“No, child, I’m not sick. But I have felt tired off an’ on the last few days when there was no call to. I do begin to feel that this big solitude of the woods is wearing on me, someway. I’ve stood up under it all these years, Dave, and it’s given me peace and strength when I needed it bad enough, God knows. But someway I reckon it’s too big for me, and will crush me in the long run. I love the clearing, but I don’t just want to end my days here.”
“Mother,” cried Miranda, springing up again, “I never heard you talk so before in my life! Leave the clearing! Leave the woods! I couldn’t live, I just couldn’t, anywheres else at all!”
“There’s other places, Miranda,” murmured Dave. But Kirstie continued the argument.
“It’s a sight different with you, child,” she said thoughtfully. “You’ve grown up here. The woods and the sky have made you. They’re in your blood. You live and breathe them. You were a queer baby—more a fairy or a wild thing than a human youngster—before ever you came to the clearing; and all the wild things seem to think you’re one of themselves; and you see what other folks can’t see—what the folks of the woods themselves can’t see. Oh, yes! it’s a sight different with you, Miranda. Your father used to watch you and say you’d grow up to be a faun woman or wood goddess, or else the fairies would carry you off. This place is all right for you. And I used to think I was that big and strong of spirit that I could stand up to it all the rest of my life. But I begin to think it’s too big for me. I don’t want to die here, Miranda!”
Miranda stared at her, greatly troubled.
“You won’t die till I’m old enough to die too, mother,” she cried, “for I just couldn’t live without you one day. But,” she added passionately, “I know I should die, quick, right off, if I had to go away from the clearing! I know I would!”
She spoke with the fiercer positiveness, because, just as she was speaking, there came over her a doubt of her own words. In a flash she saw herself growing old here in the vast solitude, she and Kirstie together, and no one else anywhere to be seen. The figure so cruelly conspicuous in its absence bore a strange, dim likeness to Young Dave. She did not ask herself if it were possible that she could one day wish to desert the clearing, and the stillnesses, and all the folk of the ancient wood, but somewhere at the back of her heart she felt that it might even be so, and her heart contracted poignantly. She ran and flung both arms about Kroof’s neck, and wiped a stealthy tear on the shaggy coat.
Dave, with a quickening intuition born of his dread lest the trip to the lake should fall through, saw that the conversation was treading dangerous ground. He discreetly changed the subject to johnny-cake.
Chapter XIV
Moonlight and Moose-call
When Miranda was ready to start, the moon was up, low and large, shining broadly into the cabin window. Miranda brought forward a small, tin-covered kettle, containing some little fish for bait.