“Danger? What is danger?” Florence laughed. “Anyway, it’s part of my job. I really haven’t accomplished much yet. Been drawing my pay all the time. Perhaps this will be a scoop.”
As you shall see, it was a “scoop” in more ways than one.
If Florence was anticipating trouble, Jeanne, on far-away Isle Royale, was in the midst of it at that very moment.
Who can describe Jeanne’s fright as she turned about on the wintry trail to look into the gleaming eyes of a giant moose? She expected nothing less than a wild snorting charge from the monster.
And where should she go? To swing about and dash back over the trail was impossible. The way was too narrow. To go forward meant that she would come at last to the brink of a rocky precipice. At the foot of this precipice, piled up by an early winter storm, were great jagged masses of ice.
“Go back!” she screamed at the top of her voice. “Go back!”
But the moose did not go back. Instead he lowered his great antlers, took three steps forward, then after opening his great mouth and, allowing an apparently endless tongue to roll about, he let forth a most terrific roar.
To say that Jeanne was frightened would be not to express her feelings at all. She was fairly paralyzed with fear.
As if this were not enough, her startled eyes caught some further movement in the brush that grew to the right of the trail. As her trembling fingers directed the light of her torch there, a second smaller pair of eyes gleamed at her, then another and yet another.
“Wolves—bush wolves!” Her heart sank to the depths of despair.