Isabel Hornibrook

“ His figure was skeleton-like. His lips—the lips which at the entrance of the strangers never ceased their wild crooning—were swollen and fever-scorched. His black eyes, disfigured by a hideous squint, rolled with the sick fancies of delirium.
Cyrus and the Farrars, while they looked upon him, felt that, even if they had never heard Herb’s exclamation, they would have had no difficulty in identifying the creature, remembering that story which had thrilled them by the camp-fire at Millinokett. It was Herb Heal’s traitor chum—the half-breed, Cross-eyed Chris. ”

“ Royal’s tear-away tongue, his brothers’ racket, Joe’s racy talk, Uncle Eb’s kind, dark face, and more than all, Doc’s companionship, which was as tonic to the hearts of those who travelled with him, were missed.
But spirits must be elastic in forest air. When they halted at noon to eat their “snack” on the side of a breezy knoll, with a tiny brook purling through a pine grove beneath them, with Katahdin’s rugged sides and cloud-veiled peaks looming in majesty to the north, the thought of what lay behind was inevitably lost in what lay before. Enthusiasm replaced depression. ”

“ Not a syllable passed the lips of the boys as they followed Herb into the log hut, but feeling seemed wagging a startled tongue in each finger-tip which convulsively pressed the rifles.
And not another articulate sentence came from the guide; only his throat swelled with a deep, amazed gurgle as he reached the interior of the shanty, and dropped his eyes upon the individual who raised that queer chanting.
On a bed of withered spruce boughs, strewn higgledy-piggledy upon the camp-floor—mother earth—lay the form of a man. ”

“ Sometimes only a smutty stump showed where they had stood; sometimes, robbed of life and every limb, portions of the fire-eaten trunks still remained erect,—bare, blackened poles. All smaller growth, and even the surface of the ground, parched by summer heats, had burned like tinder. Rocks and stones were baked and crumbling.
“Boys, that’s the most mournful sight a woodsman can see,” said Doc, looking away over the wrecked region, touched with golden lights from an October sunset. “It makes one who loves the woods feel as if he had lost a living friend.” ”

“ And now it may be readily guessed in what thrilling night-work these canoe-men are engaged as they skim over Squaw Pond, with no swish of paddle, nor jar of motion, nor even a noisy breath, disturbing the brooding silence through which they glide. They are “jacking” or “floating” for deer, showing the radiant eye of their silvery jack to attract any antlered buck or graceful doe which may come forth from the screen of the forest to drink at this quiet hour amid the tangled grasses and lily-pads at the pond’s brink. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Herb has had so many hairbreadth escapes that I believe the animal has yet to be born which could get the better of him. And he can find his way anywhere without a compass. Every handful of moss on a trunk or stone, every turn of a woodland stream, every sun-ray which strikes him through the trees, every glimpse of the stars at night, has a meaning for him. He reads the forest like a book. ”

“ Now, Neal, what do you say about the beaver’s intelligence?”
“If I didn’t know you, Cyrus, I’d say you were making up as you went along,” answered Neal. “It seems one of those things which a fellow can scarcely believe in. Hulloa! What’s that?”
A loud report, like the bang of a gun, made all the boys, who had been standing very quietly, gazing at the dam, suddenly jump.
“It’s only a beaver striking the water with his tail,” laughed Cyrus. “He has been swimming about somewhere up-stream, and has scented us, and dived. ”

“ Phil’s voice was serious, but exultant, “we’re a thoroughly happy set of fellows, in accord with each other and our surroundings. We feel our brains clear, our gladness springing up, and our lungs swelling to double their size with the whiffs which reach us from those sky-piercing pines yonder. So we will remember that ‘the wide earth is our Father’s temple.’ Over there in the woods we will worship him, while millions of forest creatures about us, flying, bounding, or building, in obedience to his laws, simply worship too.” ”

“ And the trio fell to voraciously, as he handed them each a steaming tin mug and an equally steaming plate. The newly awakened youngster, who had been cuddling his head sleepily against Neal’s shoulder (a glance showed that they were brothers) , had clamored for his share of the banquet.
“You haven’t been lonely, Dol, I hope, have you?” said Cyrus, as a whole flapjack, doubled over and drenched in sirup, disappeared down his capacious throat.
“Not I,” answered Dol (Adolphus Farrar, ladies and gentlemen) , shutting and opening a pair of steel-gray eyes with a sort of quick snap. ”

