was heard in a hillside thicket, and Queerman cried,—
“Listen to him, boys!”
“No,” said Stranion; “we’ll now give our very best attention while Sam tells us one of his old bear stories.”
“Indeed,” said Sam with an indignant sniff; “I’ll tell you one I never told before, and a true one at that. Now don’t interrupt, for I intend to do it up in a somewhat literary fashion, to save the Old Man trouble in writing it down.”
“Thank you kindly,” said I. I was the official scribe of the party, and familiarly known as the Old Man, or simply O. M., for short.
“BEAR VS. BIRCH-BARK,”
continued Sam, “is the title of my narrative. It was on the upper waters of the Oromocto River that the case of Bear vs. Birch-bark was decided. Thither had Alec Hammond and I betaken ourselves in our canoe to kill some Oromocto trout.
“The Oromocto is for the most part much less rapid than other trout rivers of New Brunswick; in fact, for long distances its current is quite sluggish, a characteristic finely suited to our indolence of mood. Paddling quietly, or poling when the water was swift, we soon left behind us all traces of civilization. Instead of beautiful open meadow shores shaded with here and there a mighty elm or ash, we entered the ruggedest parts of the original wilderness, where the soil was too barren and stony to tempt even a squatter, and where the banks were clothed with dark hemlocks to the water’s edge. Sometimes these sombre woods gave back a space, and a wild confusion of many kinds of trees took their place,—pines, ash, birch, basswood, larch, and beech, mixed with fallen trunks and staring white bowlders. Sometimes, again, in the midst of the most impenetrable forest a delightful little patch of interval, or dry waterside meadow, would open up before us, inviting us to pitch our tent amid its deep, soft grasses. Scattered through the grass were clumps of tall wild lilies, their orange blossoms glowing amid the green; and around the stately heads of the wild-parsnips, which made the air heavy with rich perfume, fluttered and clung the silver-throated bobolinks. What wonder we rested when we came to these wilderness gardens whose possession there was none to dispute with us! We found that as a rule we might count upon an ice-cold brook near by. Wherever such brooks flowed in, there would be a deep pool, or an eddy covered with foam-clusters, or a pebbly, musical rapid, which meant a day of activity for our rods and reels and flies.
“One day, after such a morning with the trout as had left our wrists well tired, we were inclined to give our rods a resting-spell. The afternoon was sultry and drowsy,—it was toward the close of July,—and Alec’s highest ambition was to take a long siesta in the tent-door, where an overhanging beech-tree kept off the sun, and a sweet breeze seemed to have established its headquarters. There was no wind elsewhere that I could perceive, yet round our tent a soft breath of it was wandering all the day.
“For my own part I didn’t feel like loafing or lotus-eating. The fever for specimens was upon me. I have an intermittent passion, as you know, for the various branches of natural history, and am given at times to collecting birds and plants and insects. This afternoon I had visions of gorgeous butterflies, rare feathered fowl, and various other strangely lovely things thronging my brain, so I put into the canoe my gauze net and double-barrelled breech-loader, and set off up stream in a vague search after some novelty.