“It will be difficult,” Blaise replied doubtfully. “To do it we must cling to the roots and branches. Those trees have little soil to grow in. Our weight may pull them over.”
“We must get down some way,” Hugh insisted. “We shall have to take our chances.”
“The wind and waves will calm. We have but to wait and enter from the water.”
Hugh had not the Indian patience. “The wind is not going down, it is coming up,” he protested. “It may blow for a week. I didn’t come here to wait for calm weather. I’m going down some way.”
He wriggled between the lower branches of a spruce growing on the very verge of the crack and let himself down a vertical wall, feeling with his toes for a support. Carefully he rested his weight on the slanting stem of a stunted cedar growing in a niche. It held him. Clinging with fingers and moccasined feet to every projection of rock and each branch, stem or root that promised to hold him, he worked his way down. He heeded his younger brother’s warning in so far as to test every support before trusting himself to it. But in spite of his care, a bit of projecting rock crumbled under his feet. His weight was thrown upon a root he had laid hold of. The root seemed to be firmly anchored, but it pulled loose, and Hugh went sliding down right into the old boat. The ice, which had filled the wreck when he first saw it, had melted. The bateau was more than half full of water, into which he plumped, splashing it all over him. He was not hurt, however, only wet and shaken up a bit.
Blaise had already begun to follow his elder brother into the cleft, when he heard Hugh crash down. Halfway over the edge, the younger boy paused for a moment. Then Hugh’s shout came up to him. “All right, but be careful,” the elder brother cautioned.
Light and very agile, the younger lad had better luck, landing nimbly on his feet on the cross plank of the old boat. It was the vermilion painted thwart that had held the mast. Eagerly both lads bent over it to make out, in the dim light, the black figures on the red ground.
“It is our father’s sign,” Blaise said quietly, “our father’s sign, just as I have seen it many times. This was his bateau, but whether it was wrecked here or elsewhere we cannot tell.”
“I believe it was wrecked here,” Hugh asserted. “See how the end is splintered. This boat was driven upon these very rocks where it now lies, the prow smashed and rents ripped in the bottom and one side. But it is empty. We must seek some sign to guide us to the furs. We need more light.”
“I will make a torch. Wait but a moment.”