“I wonder if we’ll run across him?” said Nixon. “He can’t ‘make camp’ among the dunes. Nobody is allowed to camp out here, without special permission. Boy scouts are privileged persons; they know we won’t set fire to the brush.”
“Oh! when he needs a fire—when he knocks a woodchuck on the head and wants to cook it—I suppose he rows over to one of those little islands there; they say he has an old rowboat here.” Leon pointed to two small islets rising from the plains of water a little higher up the river.
“Well, I don’t envy him!” Marcoo shrugged his shoulders. “He must have a bitter time of it in winter, when the river is frozen over down to the bay, an’ you don’t hear a sound here beyond the occasional pop of a sportsman’s gun, or the barking of the seals—and even they’re pretty quiet in midwinter. Hey! Look at that spotted sandpiper. ‘Teeter-tail’ we call him: see his tail bob up and down!” exclaimed Coombsie, who was an enthusiast about birds.
In watching the sandpiper rise from the white beach and dart across the water, in listening to his sweet, whistling “peet-weet!” note, speculations about the habits of the vaurien, the good-for-nothing young vagrant, were forgotten.
He, Dave Baldwin, faded completely from the campers’ thoughts as the narrow skiff grounded its sharp nose for the fourth time on the beach, landing the remainder of their camp dunnage and commissariat; and the work began of selecting a site for the camp amid the milky sand-hills, interspersed with a few trees, slender and short of stature.
Those gray birches and ash-trees formed pleasant spots of shade amid the dazzling whiteness of the dunes. But there was other and more unique vegetable growth to be considered.
“Say! but will you just look at the cranberry patch, growing out of the white beach?” shrieked young Colin after an ecstatic interval, addressing no one scout in particular.
“Cranberries there near the tide!”—”Growing out of the sand!”—”Tooraloo!”—”Nonsense!” came from his brother Owls who were already getting busy, erecting tents.
But cranberries there were, in ripening beauty—as the workers presently saw for themselves—cranberries whose roots underran the dazzling beach, whose crimson creepers trailed delicately over its whiteness, whose berries nestled their rosy cheeks daintily, each upon its snowy pillow.