[CHAPTER XII]
In September a sinister and foreboding gloom seemed to creep out of the wilderness surrounding Five Fingers.
The golden autumn, with its soft Indian summer and its radiance of color, died almost before it was born. The birch leaves did not turn yellow and gold but stopped at a rusty brown; the poplar leaves curled up and began to fall from their stems before the first frost; mountain ash berries were pink instead of red, and heavy fogs settled like wet blankets between the ridges, while in the swamps the rabbits were dying in hundreds and thousands of the mysterious "seven years' sickness."
The men at Five Fingers, and especially Pierre Gourdon and Dominique Beauvais, who read the wilderness as if it were a book, regarded these matters with anxious eyes. It was Pierre who called attention to the going of the bluebirds a month before their time, and noted first that the red squirrels were gathering great stores of cones, and that the robins were restless and uneasy and were assembling in the flocks which presaged sudden flight.
Then, one sunset, a great flock of wild geese went honking south. They were high and flying very fast.
Pierre Gourdon pointed up. "When the wild geese race like that in September—it means a bad winter. Only twice have I seen it. The last time was two years before we came to Five Fingers—a year of starvation and plague; and the other time——" He shuddered, and shrugged his shoulders, for that other time was in boyhood, when his mother and father had died back in the forests, and he had dragged himself starving and nearly dead to Ste. Anne de Beaupré.
Colder nights came, filled with moaning winds, and the days were darkened by ash-gray skies through which the sun seldom shone warmly, and more and more frequently came the honk of geese racing south. Peter could hear them at night, in darkness and when the stars were shining, coming from the north, crying down their solemn notes of passage from the high trails of the air.
And these same nights he heard the wolves howl back in the hollows and ridges and deeper hunting grounds of the forests, and Pierre Gourdon listened uneasily to the cold, hard note in their voices, and said to Dominique:
"The wolves will run lean this winter, and when hunger trails the wolves, famine is not far behind."