All the afternoon they laboured on and on, and by degrees two things came to pass. The woods thinned, there were open spaces, the banks grew lower and more open. They were coming to the lake.
The other obvious change was in the wind. It had veered to the north and blew bitterly cold, while fine particles of frozen snow began to strike the travellers faster and faster. As it grew dusk the air was freezing hard, and that wind from the north was getting up.
Then, also in a moment, the white expanse of the lake spread before their eyes--dim and shadowy, lost in the distance.
Nell's heart sank a bit at that moment. It was all so fearfully dreary and exposed. The forest they had passed through seemed a friendly shelter beside this! But it had to be faced. The river passed through it and the journey must be taken up again--away over there in the far-away dimness--where the stream poured out, wider, going east to join the Moose River.
"I suppose," said Nell, looking round with carefully assumed indifference, "we'd better camp here. It's getting dark."
"Not much shelter," David suggested. "Hope it isn't going to work up a blizzard."
His sister was sure it was late in the year for a blizzard. She said that, but in her heart she knew that April was an uncertain month always. She stood looking and looking, while the blowing fur tails hid the troubled expression of her face.
"Come along," she said at last, "round by the north bank, we'll go--there," she pointed some distance along to the left with her fur-mittened hand.
David asked why not straight across--it was level and easier.
"Is it because of the trail?" he asked. "The snow will cover that. Just look how it's coming down."