A wealth of memories was in the woodsman’s eyes as he gazed up at the timber nest, the log camp which his own hands had put up, standing on a narrow plateau, and built against a protecting wall of rock that rose in jagged might to a height of thirty or forty feet.
An earth bank or ridge, covered with hardy mosses and mountain creepers, sloped gently up to the sheltered platform. To climb this was, indeed, “as easy as rolling off a log.”
“We used to have a good beaten path here, but I guess it’s all growed over,” said Herb in a thick voice, as if certain cords in his throat were swelling. “Many’s the time I’ve blessed the sight of that old home-camp, boys, after a hard week’s trapping. Hundert’s o’ night’s I’ve slept snug inside them log walls when blasts was a-sweeping and bellowing around, like as if they’d rip the mountain open, and tear its very rocks out.”
While the guide spoke he was leaping up the ridge. A few minutes, and he stood, a towering figure, on the platform above, waving his battered hat in salute to the old camp.
“I guess some traveller has been sheltering here lately!” he cried to Neal Farrar, as the latter overtook him. “There’s a litter around,” pointing to dry sticks and withered bushes strewn upon the camping-ground. “And the door’s standing open. I wonder who found the old shanty?”
Neal remembered, hours afterwards, that at the moment he felt an odd awakening stir in him, a stir which, shooting from head to foot, seemed to warn him that he was nearing a sensation, the biggest sensation of this wilderness trip.
He heard the voices of Cyrus and Dol hallooing behind; but they sounded away back and indistinct, for his ears were bent towards the deserted camp, listening with breathless expectation for something, he didn’t know what.
One minute the vague suspense lasted, while he followed Herb towards the hut. Then heaven and earth and his own heart seemed to stand still.
Through the wide-open door of the shanty came random, crooning snatches of sound. Was the guttural voice which made them human? The English boy scarcely knew. But as the noise swelled, like the moaning of a dry wind among trees, he began, as it were, to disentangle it. Words shaped themselves, Indian words which he had heard before on the guide’s tongue.
“N’loan pes-saus, mok glint ont-aven,
Glint ont-aven, nosh morgun.”