CHAPTER XV
SHOOTING THE RAPIDS
THREE months earlier, if anybody had told Adrian he would ever be guilty of such “squeamishness,” he would have laughed in derision. Now, all unconsciously to himself, the influence of his summer at Peace Island was upon him, and it came to him with the force of a revelation that God had created the wild creatures of His forests for something nobler than to become the prey of man.
“Oh! That grand fellow! His splendidly defiant, yet hopeless, facing of death! I wish we’d never met him!”
“Well, of all fools! I thought you wanted nothing but a chance at him yourself.”
“So I did, before I saw him. What if it had been Madoc?”
“That’s different.”
“The same. Might have been twin brothers. Maybe they were.”
“Couldn’t have been. Paddle, won’t you?”
Adrian did so, but with a poor grace. He would now far rather have turned the canoe about toward camp, yet railed at himself for his sudden cowardice. He shrank from looking on the dead moose as only an hour before he had longed to do so.
They were soon at the spot where the animal had disappeared, and, pushing the boat upon the reedy shore, Pierre plunged forward through the marsh. Adrian did not follow, till a triumphant shout reached him. Then he felt in his pocket and, finding a pencil with a bit of paper, made his own way more slowly to the side of his comrade, who, wildly excited, was examining and measuring his quarry. On a broad-leaved rush he had marked off a hand’s width, and from this unit calculated that: