It was highly wrong, of course, but the omelette was delicious, and Carl did not reprimand her.
It was now the middle of June, and summer seemed to have come on with a rush. All the trees were in full leaf; the buds on the raspberry canes were swelling, and the bloom might be expected in a week. The days had grown almost hot, and mosquitoes began to appear. Bob wrote that his examinations had commenced, and that he would be able to come up within ten days.
Alice and Carl had pretty well finished their preparations for the honey-flow, and now had a good deal of time on their hands. They fished often, following the river up and down, wishing for a canoe. And they explored the woods in every direction to find the extent of the bee pasturage.
“Why, there must be miles of berries,” Carl said. “There’s no end to them, not to speak of lots of basswood. I don’t see how we can fail to get a hundred pounds of honey per colony.”
Alice’s garden was flourishing too. All the vegetables were up, and she tended them herself. This occupation, with the care of the cabin, took up a good deal of her time, and Carl often went on fishing and exploring expeditions alone. It was on one of these solitary rambles that he met with an adventure that he never could forget and never remembered without a shock of horror.
It was a hot, late June day, and he had walked up the river with his fly-rod, fishing at intervals, but for the most part merely loitering. It was too sunny and hot for the trout to rise well, but there was much of interest to be seen in the stealthy, wild life that swarmed around him. He knew well where a pair of wild ducks had their nest in a marshy spot, and he watched them from a distance. Muskrats could be seen anywhere, and he knew now where to look for the shy mink. At a sandy spot on the shore he found the trail of a deer that had come to drink the night before, and a little farther up he came to the foot of a long rapid.
The banks of the river narrowed greatly here, and the current swept down like a mill-race through the cramped channel studded with sharp, black rocks. The chute was over a hundred feet long, and was a place which only a daring canoe-man would have dared to run. A portage would have been difficult, however, for the shore on both sides and for a long way back was choked with dense cedar thickets, a maze of fallen and standing trunks that was nearly impenetrable.
Carl stopped and cast his flies across the tail of the rapid, where he knew big fish were accustomed to lie. The day was unfavorable, however; after half an hour’s fishing he caught only two rather small trout, and he began to debate whether to return or to go through the jungle. It was hardly worth while to go farther, but at the head of the rapid there was an immense burned slash choked with wild raspberry, and he was anxious to see how the buds were coming on.
So he took his rod apart and plunged into the thickets. It was a slow, struggling business and took him more than half an hour to reach the other side, where the rapid began its tumultuous course.
The raspberry slash was fully a quarter of a mile wide and ran off to an indefinite distance from the river. The canes were growing four feet high and were covered with large buds; here and there a flower was almost open. Carl pushed into the prickly thickets for some distance, and was looking at the prospect of bloom with great delight, when he caught a glimpse of a grayish, furry hide vanishing among the bushes a few rods away.