Chapter XXI - On Katahdin

"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.

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." QXGjPKp0hfXwo2mT8XABlmcMvANeKcO61tRsbgNAYYve8lvquw6GOWwvQMLoI378