Mary nodded.
"It makes me feel," she said. "I can't quite express it. I might if I had wings."
"I have a feeling too," Rod confessed. "But it's mostly one of emptiness in my tummy. Let's get ashore and make a pot of tea. The Hiding Place is just around the corner. Give way, men! I'll show you a sight."
They turned a jutting point and met a slow outsetting current. Against this Rod made his way straight for a cliff which, as they drew near, opened like a great window chiselled in solid granite. Through this the stream flowed, sluggish, deep, a pale-green translucence between high, damp walls. Somewhere within rose the monotone of a waterfall. The square framed broad-leaved maple tops. Higher up the pointed crests of cedar and the tufted plumes of fir stood sharp against the sky.
They rowed into the cleft, worked upstream between high, flood-scoured walls. In that chasm the sun touched only for an hour at noon. It was dark and cool. Mosses and maidenhair fern lightened black crevices with streaks and clusters of green. There was a beauty about this gloomy cleft floored with liquid emerald, but it was not a beauty one wished to embrace or linger with too long,—too cavernous, a little grim. Mary drew closer to Rod in that hundred-yard passage. But she clapped her hands when the boat drew clear. They came out into sunlight. They had passed through the canyon as if it were a door which led to a tiny flat cupped in the hills, all clear of dense forest, almost free from thickets, clothed with bracken. The creek wimpled between low, gravelly banks. Between two maples on one side stood a small cabin of split cedar. Fireweed lifted blazing heads in a mass on one bank. A small grassy plot surrounded the cabin and the two trees. Rod sidled the boat in to the bank.
"Isn't this some little retreat?" he asked. "I came in here once long ago when we were cruising up the Inlet. Only had half an hour or so to spare. The crowd was in a hurry. I've always wanted to come back and camp awhile. This creek comes out of a lake in the woods about two miles inland. They say it's a gem. A trapper built the cabin. He's supposed to have made a blazed line to the lake."
"Lovely, lovely," his wife murmured. "And this country of ours has so many of these beauty spots. Sometimes I think we were so fortunate to be born here, Rod. If one could paint this. If one were a combination of Corot and Turner."
"Maybe one is," Rod commented genially. "How do we know what we can do? We've never had a chance to try. But you'd have to splash this 'on a seven-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair.' There are some things man can't reduce to his own dimensions; can't reproduce in miniature. How could you get the effect of this? Lofty heights. Sweeping distances. Big forests of big trees. It's all too—too superlative. Nature was in the mood for a grand gesture when she fashioned this part of the world, Mary mine."
They made camp under the maples after a look at the moldy cabin interior. The stars came out to speckle a cloudless sky as they sat over their evening fire. Before they turned into blankets spread on a layer of fern and hemlock boughs, a moon sailed up from behind the Coast range. It touched all the hills with a silver glow, filled every hollow with ebony shade. They fell asleep to the lullaby of falling water and wakened with the sun on their faces.
They had no definite object beyond an impulse to be alone, to live awhile in those peaceful solitudes, to fish or loaf or climb as the spirit moved them. But that eagerness of spirit which has sent men alike to the Poles and into equatorial jungles to look on the face of new lands touched them both. They spent a day setting their camp to rights after the fashion of the woodwise. Then they sought and found the trapper's blazed line. It led them by dim marks through dense thickets, across lowlands where cedars stood like brown columns supporting the sky itself, their feet planted in thick mosses and sunless shade, over fir-clad ridges where a west wind made a faint sighing among branches a hundred feet above their heads, and brought them at last out on the shore of the lake.