If Pierre thought to confound his mate by his woodland slang he was disappointed. Margot had been a good teacher, and Adrian had been eager to learn what he had not already done from the loggers. Pierre had been puzzled by “commissariat” and “expedition,” and felt that he had evened matters nicely.
“Oh! I know. A thoroughfare is a river, and a dead water is a lake. And a carrier is—yourself!”
To show his new skill he caught up the canoe and inverted it over his own head. He, also, had been calculating a bit, and realized that the birch was really the lighter burden. So he generously left the pack to his neighbor and started forward bravely.
“All right, like you say. One little bit, then you change. Then, too, maybe I’m not ready.”
With a whistle and spring Pierre hoisted the pack to his shoulders, wound its straps around his body, and started off through the forest at a sort of dog-trot pace, pausing neither for swamp nor fallen tree, and Adrian realized that if he were to keep his companion in sight he must travel equally fast.
Alas! this was impossible. The birch which had seemed so light and romantic a “carry” became suddenly the heaviest and most difficult. He caught its ends on tree trunks, and righting these blunders he stumbled over the rough way. The thongs that had seemed so smooth cut his forehead and burned into his chest, and putting pride in his pocket he shouted:
“Pierre! Pierre Ricord! Come back or you’ll get no money!”
It would have been a convincing argument had it been heard, but it was not. Pierre had already gone too far in advance. Yet at that moment a sound was borne on the breeze toward Adrian which effectually banished all thought of fatigue or of ill-treatment. A long-drawn, unmistakable cry that once heard no man with the hunter instinct ever forgets. The boy’s heart beat faster.
“A moose! and Pierre has the gun!”
[TO BE CONTINUED]