At last Regnar awoke, and to him Waring applied for an explanation of the strange sounds. Orloff listened attentively, and answered with paling cheeks,--
"Such are the melodies which my people say that the sad Necker sings by the lonely river, when he bemoans his lot, in that Christ died not for him. Doubtless the sea has its water spirits, and they now surround our island of ice."
Waring, unskilled in the folk-lore of Dane, Swede, and German, answered,--
"It can't be that. It must be that some vessel is near us, or there is a crew of wrecked sealers around us on the ice. Ah, Peter, are you thinking of getting up. Listen to those sounds, and tell us what they are--will you?"
"I not know that noise, brother. I know nearly all the cries of bird and beast, and often I sleep all 'lone in the woods; hear howl, hear fox, hear frog, hear everyting. Sometime I tink I know that noise; then I tink I not know him at all. Get La Salle awake; ask him--he know."
La Salle slept but lightly whenever there was need of vigil, and the last words had fallen on his awakening ears.
"We hear many strange noise. I not know, George not know, Regnie not know, none of us know. There it come again. What you call that?"
La Salle listened a moment, went to the door, and then beckoned to his companions to follow. The rain fell heavily, but the wind came warm and gently from the balmy south, and no rude blast shrieked and sighed amid the ice-peaks. The strange sounds were sweeter, louder, and apparently nearer than before. Soft and sad as the strains of the disconsolate Necker, plaintive as the mournings of men without hope, wild as the cries of the midnight forest, and the sighings of wind-tossed branches. La Salle laughed a low, glad laugh.
"You may sleep soundly," said he; "the coots and ducks have come northward, and the spring is here at last. To-morrow will bring us sport to repletion, for the sounds you hear are the love-songs of the sea-birds, whose voices, however harsh, grow sweet when the sun brings back again the season of love and flowers."
When the morn came, unheralded by sunbeams, and shrouded by leaden rain-clouds, a veil of mist covered the vast ice-field, of which no two masses retained their former proximity. A network of narrow channels opened and closed continually among the dripping bergs, from whose sides flashed the frequent cascade, and glimmered the shimmering avalanche of dislodged snow. Amid this ever-shifting panorama, giving it life and beauty, covering pool and channel with merry, restless knots of diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it hath fallen to the lot of few sportsmen to witness and enjoy.