“How many traps have you?” inquired Harry, in a low tone.
“Three,” replied the accountant.
“Do you know I have a very strange feeling about my heels—or rather a want of feeling,” said Hamilton, smiling dubiously.
“A want of feeling! what do you mean?” cried the accountant, stopping suddenly and confronting his young friend.
“Oh, I daresay it’s nothing,” he exclaimed, looking as if ashamed of having spoken of it; “only I feel exactly as if both my heels were cut off, and I were walking on tiptoe!”
“Say you so? then right about wheel. Your heels are frozen, man, and you’ll lose them if you don’t look sharp.”
“Frozen!” cried Hamilton, with a look of incredulity.
“Ay, frozen; and it’s lucky you told me. I’ve a place up in the woods here, which I call my winter camp, where we can get you put to rights. But step out; the longer we are about it the worse for you.”
Harry Somerville was at first disposed to think that the accountant jested, but seeing that he turned his back towards his traps, and made for the nearest point of the thick woods with a stride that betokened thorough sincerity, he became anxious too, and followed as fast as possible.
The place to which the accountant led his young friends was a group of fir trees which grew on a little knoll, that rose a few feet above the surrounding level country. At the foot of this hillock a small rivulet or burn ran in summer, but the only evidence of its presence now was the absence of willow bushes all along its covered narrow bed. A level tract was thus formed by nature, free from all underwood, and running inland about the distance of a mile, where it was lost in the swamp whence the stream issued. The wooded knoll or hillock lay at the mouth of this brook, and being the only elevated spot in the neighbourhood, besides having the largest trees growing on it, had been selected by the accountant as a convenient place for “camping out” on, when he visited his traps in winter, and happened to be either too late or disinclined to return home. Moreover, the spreading fir branches afforded an excellent shelter alike from wind and snow in the centre of the clump, while from the margin was obtained a partial view of the river and the sea beyond. Indeed, from this look-out there was a very fine prospect on clear winter nights of the white landscape, enlivened occasionally by groups of arctic foxes, which might be seen scampering about in sport, and gambolling among the hummocks of ice like young kittens.