“Hist!” exclaimed the guide, with that peculiar subdued energy that at once indicates an unexpected discovery, and enjoins caution, while at the same moment, by a deep, powerful back-stroke of his paddle, he suddenly checked the rapid motion of the canoe.
Harry and his friend glanced quickly over their shoulders with a look of surprise.
“What’s in the wind now?” whispered the former.
“Stop paddling, masters, and look ahead at the rock yonder, jist under the tall cliff. There’s a bear a-sittin’ there, and if we can only get ashore afore he sees us, we’re sartin sure of him.”
As the guide spoke, he slowly edged the canoe towards the shore, while the young men gazed with eager looks in the direction indicated, where they beheld what appeared to be the decayed stump of an old tree or a mass of brown rock. While they strained their eyes to see it more clearly, the object altered its form and position.
“So it is,” they exclaimed simultaneously, in a tone that was equivalent to the remark, “Now we believe, because we see it.”
In a few seconds the bow of the canoe touched the land, so lightly as to be quite inaudible, and Harry, stepping gently over the side, drew it forward a couple of feet, while his companions disembarked.
“Now, Mister Harry,” said the guide, as he slung a powder-horn and shot-belt over his shoulder, “we’ve no need to circumvent the beast, for he’s circumvented himself.”
“How so?” inquired the other, drawing the shot from his fowling-piece, and substituting in its place a leaden bullet.
Jacques led the way through the somewhat thinly scattered underwood as he replied, “You see, Mister Harry, the place where he’s gone to sun hisself is just at the foot o’ a sheer precipice, which runs round ahead of him and juts out into the water, so that he’s got three ways to choose between. He must clamber up the precipice, which will take him some time, I guess, if he can do it at all; or he must take to the water, which he don’t like, and won’t do if he can help it; or he must run out the way he went in, but as we shall go to meet him by the same road, he’ll have to break our ranks before he gains the woods, an’ that’ll be no easy job.”