounds brought Herb, with Dol in tow, to a platform of
rock, which rose above a bed of blueberry bushes. It narrowed into a
sort of cave, roofed by an overhanging bowlder.
“We’ll be snug enough under this rock!” he exclaimed, pointing to the
canopy. “Creep in, boys. We’ll have tubs of rain, and a pelting of
hail. The rumpus is only beginning.”
So it was. The storm had been creeping from its cradle. Now it swept
down with an awful whirl and commingling of elements.
The boys, peering out from their rocky nest, saw a magnificent panorama
beneath them. The regiments of the air were at war. Lightning chains
encircled the heavens, lighting up the forests below. Winds charged
down the mountain-side, sweeping stones and bushes before them.
Hail-bullets rattled in volleys. Thunder-artillery boomed until the
very rocks seemed to shake.
“It’s fine!” exclaimed Cyrus. “It’s super-fine!”
Then a curtain of thick rain partly hid the warfare, the lightning
still rioting through it like a beacon of battle.
“The stones up above will have to be pretty firmly fixed to keep their
places,” said Herb. “Boys, I hope there ain’t a-going to be slides on
the mountain after this.”
“Slides?” echoed Dol questioningly.
“Landslides, kid. Say! if you want to be scared until your bones feel
limp, you’ve got to hear a great big block of granite come ploughing
down from the top ’o the mountain, bringing earth and bushes along with
it, and smashing even the rocks to splinters as it pounds along.”
“I guess that’s a sensation we’d rather be spared,” said Cyrus gravely.
And under the quieting spell of the airy warfare there was silence for
a while.
“Do you think it’s lightening up, Herb?” asked Neal, after the storm
had raged for three-quarters of an hour.
“I guess it is. The rain is stopping too. But we’ll have an awful
slushy time of it getting back to camp. To plough through them soaked
forests below would be enough to give you city fellows a shaking ague.”
“Couldn’t we climb on to your old log camp?” suggested Garst. “If we
have the luck to find the old shanty holding together, we can light a
fire there after things dry out a bit, and eat our snack. Then we
needn’t be in a hurry to get down. We’ll risk it, anyhow.”
“I reckon that’s about the only thing to be done,” assented the guide.
And in twenty minutes’ time the four were again straining up Katahdin,
clutching slippery rocks, sinking in sodden earth, shivering as they
were besprinkled by every bush and dwarfed tree, and dreadfully
hampered with their rifles.
“Never mind, boys; we’ll get there! Clinch yer teeth, and don’t squirm!
Once we’re past this tangle, the bit of climbing that’s left will be as
easy as rolling off a log!”
So shouted Herb cheerfully, as he tore a way with hand and foot through
the stunted growth of alders and birch, which, beaten down by the
winds, was now an almost impassable, sopping tangle.
“Keep in my tracks!” he bellowed again. “Gracious! but this sort o’
work is as slow as molasses crawling up-hill in winter.”
But ten minutes later, when the dripping jungle was behind, he dropped
his jesting tone.
He came to a full stop, catching his breath with a big gulp.
“Boys,” he cried, “it’s standing yet! I see it—the old home-camp! There
it is above us on that bit of a platform, with the big rock behind it.
And I’ve kep’ saying to myself for the last quarter of an hour that we
wouldn’t find it—that we’d find nary a thing but mildewed logs!”
A wealth of memories was in the woodsman’s eyes as he gazed up at the
timber nest, the log camp which his own hands had put up, standing on a
narrow plateau, and built against a protecting wall of rock that rose
in jagged might to a height of thirty or forty feet.
An earth bank or ridge, covered with hardy mosses and mountain
creepers, sloped gently up to the sheltered platform. To climb this
was, indeed, “as easy as rolling off a log.”
“We used to have a good beaten path here, but I guess it’s all growed
over,” said Herb in a thick voice, as if certain cords in his throat
were swelling. “Many’s the time I’ve blessed the sight of that old
home-camp, boys, after a hard week’s trapping. Hundert’s o’ night’s
I’ve slept snug inside them log walls when blasts was a-sweeping and
bellowing around, like as if they’d rip the mountain open, and tear its
very rocks out.”
While the guide spoke he was leaping up the ridge. A few minutes, and
he stood, a towering figure, on the platform above, waving his battered
hat in salute to the old camp.
“I guess some traveller has been sheltering here lately!” he cried to
Neal Farrar, as the latter overtook him. “There’s a litter around,”
pointing to dry sticks and withered bushes strewn upon the
camping-ground. “And the door’s standing open. I wonder who found the
old shanty?”
Neal remembered, hours afterwards, that at the moment he felt an odd
awakening stir in him, a stir which, shooting from head to foot, seemed
to warn him that he was nearing a sensation, the biggest sensation of
this wilderness trip.
He heard the voices of Cyrus and Dol hallooing behind; but they sounded
away back and indistinct, for his ears were bent towards the deserted
camp, listening with breathless expectation for something, he didn’t
know what.
One minute the vague suspense lasted, while he followed Herb towards
the hut. Then heaven and earth and his own heart seemed to stand still.
Through the wide-open door of the shanty came random, crooning snatches
of sound. Was the guttural voice which made them human? The English boy
scarcely knew. But as the noise swelled, like the moaning of a dry wind
among trees, he began, as it were, to disentangle it. Words shaped
themselves, Indian words which he had heard before on the guide’s
tongue.
“_N’loan pes-saus, mok glint ont-aven,
Glint ont-aven, nosh morgun_.”
These lines from the “Star Song,” the song which Herb had learned from
his traitor chum, floated out to him upon Katahdin’s breeze. They
struck young Farrar’s ears in staggering tones, like a knell, the
sadness of which he could not at the moment understand. But he had a
vague impression that the mysterious singer in the deserted camp
attached no meaning to what he chanted.
“Look out, I say! I don’t want to come a cropper here.”
It was Dol’s young voice which rang out shrilly among the mountain
echoes. Side by side with Cyrus, the boy had just gained the top of the
ridge when the guide suddenly backed upon him, Herb’s great
shoulder-blade knocking him in the face, so that he had to plant his
feet firmly to avoid spinning back.
But Herb had heard that guttural crooning. Just now he could hear
nothing else.
Twice he made a heaving effort to speak, and the voice cracked in his
throat.
Then, as he sprang for the camp-door, four words stumbled from his
lips:—
“By thunder! it’s Chris.”
[Illustration]