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Herb Heal had decided that his call should be given from the water, his "good calling-place" being an alder-fringed logon at the loneliest extremity of the lake. During the afternoon he took Neal and Dol with him into a grove of poplars and birches which bordered one end of the clearing, leaving Cyrus lounging by the camp-fire.
The land was rolling, and through the clearing ran a vigorous creek, already alder-fringed for the alder follows the chopper swiftly and glittering with countless minnows. In the spring great pickerel came up, too, from the deep waters, miles away, to spawn and, sometimes, to be speared. From either side of the creek the ground ascended somewhat, and on one bank stood a little house.
Sometimes it led us through a smooth country, across natural meadows, alder-fringed, where the bed of the stream was of amber sand and polished gravel, and the water rippled gently over the shallow bars, and there were deep holes underneath the hanging bushes, where the trout hid from the heat of the noon sun.
So the long days go by in a kind of careless summer excursion; and when one sometimes finds their camping ground in his own summer roving through the wilderness, he looks upon it with curious sympathy. Fellow campers are they, pitching their tents by sunny lakes and alder-fringed, trout-haunted brooks, always close to Nature's heart, and loving the wild, free life much as he does himself.
While, as the last roll of departing wheels died out along the avenues, the voices of the woodland began to reassert themselves. Wild-fowl called from the alder-fringed Long Water. Night-hawks churred as they beat on noiseless wings above the beds of bramble and bracken.
Behind, a reedy marsh, covered with red cattle, paves the valley till it closes in; the steep sides of the hill are clothed in oak and ash covert.... Pleasant little glimpses there are, too, of gray stone farmhouses, nestling among sycamore and beech; bright green meadows, alder-fringed; squares of rich fallow-field, parted by lines of golden furze; all cut out with a peculiar blackness and clearness, soft and tender withal, which betokens a climate surcharged with rain.
On either side of the pool were cultivated terraces of stratified sand and pebbles, fifty feet high, whose alder-fringed banks, joined by an elegant cane bridge, were reflected in the placid water; forming a little spot of singular quiet and beauty, that contrasted with the savage grandeur of the surrounding mountains, and the headstrong course of the foaming torrent below, amid whose deafening roar it was impossible to speak and be heard.
It must be a wonderfully fine place in summer two or three thousand acres of playground, full of cranberries and luscious roots. In winter it is too shallow to be of much use, save for a few acres about the beavers' doorways. There are three ways of dam-building in general use among the beavers. The first is for use on sluggish, alder-fringed streams, where they can build up from the bottom.
For the first half-hour we skirt the alder-fringed banks of the tossing, foaming little river Vologne, as it winds amid lawny spaces, on either side the fir-clad ridges rising like ramparts. Here all is gentleness and golden calm, but soon we quit this warm, sunny region, and enter the dark forest road curling upwards to the airy pinnacle to which we are bound.
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