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If Cyrus's dreams were ruffled after the morning's excitement, those of his comrades were a perfect chaos.
A slight wind hummed wordless songs through the tasselled tops of the pine-trees about the camp. The music was tender and drowsy as a mother's lullaby. Contrary to their expectations, Neal and Dol were lulled to sleep by it like babies, with a feeling as if some guardian spirit were gliding among the tree-tops.
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. In fact, that rolling music of the pines was translated into every forest sound which they had heard, or expected to hear.
The excitement of wild scenes, new sensations, strange knowledge, still thrilled them even in sleep. Their visions were accordingly wild, rushing, jumbled, yet all set in a light so bright as to be bewildering—a sign that health and happiness as great as human boys can enjoy were the possession of the dreamers.
By and by their pulses grew steadier. Out of this confused rush of imaginings grew in the mind of each one steady, absorbing dream. Neal fancied that he was on the top of Old Squaw Mountain, and that beneath, above, around him, sounded the strangely prolonged weird call, which he had heard at a distance on the previous night while Cyrus was recovering the jack-light. Owing to the ever-changing excitements of camp-life, he had not questioned his comrade again about it.
Dol's visions resolved themselves into a mighty coon hunt. He tossed on his pine boughs, kicked and jabbered in his sleep, with sundry odd little cries and untranslatable mutterings,—
"Go it, Tiger! Go it, old dog! There he is—up the tree! Ah" (disgustedly), "you're no good!"
A lull. Then the dreamer rolled out a string of what may be called gibberish, seeing that it consisted of fragments of words and was unintelligible, followed by,—
"The coon's eating the pork—no, he's b-b-b-barking it! Hu-loo-oo!"
"Oh, say, Chick, give us a chance! We can't sleep with you chirping into our ears."
It was Cyrus who spoke, shaking with drowsy laughter, and Cyrus's big hand gently shook the dreamer's arm.
"What? what? wh-wh-at?" gasped Dol, awaking. "I wasn't talking out loud, was I?"
"Not talking aloud! Well, I should smile!" answered the camp captain. "You were making as much noise as a loon, and that's the noisiest thing I know. Go to sleep again, young one, and don't have any more crazy spells before dinner-time."
Cyrus removed his hand, shut his eyes, and in a minute or two was breathing heavily. Neal, who had been aroused too, followed his example, laughing and mumbling something about "it's being an old trick of Dol's to hunt in his sleep."
But the junior member of the party remained awake. After his dreams had been dissipated he cared no more for slumber. When he could venture it without disturbing his companions, he rose to a sitting posture, and, after squatting for a while in meditation, got on his feet, picked up his coat and moccasins, and, stealthily as an Indian, crept out of the hut.
The rolling music among the pine-tops had died down; only at long intervals a soft, random rustle swept through them. It was nearly midday. The camp-fire was almost dead, quenched by the dazzling sunlight which fell in patches on the camping-ground, and flooded the clearing beyond the shadow of the pines.
Moreover, the camping-ground was deserted. Neither Uncle Eb nor Tiger could be seen, though Dol's eyes sought for them wistfully. But something caught his attention. It was a ray of light filtering through the pine boughs and glinting on the trigger of an old-fashioned muzzle-loading shot-gun, which leaned against a corner of the hut. An ancient, glistening powder-horn and a coon-skin ammunition pouch hung above it.
Dol lifted the antiquated weapon, withdrew to a short distance, and examined it closely. He knew it belonged to the guide, but was rarely used by him since he had purchased the 44-calibre Winchester rifle, with which he could do uncommon feats in shooting.
The shot-gun interested the boy mightily. There was a facsimile of it, swathed in green baize, stowed away somewhere in his father's house in Manchester. The first time he had ever used fire-arms was on a memorable day when his fingers pulled its trigger in his father's garden under Neal's direction, and a lean starling fell before his shot. After that he had often taken out a fowling-piece of a newer style, and had done pretty well with it too.
As he handled the shot-gun, which the guide had bought away back in the year '55, musing about it under the pines, the thought suddenly tumbled out of a corner of his brain that at present there was a brilliant opportunity for him to use the gun and all the shooting skill he possessed for the benefit of his comrades and himself.
There was no meat in the camp for dinner or supper save the pork on which they had feasted since they arrived there, and that was fast giving out. Cyrus, in addition to his knapsack, had hauled over from Greenville, where articles of camp fare could be procured in abundance, a goodly supply of tea, coffee, condensed milk, flour, salt, sugar, etc., in a stout canvas bag, Neal at intervals helping him with the burden. For the rest he had trusted to Nature's larder, and such food as he might purchase from his guides, desiring to go into the woods as "light" as possible.
