INTO THE UNKNOWN
After the evening meal, the two lads built a big camp-fire of green
birch logs, mixed with such dry sticks as they could find, so as to
make a ruddy blazing fire, which grew so hot that both men and dog had
to back away from it. Ganawa smiled as he watched the lads pile on wood
and then back off.
“White men do strange things,” he said laughing. “Here, my sons, you
have been working hard at cutting wood, and now you have built a big
fire, which is so hot that we all have to back away from it. Why did
you not build a small fire and sit close to it?”
The lads looked at each other, but neither of them had a good answer.
“I suppose, my father,” Bruce replied after a moment of silence, “white
men just like to see a big fire, and most white boys would rather cut
and gather much wood and watch a big camp-fire than sit close to a
small fire.”
The lads had expected that Ganawa would talk about the man who had
almost gone over the falls and whose trail had abruptly ended below the
rapids, but after his remarks about the camp-fire of the boys, the tall
lean hunter lapsed into silence. He sat motionless looking at the fire
or gazing into the black darkness which surrounds every camp-fire at
night. The lads had learned that it was useless to try to make him talk
when he had fallen into this mood. “There will be no talk,” Ray had
remarked some days ago, “when Ganawa starts looking at the fire without
batting an eye.”
One who is used to the noisy summer evenings of more southern regions
where crickets, locusts, katydids, and tree-frogs open their noisy
nocturnal concert as soon as the red orb of the sun has sunk below the
horizon cannot help being strongly impressed by the solemn mysterious
silence of the Great Wild North.
As the fire began to burn low, Ray went into the tepee and brought a
blanket for each man, for as usual in the north the night was growing
cool. After each man had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, they
sat again in silence. There was the murmuring and rippling of the
river, for like all rivers that drop into the north shore of the Big
Lake, the Michipicoten runs almost everywhere with a swift current.
These cool, clear northern streams live, and they sing as they run.
Crickets and tree-frogs are not found in the North Shore country, but
the night-hawks flew screaming over the glowing fire, a lone
whippoorwill called near the stream; from a large pine behind the camp
came the spooky call and the guttural notes of “kookookehaw,” the big
owl; and from the hill across the river came the long-drawn howl of a
wolf.
Next morning Ganawa told the lads to make breakfast and roll up the
tepee. “We move after we have eaten,” he added. “I go down and watch a
while for the man who ran away.”
Tawny wanted very much to go along, but Ganawa would not let him.
“Ohnemoosh,” he said, “you stay in camp. I go alone with my gun and
watch for him.”
Ganawa might have been gone an hour or two hours. To Ray it seemed two
hours, and he was just about to go and look for the hunter when the
tall red man came striding back into camp.
“I did not see him,” he told the lads, “and I do not think he is coming
back to follow us, because he has lost his gun, and it is hard for a
poor Indian to buy a new gun. But we shall go away now on a long
journey to some big lakes and many streams to the north and northeast
of our camp. The lakes are large, they lie in the rocks in the forest
and many little streams run into them, and the beaver people build
their dams and houses on these little rivers, and they also build
houses on many small lakes, which no hunter has ever found; for this is
the country which the Great Spirit has made to be a refuge for the
beaver people and the moose. In this country the hunters shall never
kill the last beaver and the last moose, because the animals can always
find a trail that leads them to a safe place.”
“My father,” asked Bruce, “shall we stop looking for the camp of my
friend while we go to explore many lakes and streams?”
“My son,” replied Ganawa, “we shall always be looking for the camp of
your friend and for signs that tell us where he may have gone; and if
we do not find him and find no signs of his camp, then, maybe, we shall
have to go back and tell our friends that the wilderness has swallowed
the white man.”
Bruce and Ray wanted very much to know if Ganawa knew who was the man
that had followed them, but on this subject Ganawa did not utter a word
and the lads knew it would be useless to ask him. He talked of moose
and caribou they might find in the country ahead, of many big lakes,
some of which he had never seen himself; but the strange Indian, who
had fled from them as if driven by an evil conscience, he seemed to
have forgotten.
“We must look for moose,” Ganawa told the boys when they entered the
narrow bay of a large lake one morning. “My sons are getting thin from
eating nothing but fish.”
Ray’s heart began to thump when half an hour later Ganawa pointed
toward the north shore of the lake and called in a low voice, “Moose!”
and began to steer the canoe so as to approach the animal without
alarming him.
“He is too big,” said Ganawa when they had approached within gunshot.
But now the moose, a big bull with antlers in the velvet, became
suspicious. He left the shallow water, in which he had been feeding on
aquatic plants, and circled around far enough so he could get the wind
of the hunters. Then he stepped out of the spruce forest, gazed at the
hunters and sniffed the wind, and Ray thought he saw him shake his
head. Then he disappeared among the big black spruces which grow around
the shallow bays of almost every northern lake.
“Let him go,” said Ganawa. “He is old and poor. Did you see his ribs?
The black flies and the deer-flies and the big bulldog-flies have
worried him, and he needs much food to make his big horns grow. We must
try to get a young moose.”