“And—and—I can’t shoot the thing while it’s looking at me like that!” the boy blurted out.
“You dunderhead! What do you mean?” gasped Cyrus, breaking silence in a gusty whisper of mingled anger and amusement. “You won’t get a chance to shoot it or anything else now. You’ve lost us our meat for to-night.”
“Well, I couldn’t help it,” Neal whispered back. “For pity’s sake, what has been moving this canoe? The quiet was enough to set a fellow mad! And then that buck stared straight at me like a human thing. I could see nothing but two burning eyes with white rings round them.”
“Stuff!” was the American’s answer. “He was gazing at the jack, not at you. He couldn’t see an inch of you with that light just over your head. But it would have been a hard shot anyhow, for his nose was towards you, and ten to one you’d have made a clean miss.”
“Well,” he added, after five minutes of acute listening, “I guess we may give over jacking for to-night. That first cry of yours was enough to set a regiment of deer scampering. I’m only half mad after all at your losing a chance at such a splendid buck. It was something to see him as he stooped to drink in the glare of the jack, a midnight forest picture such as one wants to remember. Long may he flourish! We wouldn’t have started out to rid him of his glorious life if we weren’t half-starved on flapjacks and ends of pork. Let’s get back to camp! I guess you felt a few new sensations to-night, eh, Neal Farrar?”
Chapter II.
A Spill-Out
Indeed, shocks and sensations seemed to ride rampant that night in endless succession; a fact which Neal presently realized, as does every daring young fellow who visits the Maine wilderness for the first time, whatever be his object.
Ere turning the canoe towards home, Cyrus drove it a few feet nearer to shore, again warily listening for any further sound of game. Just then another wild, whooping scream cleft the night air; and, on looking towards the bank, Neal beheld his owlship, who had finished the squirrel, seated on an aged windfall,[[1]] one end of which dipped into the water. The gray bird on the gray old trunk formed a second thrilling midnight picture, but at this moment young Farrar was in no mood for studying effects. He felt rather unstrung by his recent emotions; and, though he was by no means an imaginative youth, he actually took it into his head half seriously that the whooping, hooting thing was taunting him with making a failure of the jacking business. Without pausing to consider whether the owl would furnish meat for the camp or not, he let fly at him suddenly with his rifle.
[1] A forest tree which has been blown down.