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It isn't much bigger than that old desk Miss Prue gave you, but it has everything in it, I should think; and there isn't an inch of waste room. I found everything I needed to set the table with, and we had canned things, and biscuit and cheese and coffee, and lots of nice things to eat. You don't know much about fishing with a jack-light, do you? It's good fun.
Neal fancied that he was on the top of Old Squaw Mountain, and that beneath, above, around him, sounded the strangely prolonged weird call, which he had heard at a distance on the previous night while Cyrus was recovering the jack-light. Owing to the ever-changing excitements of camp-life, he had not questioned his comrade again about it. Dol's visions resolved themselves into a mighty coon hunt.
He could only stare, fascinated, an easy mark for the hunter behind the jack-light. From the forest in the rear of the moose came a faint sound. It was only the crackling of a twig, yet it served to break the spell under which the beast stood, for in the wilderness the snap of a twig is one of the most ominous of sounds. The animal wheeled sharply just as the hunter pulled the trigger.
"The second way is night-hunting, going after 'em in a canoe with a jack-light; same thing as jacking for deer. I guess you've tried that, so you'll know what it's like skeery kind o' work." Neal nodded an eloquent assent, and Herb went on: "The third method is a dog's trick. It's following 'em on snowshoes over deep snow. I've tried that once, and I'm blamed if I'll ever try it again.
It marked a new era in Neal's experience of sounds, and left him choking with bewilderment about what sort of forest creature it could be which uttered such a call. He began to get out some bungling description when Cyrus joined him shortly afterwards, but the American had had a lively time of it while recovering his jack-light and righting the canoe on mid-pond.
Its touch held in check the speech which Dol could no longer control. The moose was a big one, "about as big as they grow," as the guide afterwards declared. Under the jack-light he looked a regular behemoth. He must have been over seven feet high at the shoulders, for he was taller than the tallest horse the boys had ever seen. His black mane bristled. His antlers were thrown back.
"How about allowing dogs to roam the woods up here, Tom; isn't it against the law in this State nowadays?" Josh asked. "It certainly is," he was informed. "For a good many years chasing deer with hounds, and using a jack-light at nights to get them, has been strictly forbidden. Time was when packs of hounds used to be met with in plenty. Men would start out and hunt deer that way.
The fascinated deer stares into the blaze of the jack-light while the hunter's canoe creeps through the lily-pads. But the charm that masters them is one of dread, not of love. It is the witchcraft of the serpent's lambent look.
In the calm darkness they walked around the pond down the brook to the falls. With a bright jack-light, made of pitch-pine-knots, everything seemed strange and exciting to the boy who was making his first acquaintance of the wilderness world by night. His brother Enoch speared an eel that weighed four pounds, and a pickerel of the same weight.
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