“’Shaw! I’m afeard they’re ‘nowhere’ by this time,” he whispered, when the hunters reached the rising ground, glancing at Dol, who stepped lightly beside him.
The boy’s lips parted to breathe out compressed disappointment; but his answer was lost in a sharp whirr! whirr! and a sudden flutter of wings above his head. His eyes went aloft towards a bough about eight feet from the ground. So did Herb’s, and lit with a new, whimsical hope.
“A spruce partridge!” hissed the guide, his voice thrilling even in its stealthy whisper. “That’s luck—dead sure! The Injuns say, ‘The red eye never tells a lie;’” and the woodsman pointed out the strip of bare red skin above the beady eyes of the bird, which cuddled itself on its branch, and looked down at them unfrighted.
Dol Farrar, who in this region of moose-birds and moose-calls could believe in anything, felt both his spirits and credulity rise together. He managed to keep abreast of the trained hunter, as the latter, with swift, stretching, silent steps climbed the hill. And he heard the hunter’s sudden cluck of triumph as he reached the top, and looked down upon the valley at the other side, the inarticulate sound being followed by one softly rung word,—
“Caribou!”
“Caribou? They look awfully like quiet Alderney cows, except for the big antlers!” The amazed exclamation stirred the English boy’s tongue, but he did not make it audible.
Following Herb’s example, he stretched himself flat upon his stomach under a spruce, and stared over the brow of the hill at a forest pantomime which was being acted in the valley.
Cautiously slipping from tree to tree, Cyrus and Neal, who had lagged a few steps behind, joined the leaders, and lay low, eagerly gazing too.
On its farther side the hill was yet more sparsely covered, the scattered spruces showing gaps between them where the lumberman’s axe had made havoc. Through these openings, which were as shafts of light amid the evergreen’s waving play, the hunters saw the sun silver a brown pool in the valley. A few maples and birches waved their shrivelling splendors of scarlet and buff at irregular distances from the water. And in and out among these trees moved in graceful woodland frolic four or five large animals,—perhaps more,—their doings being plainly seen by the watchers on the hill.
Their coats, like those of the smaller deer, were of a brown which seemed to have caught its dye from the autumnal tints surrounding them. In shape they justified Dol’s criticism; for they certainly were not unlike cows of the Alderney breed, save for the widely branching horns.