THE SCARLET IBIS
The boy stopped sharply in the portage, and swung about and glanced inquiringly at Josef. Light as the sound was, quickly as the boy had heard it, Josef had heard first. He stood rooted in the path, a line of lean strength, in vague-colored clothes, his black locks tumbling from under his battered felt hat, a scarlet bandanna in the belt at his slim waist pricking the dim light with an explosion of color. His extraordinary eyes, very light blue, very large, with pupils dilated over the irises, as animals’ eyes dilate, snapped electrically; his glance searched the woods to this side and that.
The boy had been trained under Josef and knew his ways; he stood stock-still as the guide listened, as he sent that concentrated glance ahead into the confused masses of shadow and brightness and foliage and water of the Canadian forest. It flashed, that blue search-light, straight through tangled branches and across bulks of emerald velvet, which were moss-covered bowlders; it went on deep into the inscrutable forest—Josef’s glance. And the boy knew that he was seeing things in those mysterious depths, and reading them as wild creatures see and read the woodland, as the boy himself, trained woodsman though he was, might never hope to do. With that, the tense pose relaxed, the wonderful eyes came back from their exploring and—gentle, friendly, shy—met the boy’s eyes. Josef smiled.
“M’sieur Jack hears the m’sieur talking?” he asked in French.
Used as he was to his guide, the boy was surprised. “What m’sieur? What do you mean, Josef?”
Josef waved a careless hand. “There is a m’sieur and a guide. The landing-net dropped, just now. It was that which one heard. They fish in the little river, around the next turn, at the Rémous des Jurons—Profanity Pool—one will see in a moment. The m’sieur, par exemple, is large—a heavy man.”
This in quick, disjointed sentences, as Josef talked—much the same way as he sprang from one rock to another in a river crossing, feeling his way, assuring himself of a footing before he tried the next. Josef was shy even with his own young m’sieur, whom he had guided for seven years, since M’sieur Jack was a lad in knickerbockers. It was of his nature to talk in a hurrying low voice, in short phrases, meeting one’s glance with the gentleness of the brilliant, great, light eyes, guardedly, ready to spring back into the cave of his reserve as an alarmed wild creature might hide in its den. Yet he loved to show M’sieur Jack this gift of his, this almost second sight in the woods. It gratified him now when the boy spoke.
“How in thunder do you know all that?” he demanded. “I’m not so blamed slow, and yet I can’t hear any one talking.”
Josef held up his hand dramatically, very Frenchly. “Listen—écoutez!”
Jack listened, Josef smiling at him broadly, alert, vivid. The little river ran at their left, brown-pooled, foam-splashed, tumbling over rocks, blurring all sounds. Overhead, in the tall white birches, in the lower spruce-trees, the wind rustled, and brushed with a feathery music the edges of the tinkling water noises. It seemed, as one walked along the portage—the old, old Indian trail—all beautiful peace and stillness; but when one stopped to listen there was a whole orchestra of soft instruments playing, and any one sound was hard to disentangle. Jack threw his whole soul into the effort before he made out, through the talking water and the wind sounds, an intermittent note which he could place as a man’s speech some distance away.