“Then I’ll not tell him—for I was never more interested in life than I am now,” said Tom, gravely.
Soon all the grass was cut, cured and housed, except that in the “new clearin’.” This piece of land was actually four, five and six years old as a clearing. Though not more than four acres in extent it represented three seasons’ brushing and burning. Old Gaspard Javet had cleared every rod of it single-handed. Each spring, as soon as the ground was dry, he had set to work, cutting out the brush and smaller growth at the roots but leaving waist-high stumps in the felling of the larger timber. Then, having trimmed and twitched out the stuff for fence-rails and firewood, he had piled the brush and branches and set fire to them, piled them again and burned them again, then scattered his oats and grass-seed and harrowed them into the ashes among the scorched stumps. Thus he had taken a crop of grain, or a crop of fodder if the frosts fell early, from each patch of new land in the first year, and harvests of hay in the following years. Now the whole clearing stood thick with long spears of timothy grass that topped the gray and black stumps.
The new clearing lay north of the older fields and was separated from them by a belt of woods several hundred yards wide.
Tom cut into the ripe timothy early one morning, while Gaspard Javet and Mick Otter were still engaged in an argument concerning the relative merits of several methods of trapping mink. He cut along the northern edge of the field—a wavering swath, owing to obtrusive stumps. He was about to return to the starting-point when the excited barking of Blackie, the little dog of obscure antecedents, attracted his attention. There was a serious, threatening note in Blackie’s outcry that was new to it—a tone that Tom had never heard when chipmunks, or even porcupines, were the cause of the excitement.
“He has found something interesting,” said Tom, and he immediately balanced the scythe on the top of a stump, vaulted the brush-fence and made for the sound through the thick undergrowth of young spruces. The dog continued to bark; and suddenly Tom realized that he was moving to the right in full cry. So he quickened his own pace and shouted to the dog as he ran. Then he heard the crashing of a heavy body through the thickets, receding swiftly; and Blackie’s angry yelps, also receding, took on a breathless note. He ran at top speed for several hundred yards, avoiding the trunks of trees but setting his feet down blindly, until a sprawled root tripped him and laid him flat on the moss. He sat up as soon as he had recovered his breath.
“It didn’t sound like a deer,” he reflected. “It wasn’t jumping. The pup doesn’t pay any attention to deer. It may have been a bear or a moose—though I can’t quite imagine either of them running away from that pup.”
He got to his feet and spent a few minutes in searching around for tracks in the moss. Though rain had fallen during the night, he failed to discover any marks of hoof or claw. So he returned to the clearing; and there he found Gaspard and Mick.
“What you bin chasin’, hey?” asked the Maliseet.
Tom told them. Mick immediately discarded his scythe and scrambled through the fence. Old Gaspard Javet grinned and stroked his white whiskers.
“There goes that durned Injun, fer a run in the woods,” he said, with an expression of face and voice as if he were speaking of a beloved infant. “He’s the everlastin’est wild-goose chaser I ever see. He’d foller a shadder, Mick would—aye, foller its tracks, an’ overhaul it, too—an’ maybe try to skin it. But he’s more for the chase nor the kill, Mick is—more for the hunt nor the skin. He’s what Cathie’s pa uster call a good sportsman, I reckon—that gad-about old Injun.”