“How on earth do ye do it, Mirandy?” whispered Dave, rather awestruck.
“They know me,” replied the girl; which seemed to her, but not to Dave, an all-sufficient answer.
There was no more said. The magic of the dark held them both breathless. They were strung to a strange, electric pitch of sympathy and expectation. Dave’s fingers, where they rested on the girl’s arm, tingled curiously, deliciously. Once, close beside them, there was a sharp rattle of claws going up the bark of a fir tree, and then two little points of light, close together, gleamed down upon them from overhead. Both Miranda and Dave knew it was a raccoon, and said nothing. Farther on they came suddenly upon a spectrally luminous figure just in their path. It was nearly the height of a man. The ghostly light waxed and waned before their eyes. A timorous imagination might have been pardoned for calling it a spirit sent to warn them back from their venture. But they knew it was only a rotting birch stump turned phosphorescent. As they passed, Dave broke off a piece and crumbled it, and for some minutes the bluish light clung to his fingers, like a perfume.
At last they heard an owl hoot solemnly in the distance. “Tw’oh-hoo-hoo-hoo-ooo,” it went, a cold and melancholy sound.
“We’re near the lake,” whispered Miranda. “I know Wah-hoo; he lives in an old tree close to the water. We’re almost there.” Then glimpses of light came, broken and thin, from the far-off moon-silvered surface. Then a breath of chill, though there was no wind. And then they came out upon the open shore.
Miranda, with a decisive gesture, removed her arm from Dave’s grasp, and side by side the two followed the long sweep of sandy beach curving off to the right.
“See that point yonder,” said Miranda, “with the lop-sided tree standing alone on it? I’ve got my line and hooks hidden in that tree.”
“How do ye set a night line without a boat?” queried Dave.
“Got one, of course!” answered the girl. “Your father made me a dugout, last summer a year ago, and I keep it drawn up behind the point.”
The moon was high now, sailing in icy splendour of solitude over the immensity of the ancient wood. The lake was a windless mirror. The beach was very smooth and white, etched along its landward edges with the shadows of the trees. At one spot a cluster of three willows grew very near the water’s brink, spreading a transparent and mysterious shadow. Just as Dave and Miranda came to this little oasis in the shining sand, across the water came the long, sonorous call of a bull moose. It was a deep note, melodious and far carrying, and seemed in some way the very spoken thought of the vastness.