La Salle slept but lightly whenever there was need of vigil, and the last words had fallen on his awakening ears.
"What's the matter, Peter?" said he.
"We hear many strange noise. I not know, George not know, Regnie not know, none of us know. There it come again. What you call that?"
La Salle listened a moment, went to the door, and then beckoned to his companions to follow. The rain fell heavily, but the wind came warm and gently from the balmy south, and no rude blast shrieked and sighed amid the ice-peaks. The strange sounds were sweeter, louder, and apparently nearer than before. Soft and sad as the strains of the disconsolate Necker, plaintive as the mournings of men without hope, wild as the cries of the midnight forest, and the sighings of wind-tossed branches. La Salle laughed a low, glad laugh.
"You may sleep soundly," said he; "the coots and ducks have come northward, and the spring is here at last. To-morrow will bring us sport to repletion, for the sounds you hear are the love-songs of the sea-birds, whose voices, however harsh, grow sweet when the sun brings back again the season of love and flowers."
When the morn came, unheralded by sunbeams, and shrouded by leaden rain-clouds, a veil of mist covered the vast ice-field, of which no two masses retained their former proximity. A network of narrow channels opened and closed continually among the dripping bergs, from whose sides flashed the frequent cascade, and glimmered the shimmering avalanche of dislodged snow. Amid this ever-shifting panorama, giving it life and beauty, covering pool and channel with merry, restless knots of diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it hath fallen to the lot of few sportsmen to witness and enjoy.
"I kill many birds on hice, in quetan, among sedge out on the bay, but I never see such sight. I never think so many birds in the world before," said Peter, as he loaded his double-barrel.
"I been up Ivuctoke Inlet, on Greenland coast; down Disco saw great many bird, but nothing like this," muttered Regnar.
"It is almost too bad to kill any of these lovely creatures," said George, whose loving nature drank in the full beauty of the scene; "can't we do without them?"
"We have only six birds, and some seal fat, meat, and liver. If it closes the ice again we shall soon be short of food. So we'll get out our floating decoys to leeward, and see what we can do to replenish our larder."