“Boat.” It’s strange how a single word tells a long story. The whiff of cold air had told him that they had flown north. Now he knew that they had landed on water. But what water? And where?
“There you are.” A hand in the moonlight guided him to a seat in the stern of a small boat.
Red opened his eyes wide at the scene that lay before him, a broad, deep bay fringed by a black ribbon of spruce and balsam. The moonlight, forming a path of gold across the water, fell upon some dark object. As the oars of the boat creaked, the dark object made a splashing sound; it moved.
As if reading the boy’s thoughts, the oarsman ceased his labors to cast the circle of a powerful flashlight in the direction of the moving creature.
With a quick intake of breath Red stared enchanted; for there, not twenty yards away, standing at the end of the small island which he had reached at this moment, was a moose.
Nowhere in all his life had the boy beheld such complete majesty. Erect, silent, powerful, the monarch of the forest stood there defiant and unafraid.
“Where in all the earth could one find a spot such as this?” Red breathed to himself. “A spot so sheltered that even the shyest of the forest’s great ones shows no fear.”
He had expected the oarsman to drag a rifle from the prow and fire point-blank at this moose. Instead, he sat there for a second, his rough face disfigured by a semblance of a smile; then, pocketing his flashlight, he once again took up his oars.
For Red there was little enough time for thought. The boat swung about. Before them lay a point of land, perhaps the end of an island. At its extreme end was a little half-clearing where a score of girdled birches pointed their barren trunks, like dead fingers, toward the sky.
At the edge of this clearing was a small log cabin. From this a pale light gleamed. Toward this cabin the boat directed its course.