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"It is Thanksgiving for me, and I'm going to get a grouse for dinner," she replied; and in less than an hour the snap of her rifle made good her promise. After leaving the upper lake she turned to the right and followed the course of a swift and splendid stream, which came churning through a cheerless, mossy swamp of spruce-trees.
The bending figure of the man breaking trail, his head low, his body moving in its swing with the regularity of a pendulum; the four wolf-like dogs, also bending easily to what was not a great labour, the line of their open jaws and lolling tongues cut out against the snow; another human figure; the low, dark mass of the sledge; and again the bending figure at the rear, all these contrasted in their half-blurred uncertainty of outline and the suggested motion of their attitude with the straight, clear silhouette of the spruce-trees against the sky.
It presented a compact front of spruce-trees closely interlaced at the ground, and of course impassable. But a way opened in the midst, the path of a mountain brook, deserted now and dry. I sought an alpenstock. I abandoned all impedimenta. I started up that stony path escorted on each side by a close rank of spruce.
The plantation of spruce-trees screened him for the moment; then he ran swiftly across the open space and reached the shelter of the pavilion. It was empty, but he had expected that; he had previously set his answering signal at the window of a house overlooking the garden at the back, and he would now have to wait until Esmay should find opportunity to join him.
Over the divide to the north they went, down to the spruce-trees which Smoke had glimpsed the preceding afternoon. They followed the stream for a dozen miles, abandoning it when it trended to the west and heading directly eastward up a narrow tributary. The first night was spent in a camp which had been occupied for several days.
"You have a ladder? Very well, you need not be afraid of the dogs, for when you see the signal I will arrange that they are kept in leash. And now you had better go; they are surely unchained by this time, and any moment may bring them ranging about. Good-bye, and remember your promise." They walked along together until they came to the plantation of spruce-trees.
Smoke was in the lead, and the small scattered spruce-trees were becoming scarcer and smaller, when he saw one, dead and bone-dry, that stood in their path. There was no need for speech. His glance to Shorty was acknowledged by a stentorian "Whoa!"
After breakfast we set out and walked along the east-side of the arm towards the main body of the lake, leaving Samandré to prepare an encampment amongst the pines against our return. We found the main channel deep, its banks high and rocky, and the valleys on its borders interspersed with clusters of spruce-trees. The latter circumstance was a source of much gratification to us.
The horses drank the water, foaming white and amber around their knees, and then with splash and thump they forded it over the slippery rocks. As they cracked out upon the trail a covey of grouse whirred up into the low branches of spruce-trees. They were tame. "That's somethin' like," said Wade. "First birds I've seen this fall. Reckon I can have stew any day."
So the first night of coast travel was to show us the full rigour and inhospitality of the coast and to make us long for the interior again. Wood can almost always be found there within a few miles, if it be not immediately at hand, and no one properly appreciates the hospitality of a clump of spruce-trees until he has spent a night of storm lying out on this barren coast.
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