Uncle Eb had baked bread for his guests after a fashion of his own on the camp frying-pan, setting the pan on some glowing coals a foot or so from the fire; he had fried unlimited flapjacks, and had cheerfully placed what stores he had at their disposal. His three luxuries were novelties to the English lads, being pork, maple sugar,—drawn from the beautiful maple-trees near his camp,—and a small wooden keg of sticky, dark molasses. The sugar was the only one which Dol found palatable; and he knew that the Bostonian, Cyrus, shared his feeling. To tell the truth, the juvenile Adolphus was not fastidious, but he was suddenly seized with an ambitious desire to vary the diet of the camp.
"Uncle Eb said that I could use this 'ole fuzzee,' as he called it, whenever I liked," he muttered, looking wistfully at the shot-gun; "and I've a big mind to give those lazy fellows in there a surprise. They spent the night out jacking, and didn't get any meat because Cyrus let Neal do the shooting, and he bungled it. It's my turn next to go after deer, but I'm not going to wait for that."
Here his steel-gray eyes fell on the moccasins which he had not yet put on, and struck fire instantly. His ambition was doubled. For if there is one thing more than another which in the forest will stir the pluck of a novice, and make him feel like an old woodsman, it is the sight of his Indian footwear. Dol put his on, admired their light, comfortable feeling, their soft buckskin, and rashly decided that he could dispense with the loose inner soles which Cyrus had fitted into them to protect his feet.
Then, being very much of a stranger to American woods, he communed with himself after this fashion,—
"Cyrus says that different tribes of Indians wear differently made moccasins, and one redskin, if he sees the tracks of another in soft mud or snow, can tell what tribe he belongs to by his footmarks. That's funny! I suppose if any old brave was knocking about and saw my tracks in a boggy spot, he'd think it was a Kickapoo who had passed that way—not Dol Farrar of Manchester, England. These are of the shape worn by the Kickapoo tribe—so Cy says.
"I'm the kid of the camp, I know," he went on, with another flash in his eyes, as if there was a bit of flint somewhere in his make-up which had struck their steel. "But I'll be bound I can do as well or better than the others can. I'm off now to Squaw Pond. I think I can follow the trail easily enough. Uncle Eb showed me yesterday where he had spotted some of the trees all the way along to the water. And if I don't shoot a couple of black ducks for dinner or supper, I'm a duffer, and not fit for camping."
He took down the powder-horn and slung it round him, saw that there was plenty of meat in the ragged coon-skin ammunition pouch which hung beside it, fastened that to his belt, slipped on his coat, and started off, with the "ole fuzzee" on his shoulder.
Never a sound did he make as he crossed the clearing, passing the clump of bushes behind which Cyrus and Neal had lingered on the previous night to hear Uncle Eb's song. Owing to his Indian footwear, silently as the gliding redskin himself he entered the woods at a point where he saw a tree with a fresh notch carved in it. He knew this marked the beginning of the "blazed trail," and that he must be very wide-awake and show considerable "gumption" if he wanted to follow that line to the pond.
Not every tree was spotted. Only at intervals of fifteen or twenty yards he came upon a trunk with two small pieces chopped out of it on opposite sides. These were Uncle Eb's way-marks. One set of notches would catch his eye as he went towards the water, the other would lead him back to camp. Once or twice Dol got away from the trail, but he quickly found it again; and in due time emerged from the forest twilight into the broad glare of the sun, to see Squaw Pond lying before him like a miniature mother-of-pearl sea, so protected by its evergreen woods that scarcely a ripple stirred it.
He heard the shrill, wild call of a loon, the noisy bird to which Cyrus had likened him, and saw its white breast rising above the water, as it swam about among the reeds near the opposite bank. The cry was oft repeated, making an unearthly din, now joyous, now dreary, among the echoes around the lake.
Dol paused for a minute to listen; but he was bent on business, and did not want to be very long away from camp lest his absence should cause alarm. He took a careful survey of the scene. Not beholding any fleet of black ducks as yet, he loaded his gun, and warily proceeded along the bank towards the head of the pond.
Keeping a sharp lookout, he by and by detected something moving among the water grasses a little way ahead, and heard a hoarse, squalling "Quack! quack!"
Immediately afterwards a flock of half a dozen ducks sailed forth from their shelter, nodding and quacking inquisitively.
A wild drumming was at Dol's heart, and a reckless singing in his ears, as he raised his gun to his shoulder, and fired among them. Nevertheless, his aim was sure and deadly. Two quackers were killed with one shot! The others rose from the water, and with much fluttering and hoarse noise winged their way to safety.
