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The guides cheer the night with bear-fights, and catamount encounters, and frozen-to-death experiences, and simple tales of great prolixity and no point, and jokes of primitive lucidity. We hear catamounts, and the stealthy tread of things in the leaves, and the hooting of owls, and, when the moon rises, the laughter of the loon. Everything is strange, spectral, fascinating.
"Help! help!" screamed the voice shrilly. "Are you goin' to leave me to die all alone? He-elp!" The minister turned. "Hush!" he called, in answer to the voice, "hush! I'll bring you water in a minute. Burgess," he added, "you and the rest go ashore. I shall stay." "You'll stay? You'll STAY? With THAT? You're crazy as a loon. Don't be a fool, man! Come on!
"Dat ees de man of God w'at you see. He's com' for save soul hon' de Eenjun hon' Lone Moose. Bagosh, we're have som' fon weet heem dees treep." "He's a loon," MacDonald paused with a forefinger in the bowl of his pipe. "He doesna know a moccasin from a snowshoe, scarce. I'd like tae be aboot when 'tis forty below an' gettin' colder.
And now, with each day that passed, the sun rose higher in the sky; it grew warmer; the snow softened underfoot, and in the air was the tremulous and growing throb of spring. With these things came the old yearning to Baree; the heart-thrilling call of the lonely graves back on the Gray Loon, of the burned cabin, the abandoned tepee beyond the pool and of Nepeese.
How, at last, one morning, the 20th day of November, his boat came in to Newhaven Pier without him, and when he was inquired for, his crew said, "He had stayed at home, like a lazy loon, and not sailed with them the night before." How she was anxious, and had all the public houses searched. "For he took a drop now and then, nae wonder, and him aye in the weather."
A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from the lagoon, arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended legs, in obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder lady felt the justice of her gentle daughter's criticism, and retaliated with simple directness:
At last he came almost to the shore of the Loon, and there he saw the campfire of Makoki and the white man. He did not rush in. He did not bark or yelp; the hard schooling of the wilderness had already set its mark upon him. He slunk in cautiously then stopped, flat on his belly, just outside the rim of firelight. Then he saw that neither of the men was Challoner.
"I had to come off in a friend of mine's coat because my own was practically destroyed; but I'll be back again before Ben has clumb very high on that ladder of his career." The adventurer was interned at my house for ten days, till his bruises lost their purple glow and he looked a little less like a bad case of erysipelas. Then he started out again, crazy as a loon!
Almost all day, except when he was stirring the soup, which he made in a great kettle set into a brick oven, he was sitting on a little stool in his doorway, knitting, and the loon sat on a perch at his right hand. The loon who was a very large bird, was crazy, and thought he was a bobolink. Link, link, bobolink! he sang all day long, instead of crying in the way a loon usually does.
Trout leaped, flashing silver, anywhere they might look; and a flock of loon shrieked demented cries from its center. The burnished wings of a flock of mallard flashed in the air, startled by some creeping hunter. Slowly, delighted in spite of themselves by the lovely spot, they followed along its shore. They climbed the bank; and now Ben began to examine his surroundings with great care.
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