She vanished into the house, a diminutive figure of righteous indignation, and the Kid was left to the eager, laughing explanations of the unimpressed culprits.
The kyak darted down the river on a stream that made its progress something like the flight of an arrow. Its great length and narrow width left it a crazy enough vessel to handle, but the Kid had been born and bred to its manipulation, and she played with it as she chose without concern for its crankiness. Her gun lay in the bottom of the hide-built craft, for she was speeding down towards the marshes in quest of water-fowl.
With the rapid passing of the shortening northern day she knew she would find the marsh alive with duck. Game was plentiful just now. In another few weeks the approach of winter would drive the migratory fowl south, where the waters remained open and winter feed was to be had in abundance. The girl was pot-hunting, and the full stocking of the farm larder was an important duty in her routine of life.
Silently, almost ghostlike, the dip of her paddle giving out no sound, she sped on over the shining waters between high, lichen-grown banks, that were mostly rock-bound and almost completely sterile. It was a wild, broken stretch of country, without any of the vegetation which was the inspiration of the setting of the farm. It was without any graciousness, from the southern hills to the northern limits containing the shallow valley. But even so, to this girl, who had known the Caribou Valley all her young life, there was intense attraction in every detail of its familiar uncouthness.
Quite abruptly she passed beyond the undulating, rock-bound stretch, and shot into the jaws of a short but narrow canyon. For no apparent reason the country about her suddenly reared itself into a tumbled sea of low, broken hills that darkly overshadowed the passage which the river had eaten through them. The gleaming waters had lost their vivid, dancing light and assumed an almost inky blackness. Their speed had increased, and they frothed and churned as they beat against the facets of the encompassing walls, as though in anger at a resistance they had never been able to overcome.
The girl was gazing ahead at the far opening, where the hills gave way to the wide muskeg which was her goal. It was at the sort of giant gateway which was formed by two sheer sentry rocks standing guard on either side of the river, overshadowing, frowning, lofty, windswept and bare.