HAG-RIDDEN
So passed that unreal summer of '76; and so came autumn upon us with its crimsons, purples, and russet-gold; its cherry-red suns a-swimming in the flat marsh fogs; its spectral mists veiling Vlaie Water and curtaining the Sacandaga from shore to shore.
Rumours of wars came to us, but no war; gossip of armies and of battles, but no battles.
Armies of wild-fowl, however, came to us on the great Vlaie; duck and geese and companies of snowy swans; and at night I could hear their fairy trumpets in the sky heralding the white onset from the North.
And pigeons came to the beech-woods, millions and millions, so that their flight was a windy roaring in the sky and darkened the sun.
Birches and elms and chestnuts and soft maples turned yellow; and so turned the ghostly tamaracks ere their needles fell. Hard maples and oaks grew crimson and scarlet and the blueberry bushes and sumachs glowed like piles of fire.
But the world of pines darkened to a deeper emerald; spruce and hemlock took on a more sober hue; and the flowing splendour of the evergreens now robed plain and mountain in sombre magnificence, dully brocaded here and there by an embroidery of silver balsam.
When I was strong enough to trail a rifle and walk my post on the veranda roof, my Saguenay Indian took to the Drowned Lands, scouting the meshed water-leads like a crested diving-duck; and his canoe nosed into every creek from Mayfield to Fish House.
Nick foraged, netting pigeons on the Stacking Ridge, shooting partridge, turkey, and squirrel as our need prompted, or dropping a fat doe at evening on the clearing's edge beyond Howell's house.
Of fish we had our fill,—chain-pike and silver-pike from Vlaie Water; trout out of Hans Creek and Frenchman's Creek.