He pointed with his blade to the hazy blue masses across the still water. High the land towered, with points and bays and detached islands. Encouraged by the sight, the two bent to their paddles.
In a few minutes Hugh cried out again. “How strange the island looks, Blaise! I don’t remember any flat-topped place like that. See, it looks as if it had been sliced off with a knife.”
The distant shore had taken on a strange appearance. High towering land it seemed to be, but curiously level and flattened at the top, like no land Hugh had seen around Lake Superior.
“There is something wrong,” the boy went on, puzzled. “We must be off our course. That is not Isle Royale, at least not the part I saw. Where are we, Blaise? Are we going in the wrong direction? Can that be part of the mainland?”
“It is not the mainland over that way,” Blaise made prompt reply. “It must be some part of Minong.” He used the Indian name for the island.
“But I saw nothing the——” Hugh began, then broke off to cry out, “Look, look, the island is changing before our eyes! It towers up there to the right, and over there, where it was high a moment ago, it shrinks and fades away!”
“It is some enchanted land,” the younger boy murmured, gazing in wonder at the dim blue shapes that loomed in one place, shrank in another, changed size and form before his awestruck eyes. “It is a land of spirits.” He ceased his paddling to cross himself.
For a moment Hugh too was inclined to believe that he and his brother were the victims of witchcraft. But, though not free from superstition, he had less of it than the half-breed. Moreover he remembered the looming of the very boat he was now in, when he had first seen it in the mists of dawn, and also the rock that had looked like an island, when he was on his way from Michilimackinac. The captain of the ship had told him of some of the queer visions called mirages he had seen when sailing the lakes. Turning towards Blaise, Hugh attempted to explain the strange sight ahead.
“It is the mirage. I have heard of it. The Captain of the Athabasca told me that the mirage is caused by the light shining through mist or layers of cloud or air that reflect in some way we do not understand, making images of land appear where there is no land or changing the appearance of the real land. Sometimes, he said, images of islands are seen upside down in the sky, above the real water-line. It is all very strange and no one quite understands why it comes or how, but there is no enchantment about it, Blaise.”
The younger boy nodded, his eyes still on the changing, hazy shapes ahead. Without reply, he resumed his paddling. How much he understood of his elder brother’s explanation, Hugh could not tell. At any rate Blaise was too proud to show further fear of something Hugh did not seem to be afraid of.