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Updated: May 2, 2025
Getting home is always a joy; but walking about the place in the morning they noticed several little things that were wrong. Quonab's lodge was down, the paddles that stood against the shanty were scattered on the ground, and a bag of venison hung high at the ridge was opened and empty.
After dragging the toboggan for three hours, taking turns at breaking the way, they were changing places when Rolf noticed a large gray patch on Quonab's cheek and nose. "Quonab, your face is frozen," he said. "So is yours," was the reply.
But there was one thing that Rolf did think of he had no right to live in Quonab's lodge without contributing a fair share of the things needful. Quonab got his living partly by hunting, partly by fishing, partly by selling baskets, and partly by doing odd jobs for the neighbours.
Whether the chuck thinks it is another woodchuck calling, or merely a pleasant sound, is not known, but she soon did as her kind always does, came out of the hole slowly and ever higher, till she was half out and sitting up, peering about. This was Quonab's chance. He now drew a barbed hunting arrow to the head and aimed it behind her shoulders.
At New York, Rolf made no attempt to track his friend, but took the Stamford boat and hurried to the old familiar woods, where he had lived and suffered and wakened as a boy. There was a house now near the rock that is yet called "Quonab's."
Across a little opening of the woods to the west he saw a movement in the bushes, but it ceased, and he was in doubt whether the creature, presumably a deer, was standing there or had gone on. "Never quit till you are sure," was one of Quonab's wise adages. Rolf was bound to know what it was that had moved. So he stood still and waited.
His face was brown and ruddy. He had abandoned all drugs, and had gained fully twenty pounds in weight. He had learned to make a fire, paddle a canoe, and go through the woods in semi-silence. His scholarly talk had given him large place in Rolf's esteem, and his sweet singing had furnished a tiny little shelf for a modicum of Quonab's respect. But his attempts to get a deer were failures.
He would have been disappointed if it had not come. He was used to it; it made him feel at home once more. He worked hard and silently. Mick did not return till late. He had been drawing wood for Horton that day, which was the reason he happened in Quonab's neighbourhood; but his road lay by the tavern, and when he arrived home he was too helpless to do more than mutter.
But the fact of Quonab's being an Indian and Rolf supposedly one, would turn opinion against them in the Adirondacks, and it was quite likely that the rival considered them trespassers on his grounds, although the fact that he robbed their traps without removing them, and kept out of sight, rather showed the guilty conscience of a self-accused poacher.
All the events of the last year were rushing through his mind; the refuge he had found with the Indian; the incident of the buck fight and the tender nurse the red man proved. He wavered. Then he saw Skookum coming back on the trail. The dog trotted up to the boy and dropped a glove, one of Quonab's.
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