“I notice you landed yours, all right,” said Paul pettishly.
“But I may lose the next one. The uncertainty of whether you’ll land them or not after you’ve hooked them is half the fun.”
“Whiz-z-z”--away went his line again before he could finish. For half an hour, directed by Remington, he played the fish, and was at length rewarded with as fine a salmon as Ainsworth’s--considerably larger than Remington’s.
“What fun! Oh, but it’s great!” he exclaimed as, all a-tremble with excitement, he examined his catch.
“They’re here all right, and they’re taking flies. We’ve got all the fish Tom can take care of today, and we’ve had a week’s fun in two hours. What do you fellows say to climbing that barren hill?” suggested Remington. “I’m anxious to see what the country is like behind those cliffs.”
Paul was loath to go. The sport had set his blood a-tingling with excitement and he would much have preferred to remain behind and fish, but Ainsworth agreed with Remington, and his sense of courtesy to his host bade him join them.
“We’ll stretch our lines to dry before we go, Paul. Never put your line up wet or it will rot, and some day you’ll lose a fine fish,” advised Remington, who had noticed Paul lean his rod against a tree.
Their lines stretched, they wandered up the defile down which the river plunged in its mad impatience to reach the sea. Here they were in a dark forest of stunted spruce, but very quickly, as they began the ascent of the hill, trees gave way to straggling brush, and brush at length to bare rocks.
“There’s a view for you,” said Remington when the summit was reached.
To the west, a shimmering vista, lay Hudson Bay; to the east, to the north, to the south, stretched a tumbled, boundless mass of rocky ridges, interspersed with starved forests of spruce. Here and there a lake sparkled in the distance. Below them the river, a twisting, winding thread of silver, coursed down to the sea.
The sensations that had come to Paul in Hudson Strait when he first beheld the distant wilderness and the sailless sea, thrilled him again--first fear and shrinking, then an inward, inexplicable sense of power and freedom.
“And no one lives there,” he said, more to himself than to his companions.