It was a good opportunity to experiment for the best travelling note of sound. The Echoes from their perches on the frowning hillsides across the lake appointed themselves judges, unasked, and we mortals began the contest.
First Johann coughed the wood-smoke from his lungs and ran forward as though he were going to throw a cricket ball, and set back his shoulders, and yelled out a sort of dog-yap on two high notes. He scored, but not heavily.
The other Lapp lifted up his head and emitted a melancholy howl like a wolf's. We listened. Yes, that certainly carried farther.
The Finn lay on the ground, with head shrouded from the insects with his coat, and would not compete. So we foreigners in our turn cooeed, after the Australian fashion, and the Echoes, fickle ladies that they were, awarded the palm to the newer, stranger, imported sound. They cooeed back that the cooee won by an easy thousand yards.
Water-mists hung in filmy layers above the lake, and thickened as the hours drew on. Patience and more fuel to the beacon were the only things that would help us, and we applied them both assiduously. And when we were not working, we sat where the smoke of the fire could drift solidly over us, and those gentlemen of England who sit at home at ease, and have never seen the mosquito at his worst, do not understand the luxury of it. There are not many insects whose proud boast it is that they can make the monarch man find stinging wood-reek fascinating.
"_Illi robur et aes triplex Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci Commisit pelago ratem Primus_,"
wrote Horace in the days gone by; but unknown lands, had he known it, can contain far more horrid torments than the unknown sea.
But at last our vigil and beckoning came to an end. Through the gray lake-mists there loomed out a hazy dot of a deeper gray. It grew and blackened, and resolved itself into a canoe, spiritlessly sent along by a single paddler. We watched its approach with warming hearts. And lo! the solitary paddler was a woman, old, bent, and toothless. All her men-kind were away, it seemed, fishing up a farther arm of the lake. It was a year since she had been in a boat, because of her rheumatism. Moreover she had been in bed, and so our beacon had been lost on her, and being rather deaf, our shouts had fallen but dimly upon her notice. She hoped, with fluttering courtesy, that we would forgive her dilatoriness. Poor old crone! we shook hands with her all round, and soon let her know where the indebtedness was placed.