He was so very still that a couple of wood-mice went running over his moccasins, and a little black-and-white woodpecker ran up and down the trunk, searching for insects almost within reach of his hand. But these things belonged to the ordinary happenings of the forest. There was neither sight nor sound which gave him any reason to think that the thing which had watched under the hemlock was still lurking in the neighbourhood.
After a while he felt he could not stay any longer in the gloom. As he stepped out into the warm current of air, he had a sense of intense relief. Yet he did not wish to continue his watch from the camp, because of its nearness to the hemlock, lest there should steal back into its blind gloom the eyes that made it see.
So he climbed through the scrub up the mountain-side till he came out upon a grassy slope, two hundred feet above the camp.
He was above the tops of the sombre spruce woods now. The slanting sunbeams touched their summits into bronze and ruddy gold. Yet always, beneath the gold,—as Dusty Star well knew—lay the heavy green silence that never stirred even at noon, where the furtive feet padded softly over the brown fir-needles, and the furtive eyes glimmered in the gloom.
In the valley beneath nothing moved. From a thousand miles of forest and mountain the silence seemed to be oozing into it, filling it to the brim. And at his back, rose Carboona. From all its gorges, precipices and barrens there came not a single sound. The vast world of the afternoon seemed heavily asleep. Worn out with all his watching, Dusty Star also slept.
When he awoke, the last ray of sunlight had left the eastern peaks. At his feet the camp lay in deep shadow.
Ah, why did not the Spirit of the Wild Places come to him now, and tell him not to go down? At various times already during the life the Spirit had warned him, he didn't know how. There had been no distinct shape, nor any sound. But the same mysterious warning, that tells moose and caribou when danger threatens, had come to him also, and he had turned aside, or taken another trail. And so, whatever the unknown peril was, it had been escaped. Yet now, even though he needed it as never before, the warning did not come. But perhaps the Spirit had gone upon a long trail, and had not yet returned? Or perhaps it had considered the experience of the hemlock sufficient. Whatever was the reason, nothing warned him now as he went into the shadow of the trees.
Dusty Star's mind was filled with one thought—the wild hope that Kiopo might have returned: but when he reached the camp the place was empty, and everything desolate as before.
He gave a long look up and down the valley into the fast-falling night, and his heart sank. The forest was very dark now. The hemlock was inky black. He went to bed with a heavy heart.
He slept uneasily, waking from time to time; but it was only to hear the solemn cry of a horned owl sitting on some dead limb, or rampike; or the long, wailing laughter of a loon from the water-meadows to the south.