It had always been there, unexplored and forbidding, inhabited by the mud hen, the wild duck, and the blue crane. Mauney sometimes hated its desolate presence and wondered why his father’s farm had to be so near it. But the question challenged custom and actuality—things his young brain had not learned to affront.
Late in the afternoon he was roused from work by a sound as of tensed, satin fans cutting the air. He looked up to behold the broad wings of a blue crane, passing low. The rising wind which had roused it from its feeding grounds brought the dank odor of decayed poplar wood and the wild aroma of rice-grass. His eye dropped to the green waste of the marsh, brushed into fitful waves of tidal grey, and then shifted to the moving limbs of bare hemlocks and birches at the border of the swamp.
Chilled by the sharp blast, he straightened himself to his feet, his shirt moulded to the underlying sculptory of his vigorous young chest. His wind-tossed, auburn hair peeled back from his fine forehead, as his wide, blue eyes received the rugged beauty and his lips smiled from sheer visual delight. Then, as he gazed, a bright magic, bursting from the west behind him, transformed his wilderness momentarily to a static tableau of metallic gold.
It was supper time. Moments since the kitchen bell had been ringing, rocking under its cupola on the kitchen roof. His father, his brother and the hired man, fertilizing the grain field beyond the shoulder of the hill, would have heard it and be promptly on their way. After drawing on his faded coat, he picked up a pair of pliers from the ground and shoved them into the hip pocket of his overalls. He shouldered his axe and saw, then started.
The long marsh was separated from his father’s farm by the Beulah road, a narrow clay highway curving past the head of the swamp toward the village of Beulah. In the opposite direction, it ran on eventually to the town of Lockwood on the bank of the St. Lawrence. The Bard farmhouse, a prosperous red brick structure, faced the road and the swamp, presenting a stone fence of dry masonry, and within the fence an apple-orchard. At one side a lane, guarded by a board gate, led in from the road.
As Mauney swung up the lane toward the farmyard the crisp snap of a whip was borne to his ears from below the shoulder of the grain-field, followed by a man’s call to his horses:
“Git ap!... yah lazy devils!... git ap!”
A second crack of the whip—then the rumble of heavy wheels and the rattle of the board-bottom of the wagon. The usual, boring sights and sounds!
The yard echoed to the barking of a collie who was springing in savage enjoyment at the heels of tardy cows. The lazy animals jogged in awkward trot, as their full udders swung to the rhythm of their gait. As Mauney crossed the yard, wading with gluey steps through the soft under-foot, the dog darted toward him, splashing through brown-stained pools of stagnant water.