"How'll they be for meat, I wonder? Won't I have a crow over those fellows?" shouted Adolphus aloud, with a yell entirely worthy of a Kickapoo Indian, when he had recovered from surprise at the success of his own shot.
He laid down the gun, pulled off his moccasins and socks, rolled up his trousers, and waded in for the prize. Truly luck was with him—so far—in his first venture in this region of the unknown. The water was so shallow that, having grabbed the ducks, he splashed out of it, kicking shiny drops from his toes, without wetting an inch of his garments.
"I'm the kid of the camp, I know; but I'll be the first fellow to bring any decent meat into it. Hooray!" he whooped again. "Shouldn't wonder if these moccasins brought me wonderful luck; one can steal about so quietly in them."
He had hit upon the supreme advantage which the Indian footwear possesses over every other for the woodsman. A little later he was to learn its disadvantage, having, with foreign inexperience, disdained the extra soles because they were not "Indian" enough for his taste; for the soft buckskin could not protect from roots and stones a wearer whose flesh was not hardened to every kind of forest travelling.
But at present Dol bepraised his moccasins; for they had enabled him to sneak upon his birds, the wildest of the duck tribe, who generally, at a single hoarse "Quack!" from their leader, will cease their antics in lake or stream, and disappear like a skimming breeze before a sportsman can get a fair shot at them.
For a quarter of an hour Dol Farrar sat by this forest pond engaged in the cheerful occupation of "booming himself," as his friend Cyrus would have said. He told himself that he had made a pretty smart beginning, not alone in shooting a brace of black ducks, but in successfully following a difficult trail on his fourth day in the woods. Henceforth, he thought, there would be little reason for him to dread the unknown in this great wilderness.
He reclothed his legs, gathered the stiffening claws of the defunct quackers in his left hand, picked up his empty "ole fuzzee," which had done such good service despite its age, and set forth on his return to camp.
Retracing his steps along the bank, after some searching he found the beginning of the trail, and started along it with a know-it-all, cheerful confidence in the little bit of wood-lore which he had acquired. Hence he now found it considerably more difficult to follow the spotted trees. His brain was excited and preoccupied; and when once in fancied security he suffered his eyes and thoughts to stray for a minute from the trail, every unfamiliar woodland sight and sound tempted them to wander farther.
First it was an old fox, which poked its sharp, inquisitive nose out of a patch of undergrowth near at hand. Dol uttered a mad "Whoop-ee!" and heedlessly dashed off a few steps in pursuit. Reynard whisked his brush as much as to say, "You can't get the better of me, stranger!" and defiantly trotted away.
Recovering his senses, the boy managed to recover the trail too, and was keeping to it carefully when a second temptation beset him. A chattering squirrel, seated on the low bough of a maple-tree, with his fore paws against his white breast, his eyes like twinkling beads, and his restless little head playing bo-peep with the intruding boy, began to scold the latter for venturing into his forest playground.
Dol's first thought was full of delighted interest. His second was a sanguinary one; namely, that a pair of ducks would only be one meal for four campers who were "camp-hungry," and that Uncle Eb had spoken of squirrels as "fust-rate eatin'." He handled his gun uncertainly, deliberating whether or not he would load it, and try a shot at the bright-eyed chatterbox.
Before he had decided one way or the other, the squirrel, still scolding and playing bo-peep, scampered off his bough, and up the trunk of the maple. Thence he quickly made good his escape from one tree to another, affording a whisking, momentary view now and again of his white breast or bushy tail. Dol absolutely forgot the blazed trail, forgot the stories which he had heard about forest perils, forgot every earthly thing but his admiration for the pretty, tantalizing fellow; though to do the lad justice, he soon came to the conclusion that the camp must be in a worse strait for want of provisions before he could have the heart to shoot him. He gave chase nevertheless, plunging along in a ziz-zag way over a carpet of moss and dry pine-needles, and through some dense tangles of undergrowth, uttering a welcoming screech whenever he saw the bright eyes of the little trickster peering down at him from a bough.
He had travelled farther than he knew before his interest in the game waned. He began to feel that it was rather beneath the dignity of a fellow who wore moccasins, carried coon-skin pouch and powder-horn, and who was bound for remote solitudes in search of the lordly moose, to be interested in such an insignificant phase of forest life as the doings of a red squirrel.
Then he started back to find the trail. He walked a considerable distance. He searched hither and thither, straining his eyes anxiously through the bewildering gloom of the forest, but never a notched tree could he see. Whereupon Dol Farrar called himself some pretty hard names. He remarked that he had been a "hair-brained fool" and a "greenhorn" ever to leave the spotted track, but that he wasn't going to be "downed;" he would search until he found it.
