The trapper looked sulky and puzzled, and grumbled, “I bet it was Bill Hawkins done it”; then relapsed into silence.
Chapter 47. Hoag's Home-coming
When it comes to personal feelin's better let yer friends
do the talkin' and jedgin'. A man can't handle his own
case any more than a delirious doctor kin give hisself the
right physic—Sayings of Si Sylvanne.
The coming of springtime in the woods is one of the gentlest, sweetest advents in the world. Sometimes there are heavy rains which fill all the little rivers with an overflood that quickly eats away the ice and snow, but usually the woodland streams open, slowly and gradually. Very rarely is there a spate, an upheaval, and a cataclysmal sweep that bursts the ice and ends its reign in an hour or two. That is the way of the large rivers, whose ice is free and floating. The snow in the forest melts slowly, and when the ice is attacked, it goes gradually, gently, without uproar. The spring comes in the woods with swelling of buds and a lengthening of drooping catkins, with honking of wild geese, and cawing of crows coming up from the lower countries to divide with their larger cousins, the ravens, the spoils of winter's killing.
The small birds from the South appear with a few short notes of spring, and the pert chicadees that have braved it all winter, now lead the singing with their cheery “I told you so” notes, till robins and blackbirds join in, and with their more ambitious singing make all the lesser roundelays forgot.
Once the winter had taken a backward step—spring found it easy to turn retreat into panic and rout; and the ten days Quonab stayed away were days of revolutionary change. For in them semi-winter gave place to smiling spring, with all the snow-drifts gone, except perhaps in the shadiest hollows of the woods.
It was a bright morning, and a happy one for Rolf, when he heard the Indian's short “Ho,” outside, and a minute later had Skookum dancing and leaping about him. On Hoag the effect was quite different. He was well enough to be up, to hobble about painfully on a stick; to be exceedingly fault-finding, and to eat three hearty meals a day; but the moment the Indian appeared, he withdrew into himself, and became silent and uneasy. Before an hour passed, he again presented the furs, the gun, the canoe, and the traps to Rolf, on condition that he should get him out to his folks.
All three were glad to set out that very day on the outward trip to Lyons Falls.
Down Little Moose River to Little Moose Lake and on to South Branch of Moose, then by the Main Moose, was their way. The streams were flush; there was plenty of water, and this fortunately reduced the number of carries; for Hoag could not walk and would not hobble. They sweat and laboured to carry him over every portage; but they covered the fifty miles in three days, and on the evening of the third, arrived at the little backwoods village of Lyons Falls.