INTO THE UNKNOWN
After the evening meal, the two lads built a big camp-fire of green birch logs, mixed with such dry sticks as they could find, so as to make a ruddy blazing fire, which grew so hot that both men and dog had to back away from it. Ganawa smiled as he watched the lads pile on wood and then back off.
“White men do strange things,” he said laughing. “Here, my sons, you have been working hard at cutting wood, and now you have built a big fire, which is so hot that we all have to back away from it. Why did you not build a small fire and sit close to it?”
The lads looked at each other, but neither of them had a good answer. “I suppose, my father,” Bruce replied after a moment of silence, “white men just like to see a big fire, and most white boys would rather cut [[138]]and gather much wood and watch a big camp-fire than sit close to a small fire.”
The lads had expected that Ganawa would talk about the man who had almost gone over the falls and whose trail had abruptly ended below the rapids, but after his remarks about the camp-fire of the boys, the tall lean hunter lapsed into silence. He sat motionless looking at the fire or gazing into the black darkness which surrounds every camp-fire at night. The lads had learned that it was useless to try to make him talk when he had fallen into this mood. “There will be no talk,” Ray had remarked some days ago, “when Ganawa starts looking at the fire without batting an eye.”
One who is used to the noisy summer evenings of more southern regions where crickets, locusts, katydids, and tree-frogs open their noisy nocturnal concert as soon as the red orb of the sun has sunk below the horizon cannot help being strongly impressed by the solemn mysterious silence of the Great Wild North. [[139]]
As the fire began to burn low, Ray went into the tepee and brought a blanket for each man, for as usual in the north the night was growing cool. After each man had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, they sat again in silence. There was the murmuring and rippling of the river, for like all rivers that drop into the north shore of the Big Lake, the Michipicoten runs almost everywhere with a swift current. These cool, clear northern streams live, and they sing as they run. Crickets and tree-frogs are not found in the North Shore country, but the night-hawks flew screaming over the glowing fire, a lone whippoorwill called near the stream; from a large pine behind the camp came the spooky call and the guttural notes of “kookookehaw,” the big owl; and from the hill across the river came the long-drawn howl of a wolf.
Next morning Ganawa told the lads to make breakfast and roll up the tepee. “We move after we have eaten,” he added. “I [[140]]go down and watch a while for the man who ran away.”
Tawny wanted very much to go along, but Ganawa would not let him. “Ohnemoosh,” he said, “you stay in camp. I go alone with my gun and watch for him.”
Ganawa might have been gone an hour or two hours. To Ray it seemed two hours, and he was just about to go and look for the hunter when the tall red man came striding back into camp.