“Never mind,” said Curtis, soothingly. “There’s no loss without some gain, and now we will turn our attention to bigger things than speckled trout. To-night we will try this.”
As he spoke, he took from a chest something that looked like a dark-lantern with a leather helmet fastened to the bottom of it. And that was just what it was. When Curtis put the helmet on his head, the lantern stood straight up on top of it.
“This is a jack,” said he, “and it is used in fire-hunting. As soon as it grows dark some of us will get into a canoe and paddle quietly around the pond just outside of the lilies and grass. The fellow who is to do the shooting will wear this jack on his head. It will be lighted, but the slide will be turned in front of it, making it dark. When he hears a splashing in the water close in front of him he will turn on the light by throwing back the slide, and if he makes no noise about it and is quick with his gun, he will get a deer, and we shall have venison to take the place of the trout.”
This was something entirely new to the Southerners, who carefully examined the jack and listened with much interest while Curtis and his friends told stories of their experience and exploits in fire-hunting. Deer were so abundant about Rochdale that those who hunted them were not obliged to resort to devices of this kind, and in Maryland, where Hopkins lived, they were followed with hounds and shot on the runways. Egan had never hunted deer. He devoted all his spare time to canvas-backs and red-heads. They spent the forenoon in talking of their adventures, and after dinner Bert and Hutton, who had become inseparable companions, strolled off with their double-barrels in search of grouse, and Curtis and Don pushed off in one of the canoes to make a voyage of discovery to the upper pond; the former, for the first time, taking his rifle with him. He was afterward glad that he had done so, for he made a shot before he came back that gave him something to talk about and feel good over all the rest of the year.
Don and his companion paddled leisurely along until they reached the upper end of the pond, and then the canoe was turned into the weeds, through which it was forced into a wide and deep brook communicating with another pond that lay a few miles deeper in the forest. Curtis said there was fine trapping along the banks of the brook, adding that if Don and Bert would stay and take a Thanksgiving dinner with him, as he wanted them to do, they would put out a “saple line.”
“What’s that?” asked Don.
“Nothing but a lot of traps,” replied Curtis. “When a man starts out to see what he has caught, he says he is going to make the rounds of his saple line. There are lots of mink, marten and muskrats about here, and now and then one can catch a beaver or an otter; but he’s not always sure of getting him if he does catch him, for it’s an even chance if some prowling luciver doesn’t happen along and eat him up.”
“What’s a luciver?” inquired Don.
“It’s the meanest animal we have about here, and is as cordially hated by our local trappers as the wolverine is by the trappers in the west. It’s a lynx. A full-grown one would scare you if you should happen to come suddenly upon him in the woods; and after you had killed him and taken his hide off you would feel ashamed of yourself, for you would find him to be about half as large as you thought he was. They don’t average over thirty or forty pounds—one weighing fifty would be a whopper—but they’re ugly, and would just as soon pitch into a fellow as not. I have heard some remarkable stories——”