That night, after the evening meal had been eaten, there was still an hour or two of daylight; and while Fannin and Charlie got out their lines and prepared to go fishing, Hugh and Jack took their rifles and climbed a thousand feet or so up the hillside to look at the view that lay before them, up and down the channel. During the climb they saw fresh bear-tracks and a number of familiar birds,--the Louisiana tanager, the black-throated green warbler, and some others. Not far away, a ruffed grouse was heard drumming.
While perched on the face of the hillside, Hugh told Jack the simple story of the killing of the deer.
"There was no special hunting to it," he said, "I just went through the timber, quietly, and presently the deer walked out and got shot. I didn't even know that it was there, but I'm glad to have the meat."
They sat there until the sun had set, delighted with the calm beauty of the scene. In the trees above their heads, the little birds moved about uttering soft, faint notes. Up from a ravine on the right came, again and again at short intervals, the vibrating thunder of the ruffed grouse's drumming, low and muttering at first, and finally dying away into the silence.
Twilight was upon the hill before they returned to camp, and as they picked their way down the steep rocks they heard from the direction of the boat a shot, and then another--both from Hamset's rifle, and learned a little later that the Indian had been shooting at a seal. Fannin and Charlie had caught some rock-cod, curious red and black fish with staring eyes, said to live at great depths.
As the cliff rose straight up from the water's-edge, and there was no beach on which the canoe could be drawn, it was necessary that night to anchor it at a distance, and the two Indians slept in it and chanted their plaintive songs until the middle of the night. Around the camp fire the white men sat in silence, watching the strange shadows cast by the dancing flames on the overhanging rocks, or listening to the faintly heard rushing of the waters in the Narrows, which they had just passed; or to the moonlight drumming of the grouse on the mountain side above them. It had been a hard day, and there was little inclination to talk. Charlie, however, who was gratified at the killing of the deer, commented on that, and on deer hunting in distant lands.