It was nearly eight o’clock before Tom announced that it was time to start. It was a bitter cold morning. “Twenty-eight below,” Jack declared as he looked at the thermometer hanging just outside the office door.
“Jest wait till it gits down to forty an thin ye kin say as how it’s cold round the edges,” and the boys laughed as Tom stood before them fanning himself vigorously with his cap.
“It’s a wonder you don’t take off your mackinaw and go in your shirt sleeves, Tom,” Jack laughed as he stooped to fasten the thongs of his snow-shoes.
The dry snow creaked as they started off. The snow in the woods was about two feet deep and as it was light their snow-shoes sank several inches making what Tom called, “heavy goin’.”
“It was right here thot I saw thot critter the ither night,” he announced as he paused on the edge of the clearing.
“Did you look for tracks?” Bob asked.
“Sure an’ thot would have bin of no use. Yer see there’s a spring about a hundred fate in the woods an the byes go thar fer water so the snow was all tracked up here,” Tom explained as they started on again.
Two or three inches of light snow had fallen during the early part of the night so that no tracks were visible as they pushed their way through the dense forest.
“Thot tract starts right here,” Tom announced a few minutes later as he stepped and pointed to a big spruce, in the trunk of which a deep gash had been cut. “Thot cut marks the northwest boundry. ‘Ain’t it a crame of a patch?’”
The boys readily agreed with him as they gazed in rapt admiration at the mighty spruces which, growing closely together, reached up, straight as an arrow, to a lofty height.