“ Once only, when paddling on a still pond with his experienced guide for company, the latter suddenly closed the slide of the jack-lamp, hiding its light. At the same moment a dark, splendid monster, tall as a horse and swinging a pair of antlers five feet broad, suddenly appeared upon the bank, near to which the canoe lay in black shadow. The hunters dared not breathe. It was at a season of year when the Maine law exacts a heavy fine for the killing of a moose; and even the guide had no desire to send his bullets through the law, though he might have riddled the game without compunction. ”

“ And he was too dazed to see that there were signs of a cultivated intelligence in the tanned, beaming face under the horn-blower’s broad-brimmed hat. Indeed, the hat itself, its wearer, log huts, canoes, and trees seemed to have a strange propensity to waltz before the lad’s eyes, and there was a queer waving sensation in his own legs, as if they, too, would join in the spinning movement. For as he advanced into the light out of the sombre shadows, a dizziness from long tramping in the woods, and from a hunger such as he had never before experienced, overcame him. ”

“ A few minutes afterwards the party filed out of the dense woods, passed through a grove of young spruces, forded a brook which emptied itself into the stream they were following, and came upon a scene blasted, barren, and unutterably dreary.
The band of boys, who, in spite of swamps and jungles, had learned to love the forest dearly, for its many beauties, and for the wild offspring with which it teemed, sorrowfully gasped, as if they saw the skeleton of a friend. ”

“ Why, we bathed at the other end of the pond late last evening! But these wet clothes are precious uncomfortable. I wish we were nearer to camp. Good Gracious! What’s that?”
He stood stock-still and erect, his flesh shrinking a little, while his drenched flannel shirt clung yet more closely and clammily to his skin.
A distant noise was wafted to his ears through the forest behind. It began like the gentle, mellow lowing of a cow at evening, swelled into a quavering, appealing crescendo cadence, and gradually died away. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I should say we are!” answered Garst. “You’re our captain now, Herb, and it’s a case of ‘Follow my leader!’ Take us anywhere you like, through jungles or mud-swamps. We won’t kick at hardships if we can only get a good look at his mooseship. Up to the present, except for that one moonlight peep, he has always dodged me like a phantom.”
“Are you going to be satisfied with a look?” The guide’s eyes narrowed into two long slits, on which the firelight quivered, as he gazed quizzically down upon Cyrus. “If the moose comes within reach of our shots, ain’t anybody going to pump lead into him? ”

“ But when slumber held them, when the murmur increased to a surge of sound, sank to a ripple and again rolled forth, in their dreams they imagined it the scurrying of a deer’s hoofs along some lonely forest deer-path, the rustling of a buck through bushes, the splashing of a mighty moose among lily-pads and grasses at the margin of a dark pond, the startled cluck of a coon. ”

“ You did have a narrow squeak, boys, and a scarey time; but I guess you had a lot of fun out of the old snorter,” said Herb, his rare laugh jingling out, starting the forest echoes like a clang of bells. “You’ve won those antlers, Dol—won ’em like a man. Blest, but you have! I promised ’em to the first fellow who called up a moose; and nary a woodsman in Maine could have done it better. I’m powerful glad ’twasn’t your own death-call you gave. I’ll keep my eye on you now till you leave these woods. Where’s the horn?” ”

“ And now, in the beginning of October, young Garst was off into Maine wilds again, having arranged to “do” the forest thoroughly after his usual fashion, seeing all he could of its countless phases of life, and finally to meet this same guide—a dare-devil fellow who was reported to have had adventures in moose-hunting such as other woodsmen did not dream of—at a log camp far in the wilderness. Thence they could proceed to solitudes where the voice of man seldom echoed, where the foot of man rarely trod, and where moose signs were pretty sure to be found. ”

“ Something snorted close to his right ear,—loud snort, which banished stupor, and set his pulses jumping. It was a deer, a beautiful doe in a coat of reddish-drab, matching the autumnal tints of the forest, wherever maples, birches, and cedars mingled with the evergreens. She had bounded upon him suddenly from behind a dead spruce and a mound of earth.
It was long since the game on this part of the mountain had been disturbed. Madam Doe had in all probability never seen a man before, therefore her behavior was not peculiar. ”

