“I goes straight to where the Norwegians were lying bound, and cuts their cords. ‘Now,’ says I to them, ‘you’ve got to dance and sing and do all you can to please these Injuns; and, mind, you’re doing it for dear life!’ Gentlemen, I laugh to myself sometimes even yet when I think of the capers them four poor chaps cut. Old Quimo roared again, and laughed till the tears rolled down his dirty cheeks; then he vowed by the sun (the god of the Yack), that the hatchet should be buried for ever between him and the white man.
“But these Norwegians stopped and settled down among the tribe, and they have taught them caribou sleighing and hunting the walrus with iron-shod spears, instead of the old caribou-horn toasting-forks they used to use. But come, gentlemen, old Seth would keep you talking here all day. Let us get up and be doing, for I reckon you came ashore for a bit of a shoot.”
“That we did!” said McBain, “and if you’ll be our guide, you shall have as much tobacco as will last you for a year.”
The tears seemed to stand in Seth’s eyes with delight at the prospect. “I guess,” he said, “this old trapper knows where the best caribou are to be had, and so does Plunket too.”
With Seth, to make up his mind was to act, and in five minutes he had rehabilitated himself in his skins, slung on his shot-belt, and shouldered his rifle. Rory was now bemoaning his fate in not having brought his rifle instead of a fowling-piece, but Seth soon got him over that difficulty. He strode into the wigwam, and presently reappeared with a very presentable weapon indeed, and soon after, in true Indian file, they were threading their way through the forest, the mastiff first and Oscar second, seeming determined to follow the lead and do whatever the other dog did. The road—or rather, I should say, their way, for path there was none—led upwards and inland, and after a walk of fully an hour they came out into a broad open plain. This they crossed, and then wound round some hills—high enough to have been called mountains in England—when suddenly, on rounding a spur of one of these, a scene was opened out before them that my pen is powerless to describe. They stood at the mouth of a beautiful glen, or ravine, the whole bottom of which was a sheet of water that reflected the sky’s blue and the cloudlets that floated like foam flakes above, while the lofty and rugged cliffs that surrounded the lake were green-fringed with trees, the silvery birch and the white-flowered mountain ash showing charmingly out against the more sombre hues of pine and firs; and above all were the everlasting hills, their jagged peaks white-tipped with snow, on which the sun shone with silver radiance. Patches of colour here and there relieved the green of the trees, for yonder was a bold bluff, covered with scarlet lichens, and closer to the water were patches of crimson and white foxglove. Cascades, too, formed by the melting snows, could be descried here and there, and the noise they made as they joined the lake fell upon the ear like the hum that arises from a distant city.
They stood entranced, and Rory was thinking he would rather be armed with sketch-book than rifle, when—
“Hist!” cried Seth.
They followed his eye. On a rock right above them stood boldly out against the sky a tall stag; you might have counted every branch in his antlers.
“Don’t fire!” cried Seth.
It was too late. Bang went Rory’s rifle, and the echoes reverberated from rock to rock, fainter and more faint, till they were lost in the distance. Down rolled the stag.