We crawled out into the rain again, and first sprinted and then dog-trotted along the river edge. No bird notes now in the woods beside us, no whirring of wings; only the rain sounds: soft swishings and drippings and gusty showerings, very different from the flat, flicking sounds when rain first starts in dry woods.
Camp looked a little cheerless, but a blazing fire, started with dry stuff we had stowed inside the tent, changed things, and dry clothes changed them still more, and we sat within the tent flaps and ate ginger-snaps in great contentment of spirit while we waited for the rain to stop.
It did stop, and very soon the fish were sizzling in the pan.
“Of course, if we had a watch, now—” suggested Jonathan, as he carefully tucked under the pan little sticks of just the right length.
“What should we know more than we do now—that we’re hungry?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing, we’d know what time it is,” replied Jonathan tranquilly.
“And for another we’d know whether it’s dinner or supper I’m cooking,” I supplemented. “But does it matter? You won’t get anything different, no matter which it is—just fish is what you’ll get. And pretty soon the sun will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a sundial for yourself.”
“Do you suppose I don’t know that! And meanwhile, you might cut the bread and make some toast,—there are some good embers on your side under the pan,—and I’ll get the butter, and there we’ll be.”
By the time the toast was made and the fish curling brownly away from the pan, the sun had indeed come out, at first pale and watery, then clear, and still high enough in the heavens to set the soaked earth steaming fragrantly with its heat. Odors of hemlock and wet earth mingled with odors of toast and fried fish.
“Um-m! Smell it all!” I said. “What a lot we should miss if we didn’t eat in the kitchen!”
“And hear that song sparrow! Doesn’t it sound as if the rain had washed his song a little cleaner and clearer?”
There followed the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain leaves behind it—a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves, and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay—the other side was steep and pathless woods—and walked down to the nearest farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the light of a low-hung moon, and across the dim water to our own island and the embers of our fire.