That the hunchback was a great sleeper Johnny was soon enough to know. After their long journey he slept far into the day. Even after he awoke he appeared to be in a dull stupor, produced, Johnny supposed, by eating great quantities of bear meat.
Grateful as he was for the rest, the boy found himself growing restless. Longing to know more about his strange surroundings and especially eager to discover whether or not he was in a region visited at times by white men, he slipped out of the cabin, then went slipping and sliding down the steep hill.
He discovered little enough. In the scrub forest he found no mark of the white man’s axe. Had he chanced to go down the other slope he would have seen plenty, as you well know. For two days, the while preparing his raft, the aged recluse had camped at the far end of that slope.
After a two-hour ramble, Johnny returned to the cabin. In one pocket was a double handful of last year’s blueberries. In one hand he carried two grouse which had fallen before his bow.
“These,” he told himself, “will make a more appetizing meal than greasy bear meat.”
The hunchback sat just as he had left him, doubled up in the corner, asleep or at least dozing.
“He hibernates like a bear,” the boy told himself in disgust.
“I could leave him,” he thought later as he plucked the feathers from his two birds. “Strike right away into the wilderness, be gone so far and so fast that he’d never find me.”
There was a thought for you. But did he want to leave? Crude and repulsive as the creature was, he had beyond doubt saved his life. Then, too, he knew the ways of the country, was used to procuring food in it. With no companion one might easily meet up with starvation on the trail.
“Anyway,” he concluded, “if he keeps this up, at least I will get out and see more of the country. May find a way out. To-morrow I will go toward the river.”