“Sais pas!” he said, and then he changed his manner. “If M’sieur Bob wishes, there is another pond where one might have a chance.”
“What distance?” I asked.
“Sais pas,” said Josef. “It might be an hour, it might be more. I believe well that M’sieur will kill a moose if he should go to that pond.”
“All right,” I said. “Come on.”
So we crept off through the beaver meadows edging the lake, where every step comes “galoomph” out of soggy moss. Josef gave me a peach of a walk that morning. The sun went under and he had the compass, so I lost directions and we had a lot of bad going—windfalls and spruce-thickets and marshes—all sorts. We walked forever, it seemed to me, more than an hour, anyway. But finally we came out, around nine o’clock, on a little pond like a million others in Canada, which looked the real thing. There seemed to be quite a big inlet up at the end where we were. Here’s a map to show how the thing lay:
We watched at the cross-marked spot and from there you could shoot all over the pond and up the opening which seemed the inlet.
I could judge at a glance that the place was good for game. Opposite us, two hundred yards across water, lay a bank of mud with lily-pads and grass, and that bank was trampled like a cow-yard. From where I stood I could see huge sunken hoof-prints, lapping, and the mud thrown up on the edges, not caked or dry even—done inside a few hours. The big roots of the water-lilies had been dragged up—they look like long pineapples—and partly eaten and left floating—that’s the stunt of only a caribou or moose. I patted Josef on the shoulder silently, and his big eyes flashed as if he was satisfied. We selected a stump with some thin bushes in front, where I was screened, yet could swing my gun all around the place, and Josef effaced himself back of me, and we sat there and waited.
Not long. We hadn’t been there over five minutes, and I hadn’t stopped jumping at the sound of the water on a big stone below, and the sudden breeze through the trees back of me, and a squirrel who kept breaking twigs sharply and then scolding me about it—when all at once there was a thundering, unmistakable crack across the pond, in the trees close to the shore. My heart gave a pole-vault—I reckon everybody’s does at that sound—and I heard a breath from Josef:
“Original.”