“ The guide chose a spot where the earth had been much softened by the recent rain; and, with the ingenuity of a man accustomed to wilderness shifts, he broke up the drenched ground with the axe which he took from his shoulders.
That axe, which had so often made camp, had never before made a grave; the Farrars doubted that it ever would. But Herb worked away upon his knees, moisture dripping from his skin, putting sorrow for years of anger into every blow of his arms. ”

“ The tent was on Herb’s shoulders; and naught was left to mark the visit of man to the humming stream but a bed of withering boughs on which the lynx might sleep to-night, and a few dying embers which the guide had thrashed out with his feet.
No halt was made until four o’clock in the afternoon. Then Herb Heal came to a standstill on the edge of a wide bog. It lay between him and what he called the “first heavy growth;” that is, the primeval forest, unthinned by axe of man, which at certain points clothes the foot of Katahdin. ”

“ But if the hunter is an old woodsman and a clever caller, he’ll generally fool the animal, unless he makes some awkward noise that isn’t in the game, or else the moose gets his scent on the breeze. One whiff of a man will send the creature off like a wind-gust, and earthquakes wouldn’t stop him. And though he sneaks away so silently when he hears anything suspicious, yet when he smells danger he’ll go through the forest at a thundering rush, making as much noise as a demented fire-brigade.”
“Good gracious!” ejaculated Neal and Dol together. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Now, a deer, be it buck, doe, or fawn in the spotted coat, will stand as if moonstruck, if it hears no sound; to gaze at the lantern, studying the meteor which has crossed its world as an astronomer might investigate a rare, radiant comet. So it offers a steady mark for the sportsman’s bullet, if he can glide near enough to discern its outline and take aim. There is one exception to this rule. If the wary animal has ever been startled by a shot fired from under the jack, trust him never to watch a light again, though it shine like the Kohinoor. ”

“ For Cyrus has a millionnaire father in the Back Bay of Boston, who is disposed to indulge his whims.
The one point of variance is this: while all guides admire young Garst as a crack shot with a rifle, he frequently dumfounds them by letting slip stunning chances at game, big and little. They call him “a queer specimen sportsman,”—understanding little his love for the wild offspring of the woods,—because he never uses his gun save when the bareness of his larder or the peril of his own life or his chum’s demands it. ”

“ They seemed to call upon everybody to dismiss gloomy thoughts of what might have been; to crack jokes, sing songs, tell yarns, and be as merry as befitted men who had a log hut for a shelter, fresh whiffs of forest air stealing to them through an open doorway, and such a camp-fire. ”

“ Lying amid the small growth and grasses, by a lonely, glinting logon, they found the conquered king, sleeping that sleep from which never sun again would wake him. A bullet-hole, crusted with dark blood, showed in his side. The slim legs were bent and stiff, and the mighty forefeet could no more strike a ripping blow which would end a man’s hunting forever. The antlers which had made the forest ring were powerless horn.
“Do you know, boys,” said Herb, as he stooped and touched them, fingering each prong, “I’ve hunted moose in fall and winter since I was first introduced to a rifle. ”

“ Then he stretched himself beside the trio in the rude bunk, drawing one thin blanket over him. Neal, who lay on his right, was conscious of some prickings of excitement at having such a bedfellow on the fir-boughs,—the camper’s couch which levels all. There flashed upon the fair-haired English boy a remembrance of how Cyrus had once said that “in the woods manhood is the only passport.” He thought that, measured by this standard, Herb Heal had truly a royal charter, and might be a president of the forest land; for he looked as free, strong, and unconquerable as the forest wind. ”

“ Yet Neal’s triumph over the poor brute, which had raced well for its life, was not without a faint twinge of pain; and he was too manly to look on this as a weakness. A sportsman he might be, of the sort who can shoot straight when necessity demands it, but never of that class who prowl through the forests with fingers tingling to pull the trigger, dreading to lose a chance of “letting blood” from any slim-legged moose or velvet-nosed buck which may run their way. It needed Doc’s praise to make him feel fully satisfied with his deed. ”

“ Herb Heal swung himself to and fro upon his plank seat, drawing his pipe reflectively, and letting its smoke filter through his nostrils, while he prepared to answer.
“Well,” he said at last, slowly, “it seems to me that a moose is a troublesome brute to tackle, however you take him. It’s plaguy hard for a hunter to get the better of him, and if it’s only knowledge you’re after, he’ll dodge you like a will-o’-the-wisp till you get pretty mixed in your notions about his habits. ”