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Updated: May 11, 2025
The balsams and spruces still stood dark in the swamps, but the tamaracks were shyly decking themselves in their exquisite robes of spring, and through all the bush the air was filled with soft sounds and scents. In earth and air, in field and forest, life, the new spring life, ran riot. How strangely impertinent death appeared, and how unlovely in such a world of life!
So the work kept on intermittently until an incredibly late date in November. The leaves of the poison oak had turned crimson, the tall tamaracks in the high mountains were gold, frost crystals glittered each morning on the planks and boards, but Big Squaw creek kept running steadily and the sunshine soon melted the skim ice that formed over night. By this time Bruce had a fresh worry.
It was but two or three days later that the partners, coming from the assay-house to the mess late, discovered a stranger talking to the men outside under the shade of a great clump of tamaracks that nestled at the foot of a slope. They passed in and sat down at their table, wondering who the visitor could be.
The spongy stretch of moss among the scattering Tamaracks was dotted with great masses of Pitcher Plant, and half concealed by the curious leaves were thousands of Droseræ, or fly-eating plants, with their traps set to secure their prey. The bog was wonderful, but very bad walking.
He used but one match often he travelled a week on seven. When they were wet he rubbed them in his hair. Again the sharp whack of the axes cut out a ridgepole and two forked supports. Before it grew dark they had a snug lean-to built and covered with boughs at the edge of the tamaracks out of the wind. Here, after a warm meal, they passed the first night of their flight.
By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place of the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender tamaracks, sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and were out of their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way from their spindling branches. The winds came cool and damp out of the hiding-places among their dark recesses.
Tom gazed dreamily at the ceiling. "Whenever I have some darned foolish theme like this to write I want to go fishing, and I want to go like the devil. I'll get Uncle Jake to take you, too, next summer." "I wish you would." "Say, that's living all right, Hughie, up there among the tamaracks and balsams!" And he began, for something like the thirtieth time, to relate the adventures of the trip.
He perched on the end of it, his feet suspended above the wet, and abandoned himself to reflection. The lonesome diver reappeared. The breeze rustled the dead grasses and the tamaracks until they seemed to be shivering in the cold. Bob was facing himself squarely. This was his first grapple with the world outside. To his direct American mind the problem was simplicity in the extreme.
Here is the famous little river, a swift, singing current of gray-blue water Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it dashing and swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around them in showers which glitter in the sunshine.
"It's Waldstricker's brat," declared Jake, exultantly. "I were a snoopin' 'round Eb's place an' run on 'er down near the road by that there bunch of tamaracks. I says, 'What air the matter, Kid, an' she says, 'I want my ma. I says, 'Come along an' I'll git 'er fer ye, an' the kid come jest like a lamb goes to the slaughterhouse." And Jake threw back his head and roared.
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