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The first snow is come; it thaws again at once, but winter is not far off, and we are nearing the end of our woodcutting now at Ovrebo another week or so, perhaps, no more. What then? There was work on the railway line up on the, hills, or perhaps more woodcutting at some other place we might come to. Falkenberg was for trying the railway.
You are fortunate, my boy, to be able to see it. There are some winters that never bring an ice-bridge. Then sometimes it thaws in March, so we are lucky to-day." About them tossed and tumbled the angry rapids, wrangling and brawling around their granite shores, but, above their conflicting noises arose a far, clear, musical sound, like a hundred throats and lips that whistled in unison.
It stood on a wide wall between two small bridges. These were approaches to the big covered bridge spanning the main channel of the Madawaska River, and when swelled by the spring thaws and rains, the two flanking channels divided at the foundations of the house, and rustled away through the narrow paths of the small bridges to the rapids.
"Greenland!" said he. "Greenland?" I cried. "Yes; we are only thirty-five leagues from it; and during thaws the white bears, borne by the ice fields from the north, are carried even into Iceland. But never mind that. Here we are at the top of Snæfell and here are two peaks, one north and one south. Hans will tell us the name of that on which we are now standing."
We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed and washed. I looked up.
At length the hunting season closed, when the mild weather with daily thaws arrived. The fur that was now caught was deteriorating to such an extent that it was not wise to continue catching it.
Late in the year his woods trips began, the tours of inspection, of surveying for new roads, the inevitable preparation for the long winter campaigns in the forest. As soon as the spring thaws began, once more the drive demanded his attention.
But though the thaws of spring had converted much snow into floods of water, they had not greatly affected the surface of the ice, which still lay hard and solid in all its wintry strength. A greater Power, however, was present. If the ice had been made of cast-iron six feet in thickness, it must have succumbed sooner or later.
There was hope that the rain would abate by the morrow; threatenings of a worse kind, from sudden thaws after falls of snow, had often passed off, in the experience of the younger ones; and at the very worst, the banks would be sure to break lower down the river when the tide came in with violence, and so the waters would be carried off, without causing more than temporary inconvenience, and losses that would be felt only by the poorer sort, whom charity would relieve.
The metallic exterior of the Goose Man seemed to become flexible, somewhat as when a frozen body thaws out. “You have gone through a great deal,” he continued thoughtfully. “That any one who wishes to create must also experience is clear. Experience is his mother’s milk, his realm of roots; it is where the saps flow together, from which his forms and figures are developed.
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