"Git out o' there, ye imp!" she cried. "Them birds would pick the nails offen yer boots if they was good ter eat."
"They are ever so pretty," I said. "And oh! look at that poor little chap. He hopped into the frying pan and scalded his toes."
The indignant bird flew away, uttering perfectly disgraceful language, but the others seemed to be quite indifferent to his fate and remained, bent on securing every discarded crumb.
After this a flight of yellow-leg snipe passed by. Dr. Grant began to whistle their soft triple note and the wisp of birds circled in the air, coming nearer and nearer until, becoming suspicious, they winged their journey away. And then we were invaded by a troop of grosbeaks who gathered in the neighboring bushes, their queer, tiny voices, seeming quite out of place, coming out of such stocky, strong little bodies. In the meanwhile a woodpecker was tap-tapping on a dead juniper. It was all so very different from the cruel, ragged coast with its unceasing turmoil of hungry waves breaking upon the cliffs. Here there reigned such a wonderful peace, interrupted only by the song of birds. There were soft outlines in the distance, and everywhere the scent of balsams. Of course it was all very desolate; a vast swamp dominated by sterile ridges of boulder-strewn hills; an immense land of peat-bogs and mosses, grey and green and purplish, upon which only the caribou and the birds appeared able to live. Yet it was no longer a place where the fury of the elements was ever ready to unchain itself against poor people clinging to their bare rocks. The breath of one's nostrils went ever so deep in one's lungs, and one's muscles seemed to gather energy and respond ever so much more efficiently than they ever did in big towns.
"I don't think I ever before realized the beauty of great waste places," I said. "It looks like a world infinite and wonderful, over which we might be traveling in quest of some Holy Grail that should be hidden away beyond those pink and mauve mountains."
The doctor smiled, in his quiet way.
"Yes," he said. "One feels as if one could understand the true purpose of living, which should be the constant effort to attain something ever so glorious that lies beyond, always beyond."
I wonder just what he meant by that, Aunt Jennie?
Soon our little caravan went on, and we began to see many tracks of caribou, chiefly does and fawns. In low swampy places we several times came across old wind-and rain-bleached antlers, shed in the late fall of the previous year.
We had traveled for a couple of hours since luncheon when we stopped for another breathing spell. Sammy was explaining the lie of the country to the doctor, who nodded. Then the latter showed me a tiny valley where ran, amid a tangle of alders and dwarf trees, a large brook that wandered slowly, with many curves, to join the river far away on our right.