"Shoot quick!" whispered Macgregor, excitedly.
As the repeater in Horace's hands cracked, the buck whirled round in a half-circle, leaped once, and fell.
Fred uttered a wild shout, slipped the tumpline from his head, and ran forward. He was carrying the shotgun and held it ready; but the buck, shot behind the shoulder, was virtually dead, although he was kicking feebly.
The lynx had vanished; there was no sign of the other deer. Only the rush of the water in the river-bed now disturbed the forest stillness.
The dressing of the game was no small task. It was late in the afternoon when the boys had finished it and had brought up the rest of their outfit to the head of the cataract. "Buck Rapids" they named the place. There was enough meat on the deer to last them for the next week at least. The slices they cut and fried that night, although not tender, were palatable and nourishing.
The weather had been warmer that day, and for the first time mosquitoes troubled them. The boys slept badly, and got up the next morning unrefreshed and in no mood to "buck the river" again.
"Why not stop here a couple of days and prospect?" Mac suggested at breakfast.
The proposal struck them all favorably. It was the real beginning of the search for fortune. Fred in particular was fired with instant hope, and immediately after breakfast he set out to explore the country north of the river; he intended to make a wide circle back to the Smoke River and to come homeward down its bank. He carried a compass, the shotgun, and a luncheon of cold flapjacks and fried deer meat. Horace went off to the south; Macgregor remained in camp, to jerk the venison by smoking it over a slow fire.
It was a sunny, warm day. Spring seemed to have come with a bound, and the warmth had brought out the black flies in swarms. All the boys had smeared themselves that morning with "fly dope" that they had bought at the railway station, but even that black, ill-smelling varnish on their hands and faces was only partly effectual. Great clouds of the little pests hovered round them.
Fred struck straight north from the river, and then turned a little to the west. He examined the ground with the utmost care. The land lay in great ridges and valleys, and he soon found that prospecting was almost as rough work as fighting the river. In the valleys the earth was mucky with melting snow water; on the hills it was rocky, with huge boulders, tumbled heaps of shattered stone, slopes of loose gravel; everywhere was a tangle of stunted, scrubby birch and poplar, spruce and jack-pine.