Each turn in the river seemed to open on a vista more varied and beautiful than the last. Gray rocks alongshore; banks of brush and frost-nipped fern that straggled up the easy slope to the forest and lost themselves in the deeper green of the shady woodside; moss-crested boulders in midstream, some of them of Olympian dimensions, past which they slipped on the noiseless current that floated wisps of moss and river-grass out from the lower edges of these granite islands. The regular nod of an upright branch suggested some living thing marking time to the march of the shimmering brown waters. Midway in the stream an island appeared, fringed with low cedars and crowned with an almost symmetrical ring of spruce-tops, etched on the far background of blue sky like fairy spires in some enchanted land. Swiftly they drew nearer it. The long grass in the river bottom twisted and turned in the shallowing current.
From below them came the murmur of heavy waters, lunging between the rocks, and above its diapason rang a note of eerie laughter as the river spread again to pebbly shallows and hurried to charge at the rocks still farther downstream.
They rounded the lower end of the island and plunged at the next stretch of quick water. In they went and struck a submerged boulder quartering.
“To the left!” called Swickey, as David, catching her gesture, threw his shoulders into the stroke and swung the canoe toward the shore.
Swickey’s paddle shot forward as the bow sagged in a cross-current that split and spread from the knife-edge of a sunken rock. They whipped past it, ground over the shingle in a shallow, and darted through a stretch of chattering waves that slipped along the gunwale and fell behind. The canoe lurched over the rounded pitch of a submerged ledge and settled to a steady keel in the lower Squawpan deadwater.
“That’s better than the trail,” said David.
Swickey glanced back at the snoring rips and brushed a spatter of water from her face.
“We’ll drift and wait for Pop,” she replied, shaking the water from her paddle and laying it in the bow. “Dave, look! Get your rifle—it’s a young bull!”
Smoke raised his head and twitched his homely nose. “Down, Smoke!” whispered Swickey.
Two or three hundred yards ahead of them was something that looked to David like a tangle of branches on a drifting log. Had it been following the current, Swickey would probably have paid no attention to it, but it was forging steadily across the stream.