He stood beside the margin of the creek this morning, his face aglow with the gladness of the spring. He looked across the swollen waters and waved his arms toward the low-lying V-shaped water-fowl that swerved and twisted and called in honking voices. It was Davie’s time of rejoicing. His wild things were coming back to him. Ere long the black duck would sweep above the marshland tinged with shooting green, and, trailed by his mate, find his old nesting-ground. The boy’s soul craved what it knew and understood. He was glad with the gladness of the wild, free thing of wood and marsh. The gray-bird sang to him a little song which he understood full well, and the wind, soft and balmy, sighed him a promise that he knew would be redeemed. It was the first day of his coming back, for he, too, had been away from his own just as the wee bird had been. He turned from the creek and, followed by his pet raccoon, sped upward across the hardwood ridge until he came to a lower one of tall maple trees. Down across the soft, springy moss that breathed him an essence he went. Davie’s joy-season had been born again.
Soon the green shoots would peep above the water and the rush-clumps would rustle lullabys to tiny wide-mouthed fledgelings that gapped and stretched in soft nests in the swinging reeds. The blackbirds would swoop back again soon; and the marsh-birds that nested in the low swales. In his basswood canoe Davie would explore anew the old haunts and watch the tiny wood-duck dive and hide and peer with beedy eyes from behind the tangled weeds. He loved the baby wild things with a love too great to be understandable. Across the blue Eau, Point Aux Pins was taking on a deeper tinge of green. Davie would go there and seek out the nests of the timid grouse. He knew exactly where to find these nests and the joy of watching the little baby grouse hide from him. He loved to play hide-and-seek with them; to watch them scamper and dart and vanish. They did not hide from Davie because they feared him, but because it is the nature of all young things to play at hide-and-seek.
Down across the ridge the sugar-camp fire sent up a spiral of white through the trees. In the early morning Boy McTavish stood before the boiling sap, dipping from a large kettle into a smaller one. Big McTavish, coming in with a barrel of newly gathered sap on a stone-boat, stopped his oxen and laid his hand on Davie’s bare head.
“How’s Pepper?” he asked, smiling as he watched the raccoon roll and sprawl upon the ground.
“Goad,” answered Davie simply in his own language.
McTavish laughed and proceeded to empty the barrel on the stone-boat into the one alongside the kettles. This done he went over and sat down beside Boy on the log.
“Never saw such sugar weather in all my life before,” he declared. “It’s a good thing old Noah understands sugar-makin’. Don’t know what we’d do without him, us havin’ to keep the pot a-boilin’ night and day this way.”
“Did the Colonel leave this mornin’?” asked Boy, his eyes fixed on a bit of blue sky in the open.
“No, but I guess maybe he will this afternoon though,” replied the father. “He says that if he don’t go to-day Dick’ll likely come huntin’ him same’s he did before.”
“Dad,” said Boy, “don’t it all seem so queer? Think of Gloss bein’ the Colonel’s niece, and think what that means to her. She can be educated and all that now. The Colonel says he is goin’ to make her one of the first ladies in the land. Says he’s goin’ to take her back to England with him.”