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They were shut out from the stars, and in the darkness MacVeigh began to whistle cheerfully. He unstrapped his pack and spread out one of his blankets close to the box and wrapped the other about the woman's shoulders. "You sit here while I make a fire," he said. He piled up dry needles over a precious bit of his birchbark and struck a flame.
Uncle Teddy put the birchbark trumpet to his lips and sent forth a strange call, that sounded like an animal. "Why are you doing that?" asked Sahwah. "I'm going to try and make old man moose come to see us," said Uncle Teddy. "It's lots easier than going to see him. You remember the saying about Mahomet and the mountain? Well, now the mountain is coming to see Mahomet.
Like the leaves in fall, truly, they came drifting out of the forest, long slim craft, made with a wondrous cunning of birchbark peeled from the tree in one piece, fitted to frames of ash fragile as cockleshell and strong as steel under the practised hand, and smeared in every crinkle and crease and crevasse with the resinous gum of the pine tree.
He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at the news-man's booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.
The elder braves lay before their lodges, many of them idling in the sunshine, others busied themselves making arrows, fitting handles to stone knives or knotting crab nets. Two slaves, brought home prisoners by a war party, were hollowing out a dugout, which the Powhatans used instead of the birchbark canoes preferred by other tribes.
"He found out once that it wasn't his mate calling him." "Try it again, anyway," begged Sahwah. Uncle Teddy sent the call of the birchbark trumpet echoing far and wide, but though they watched in breathless silence, no moose appeared in answer to the call. "He's 'wise," said the Captain. "You can't blame him. Nobody could fool me twice either."
The lake's a short cut right enough, only I wouldn't say where to in my crazy old birchbark this kind of a blowing-up evening!" That, and a few more things he said as he squinted a weather-wise eye on the lake, came back to me as I fought his old canoe through the water. And fighting it was, mind you, for the spray hid the rocks I knew, and the wind shoved me back on the ones I didn't know.
He turned to Lord Meton, and repeated the words; and just then the birchbark began to settle under them. With one hand gripping the side, Thomas Jefferson Brown leaped over the sea. Lower and lower settled the canoe with almost a scream, Lord Meton cried above the wind: "Good Lord, it won't hold us up!"
Picking up a tin pan, she commenced beating a military tattoo upon it with a thick stick; while Phil, with a trumpet improvised from a roll of birchbark, produced an ear-splitting din which must have carried far through the quiet woods. It was not long before their customers arrived on the scene, and then the business of barter began.
A third time he blew on the birchbark trumpet. Then they heard a cracking and crashing among the branches nearby and suddenly a huge creature came trotting up a small path that led into the woods and emerged into the clearing.
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