When they reached camp they turned in and slept late, and it was nearly noon before Ed had the fat spike-horned buck “dressed out” and hung.
They kept a saddle and a fore quarter with them, and the hind quarters and the other fore quarter they took down to the lower pond, where they hung it for safe-keeping close to the shore in a small cavern below some big boulders known as the Ice Cave. Here nature had provided for the hunter an excellent refrigerator, inasmuch as it held several tons of ice all the year round, possibly due to its being entirely screened from the sun’s rays, and the fact that a cold draft of air whirled through it constantly.
These were the good old days when rich clubs and improvement companies had not penetrated the wilderness; macadamed roads, luxurious camps, electric-lighted hotels, French chefs, automobiles, and golf courses did not exist. The big woods still held their mysteries and their hardships; they held natives, too—big-hearted men like Ed Munsey, simple as children and full of dry humor. It was a vast paradise of things beautiful and real, and of constant adventure.
Already Joe looked like a different man; you would have scarcely recognized him as the smiling but rather peaked Joe, who had stepped off the stuffy sleeper. No fellow could have been more constantly in a better humor; the girth of his already broad shoulders seemed to have increased—at least Ed “’lowed” they had—and there was a healthy, solid ruddiness about him that made Ed’s heart glad. Moreover, though it was August, they had the upper pond, so far, to themselves. The four or five other modest open lean-to camps along its shore were still fireless and deserted, and though a small party of hunters in two boats a few days later passed through the ponds en route to the Boreas country, they did not stop.
The weather held fine. Sharp, cold nights, splendid crisp, sunny mornings, the pond boiling in mist, lazy noons and peaceful twilights, when Joe cast for trout up the silent, still water. The little camp was dry and in perfect order. Wasps crawled into the jam-pot whenever they could get a chance, or droned over the warm ashes of their fire, their only other visitors being a few friendly chipmunks and a family of cedar-birds.
Be it said in passing, that if we have been at pains to describe in detail the exact environment in which Mr. Joseph Grimsby found himself these days, carefree as a gypsy and as brown and healthy as a lumberjack, it is because this very spot marked, ten days later, the turning-point in his life. To receive a telegram in camp generally means bad news. We instantly think of an imperative order to return at once to civilization, or worse, the serious illness of those nearest to us—even death. The telegram addressed to Joe was brought into Keene Valley by the mail stage at noon, and handed to the postmaster in the small country store, who, having got hold of Bill Dubois’s boy, sent him off with it to the upper pond.
It must be said to his credit that Bill Dubois’s boy, whose name was Henry, and who was called Hi for short, made the trip up to camp at his best speed. That he only arrived after twilight was no fault of his. There was his father’s flat-bottomed scow hid in the bushes at the end of the lower pond, and it leaked badly; besides the pond, unlike its mate above, had roughened up under a sudden breeze, and he had to pull with all his long-legged, long-armed, red-eared strength to reach the carry, at the other end of which the boat he had counted on he found had been taken by the party going to the Boreas country. There was a vague and overgrown trail, however, skirting the shore, that he knew Joe and Ed were camped on, and having hallooed for some minutes in vain in the hope of their hearing him, he took to the trail, no easy going in the fast deepening dusk, stumbling over fallen logs. Finally he began to reach the head of the pond, and presently came out upon the small clearing before the lean-to.
Not a human being was in sight, and though he hallooed and shouted again, no one answered him, save a loon about thirty rods from shore, whose shrill, diabolical laugh seemed to mock him. He searched around, found the lantern, lighted it, brightened up the smouldering fire, made himself some tea, discovered a square of raw pork “freshening” in the dew on a stump, cut off a slice with his jack-knife, slipped it between two hardtack biscuits and, having eaten it, washed it down with the rest of the tea. Then he flung himself on the bed of balsam and was soon snoring, the telegram stuck conspicuously in an axe-cut on the lean-to’s ridge-pole.
By this time Joe and Ed, who had fished far up the still water, were making their way back to camp. As their boat came out into the pond and clear of the Gull rock, Ed was the first to catch sight of their brightened fire.
“Wall, I swan!” he exclaimed. “I presume likely we got a visitor, Joe.”