And he certainly was enough of a greenhorn not to know that every step he now took was carrying him away from the trail, and plunging him into a hopeless, pathless labyrinth of woods. For Dol had lost all knowledge of directions, and was completely "turned round;" which means that he was miserably lost.
The disaster came about in this way. The forest here was very dense, the giant trees interlocked above his head letting so little light filter through their foliage that he could scarcely see twenty yards ahead of him, and that in a puzzling, shadowy gloom resembling an English twilight.
When he ceased chasing the squirrel, he imagined that he retraced his steps directly towards the point where he had quitted the trail. In reality, seeing nothing to aim for in this bewildering maze of endless trees, turned out of his way continually as he dodged in and out around massive trunks, he gradually worked farther and farther off the course by which he had come, drifting in random directions like a rudderless ship on mid-ocean. This helpless state is called, in the phraseology of the northern woods, being "turned round."
But Dol Farrar was spared for the present a thorough realization of the dreadful mishap which had befallen him. He had a shocked, breathless, flurried feeling, as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, and he saw the dangers of the unknown as he had not before seen them. But even in the midst of abusing himself for his rash self-confidence, he uttered a cheerful "Hurrah!"
"Why, good gracious!" he cried. "Here's another trail! Now, where on earth does this lead to? I don't see any spotted trees"—looking carefully about—"but it's a well-beaten track, a regular plain path, where people have been walking. It must lead to our camp. I'll follow it up, anyhow. That will be better than dodging around here until I get 'wheels in my head,' as Uncle Eb says he did once when he lost his way in the woods, and kept wandering round and round in a circle."
Puffing with excitement and revived hope, the boy started off on this new trail, which he blessed at first—oh, how he blessed it!—as if it had been a golden clew to lead him out of his difficulty. To be sure, it was not a blazed trail; there were no notches in the trees, but the ground showed distinct signs of being frequently and recently travelled over. Though footprints were not traceable, moss, earth, and in some places the forest undergrowth of dwarfed bushes, were thoroughly pressed and trodden.
Dol never doubted but that it was a human trail, a track continually used by some woodsman; but he thought that the unknown traveller, whoever he was, must have agile legs and a taste for athletics, for many times he had to hoist himself, his gun, and the ducks over some big windfall which lay right across the way. The dead quackers he pitched before him, fearing that by the time he got back to camp—if ever he did?—their flesh would be too bruised to look like respectable meat; for he was obliged to have one hand free to help him in scrambling over each fallen tree.
Once or twice this strange trail led him through thickets where the bushes grew so high as to lash his face. He came to regard slippery, projecting roots and rough stones, which galled his feet, protected only by the thin soles of his moccasins, as matters of course. His wind decreased, and his blessings ceased. Yet he followed on, walking, walking, interminably walking, with now and again an interval of climbing or stumbling headlong, accompanied by ejaculations of thankfulness that his gun was not loaded.
His breath came in hot, strangling gasps, the veins in his head were swollen and stinging like whipcords, there was a dull, pounding noise in his ears, and a drumming at his heart. He confessed that he was thoroughly "winded" when he had been following the trail for nearly two hours, so he seated himself upon a withered stump beside it to rest.
He had relinquished the idea that the track would bring him out near Uncle Eb's camp. Had it led thither, he would have rejoined his comrades long before this. His only hope now was that by patiently following it on he might reach the camp of some other traveller, or the lonely log cabin of a pioneer farmer. He had heard of such farm-settlements being scattered here and there on forest clearings.
So presently Dol Farrar got to his feet again, when he had recovered breath and strength, and told himself pluckily that "he wasn't going to knock under," that "he had been in bad scrapes before now, and had not shown the white feather." He gritted his teeth, and resolved that he would not show that craven pinion, even in the desperate solitude of these baffling woods where no eye could see his weakness. He did not want to have a secret, humiliating memory by and by that he had been faltering and distracted when his life depended on his wits and endurance.
He squared his shoulders sturdily, as if to make the most of the budding manhood that was in him, and trudged ahead. And, indeed, he had need to take his courage in both hands, and force it to stand by him; for he had not gone far when, though the forest still continued dense, he became aware that he was beginning a steep ascent. Was the trail going to lead him up a mountain-side? The way grew yet more rugged. Every step was a misery. Jagged edges of rock and never-ending roots seemed to brand themselves with burning friction upon his feet, through their soft buckskin covering. He tried to hearten himself into a belief that he must soon reach some mountain camp or settlement.
But a bleak horror threw a gray shade upon his face as his staring eyes saw that the trail was growing fainter—fainter—fainter. At the foot of a steep crag, where a mass of earth, stones, and dead spruce-trees showed that there had lately been a landslide on the mountain above, he lost it altogether. It had led him to a pile of rubbish.