IN TIMBER AND BROLfiE. 229 



The low ground was brulee, and among the grey barkless 

 trunks which stood or leaned at every conceivable angle, 

 young trees, spruce, juniper, maple and poplar had grown 

 to a height of some ten or twenty feet. 

 1 It was quite late and the sun had already sunk when 

 from the top of the first of the woody mounds Ed spied 

 six caribou. The glass showed us that there was not a shoot- 

 able stag among them, which, however, did not prevent 

 our approaching and watching them while the light lasted. 

 Then we crept away, leaving them undisturbed, and returned 

 to camp, where I fear we slept little, so eager were we for the 

 coming day ; the up-shot, of course, being that when morn- 

 ing actually came we did not awake until the sun struck 

 on a large kettle and reflected a blinding beam across my 

 eyes. Breakfast was swallowed in double quick time, 

 and immediately after it we were on the move through the 

 glorious upland air. There had been a frost during the night, 

 so that the sun sparkled upon a thousand thousand points 

 of crystal light, as though some giant hand had flung a shower 

 of diamonds across our little portion of the world. The 

 sky was deep blue ; across the lake a loon cried ; the air 

 mounted to one's brain ; it was good to be alive. 



Of course our objective was the First Look-out, as we 

 named the spot from which we had sighted those six most 

 inspiring caribou on the previous evening. We spent a 

 blank hour there, and we walked on from knoll to knoll 

 without a glimpse of deer, but passing, nevertheless, a couple 

 of torn and broken trees upon which big stags had cleaned 

 their horns earlier in the season. At length we arrived 

 at a point from which the valley-bottom dropped some hun- 

 dreds of feet into a cleft, where it debouched upon another 

 and a deeper valley, through which a dark and slow-moving 

 river wound its way, lost itself in a reedy dead-water in the 

 middle distance, and, emerging, flowed away to the north- 

 east. 



