Natalie insisted on camping early; for it had been a gruelling afternoon on Garth. They chose a little promontory running into the water; and once he had started a fire, and put up her tent, she made him lie at length in the grass, where he stretched his limbs in delicious weariness, and watched her settling the camp for the night and cooking the supper. She was proud in the acquisition of a new accomplishment, that of baking bannock before a fire in the open, learned that morning from Mrs. Toma. The sight of her, bustling and cheerful, working for him, had a strange and painful pleasure for him. They two, alone together in the wilderness, cut off from all their kind!—the thought squeezed his heartstrings; she was so much his own there—and so little!
With the sinking of the sun, the awful stillness came stealing to envelope them; and with insistent fingers seemed to press upon the very drums of their ears. The little river flowed as stilly and darkly as the water of Lethe at their feet; and the gaunt pines over the way stood transfixed like souls that had drunk of it. Under the spell of the silence they instinctively lowered their voices; and they broke sticks for the fire with reluctance; so painful was the crash and reverberation up and down. But there is always one sound that accompanies this stillness; hardly breaks it, so smoothly it comes stealing on the suspended evening air—the quavering howl of the coyote. They heard it throb miles off; and it was answered from immeasurable distances side to side. Little by little, attracted by the smell of cooking food, the animals drew closer, and at last stationed themselves in a kind of wide-drawn circle about their camp on both sides of the river, wailing back and forth like souls inconceivably tormented. Natalie shuddered.
"They are cowardly beasts," Garth said reassuringly. "They won't come any closer."
They spoke but little to each other. Night, solitude and that spirit of woe abroad, filled them with a mighty longing for each other's arms. At last she crept away to her tent.
As the darkness deepened; and the clear-eyed Northern constellations looked out, one by one, there were other sounds; a peevish growling and whining at the top of the bank above them; a frantic scurry when Garth heaved a stone. The better to ensure Natalie's peace of mind, he weighted the tent all around with rocks; and heaped wood on the fire.
Natalie stuck her head out of her cosy refuge. "I can't bear to have you sleeping unprotected outside," she said anxiously.
Garth's heart paused breathlessly at the thought of the alternative. He sprang up and thrust the thought aside. "Nonsense! I'll be all right!" he cried. "To please you I'll keep the fire going all night."
Later, he rolled himself in his blankets across the door of her tent, as before; and lay there smoking, gazing at the fire, picturing Natalie asleep within; and assuaging his hungry heart as best he might with the sound of her child-like breathing.
The day broke gloriously; and shortly after sunrise they were on their way again, under a sky as tenderly blue as palest turquoise, over which were flung bright, silken, cloudy scarves. As they ascended, the character of the river changed; the trees disappeared, giving place to wide, flat meadows of blue grass as high as a man's waist; the current slackened, and its course became more circuitous. Along the shores, steep cut-banks alternated with muddy shoals; and a new set of problems faced Garth.
These chiefly took the form of stout willow bushes overhanging the cut-banks—diabolically malicious, sentient beings, they became to Garth. He tried crawling underneath with his tow-line, whereupon the earth gave way, precipitating him in water up to his middle; he tried crashing bodily through, and the line would invariably knot itself around the most inaccessible twig. The Flat-iron, too, seemed to rejoice in his discomfiture; and at every interruption of her progress took the occasion, in spite of Natalie's paddle, to turn about and stick her nose stupidly into the mud of the bank. Every bush in turn offered a different and more complicated obstacle than the last; in three hours they made perhaps twice three hundred yards. Natalie, alarmed by the spectacle of Garth's set lips, and the swollen veins of his temples, besought him for goodness' sake to swear and not mind her.