Ray and Ganawa could not smell it, but Tawny sniffed the air, and looked at Bruce as if he would say, “You are right, I can smell it.” The young man increased his [[261]]pace, and very soon he turned back a second time, his face flushed and his nostrils dilated. “Can’t you smell it?” he asked anxiously. “It is getting stronger. I am sure now that I am not mistaken.”
Ganawa smelled it, too, in fact the pungent odor of burning peat was now quite plain. “My sons,” he explained, “I think it is a peat fire started by lightning.”
But Bruce scarcely heard the old hunter’s explanation. “Let us go on,” he spoke in a low voice. “It may be Jack Dutton’s fire.” And he walked forward so briskly that his companions could hardly keep pace with him.
In a little while he stopped again. “Listen, friends,” he asked with a trembling voice, “do you hear a noise? A man working in the timber? With an ax? Listen! Can’t you hear it?” And Bruce walked ahead without waiting for an answer. The sound ceased, and he remembered that Jack Dutton had lost his ax. “I must be dreaming,” he thought. “I certainly smelled a [[262]]peat fire but I must have heard a caribou break through the brush. Poor Jack is dead and gone!”
No, that was not a caribou. The sound came plainly now. Once, twice, half a dozen times. It was the sound of a man breaking or cutting branches with an ax or sledge or some other tool. Bruce forgot his companions. He rushed forward until he stood within sight of a small clearing. A man was swinging a stone sledge or ax breaking the branches off a number of spruce-trees. And there were small peat fires burning all around him. But the man swinging the stone ax was not Jack Dutton. He was some fearsome wild giant. He was naked, except for a caribou skin tied about his waist. His long dark hair was tied at the back of his neck, and his face was covered with a heavy dark beard; and the color of his skin was almost as dark as that of Ganawa.
He was some fearsome wild giant.—Page 262.
Now the man raised up and drew his arm across his forehead to wipe off the perspiration [[263]]and for the first time Bruce caught the deep blue color of the man’s eyes. And suddenly the whole man changed in the eyes of Bruce. Gone was his tanned skin, his beard, and long hair. Bruce rushed up to him, crying: “Merciful God! Jack Dutton! Is it you? Or is it a wild man?”
When Ganawa and Ray came running to the clearing, Bruce and the wild man were having a wrestling match, with Tawny savagely barking and dancing around them, ready to take sides in what looked to him like a real fight.
And then Jack Dutton had to tell his story. “We hunted around so long,” he related, “after the thieves who stole our best fur and our gold ore that we did not reach this island before the first part of September. We had recovered the fur, but we never caught the thieves and our specimens of gold we did not recover. When we had explored this island and become convinced that the reddish sand wasn’t gold but just ordinary sand, the autumn storms set in and [[264]]we were afraid to risk crossing the open lake in our canoe; and as the island was well stocked with caribou, we decided to do something which no man had ever done: We decided to winter on Caribou Island. It was lots of fun. We lived on the fat of the land. We not only had an abundance of caribou meat, fat and lean, just as we liked it; we also laid in a supply of smoked geese, ducks and swans. We caught the finest whitefish and lake trout. Early in fall we caught them with hook and line and after the lake froze over we speared them through the ice, Indian fashion. We also had a little flour and corn-meal and had a bushel of dried blueberries. We lived like kings and had more fun than a hundred Indians.