‘He’s going to give us enough water to get down the first piece,’ he reported. ‘It’ll save us the carry, and the drive’s over long ago, so he can spare the water.’ He grinned. ‘The old man just stays here out of habit anyway. He don’t have anyplace else to go.’
‘What does he live on?’ Ruth asked. ‘I saw a little garden up by his cabin, but it’s not enough to raise anything.’
‘That’s just to fetch the deer around,’ Leick explained. ‘Then he can shoot one, whenever he’s a mind, to keep it from eating up his peas or whatever. He lives mostly on venison and pork and soda biscuits and potatoes.’ He looked toward the fire where young Tom Pickett was tending to the cookery. ‘Thought I’d give the boy a chance,’ he told Harland. ‘See what he can do.’ And he said: ‘I figured Sime Verity would handle Miss Ruth’s canoe. I’ll take Mrs. Harland, let Tom paddle you.’
Ruth saw Harland’s surprise. ‘It won’t seem natural, not to be with you.’
‘Tom’s no fisherman,’ Leick explained. ‘But you can tell him what to do. Sime’ll see to ’t Miss Ruth gets her share, and I’ll help Mrs. Harland all I can.’
So Harland assented, but when lunch was done and they turned to the canoes and he told Ellen the plan she objected. ‘You’re used to Leick,’ she pointed out. ‘You’ll be miserable with anyone else.’
Ruth supported her for Harland’s sake. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Don’t worry about me, Dick.’
‘It’s Leick’s idea,’ Harland told them. ‘Let him run the show. Besides, we’ll all be together.’
‘Not while we’re fishing,’ Ellen argued. ‘You and Leick can go off exploring together.’ Ruth had a puzzled certainty that for some reason Ellen did not welcome the thought of long days alone with Leick. But Harland said decisively:
‘We’ll try it his way. Sime knows the river, and I want Ruth to have good fishing.’ He saw the canoes below them loaded and ready. ‘Come along,’ he said, and led the way down the bank.
They took their appointed places, and when they were ready Wes Barrell and the dam keeper opened the sluices to give them a start, and watched them out of sight. Ruth and Sime led the way, and the wilderness received them.
– VI –
They planned to travel slowly, and they stayed several days at their first camping-place a few miles below the dam. Ruth, after a night when she slept ill, began to enjoy to the full this new experience, this complete release from contact with the world. She found Sime Verity, during the long hours when he and she were alone on the river, a good companion. She led him to talk about himself, and he said he was married but childless.
‘We had one but it died,’ he explained. ‘Never made out to have another.’ His farm was a mile or so from the village. ‘I got everything planted before I left,’ he told her. ‘The old woman will keep the weeds down till I come home.’ He said Jem Verity was the business man of the town. ‘It takes a greasy dollar to get away from him,’ he declared. ‘Once’t he gets his hands on it. But Jem’s all right. He’s a real good man.’
She came to feel that Sime too was a real good man. He had a profound knowledge of every aspect of the wilderness, and he showed her many secret beauties which without his guidance she would not have seen. One day he took her up a tributary brook to a beaver dam and tore out the dam, and they hid and waited till the beaver came to repair it. On another day when toward dusk they fished a wide pool below camp, two bank beaver played together along the waterside, going ashore to nibble bark from poplar twigs; and after his supper one of them sat up on his haunches like a squatting old man and washed his face and ears and forearms and his fat belly with such vigor that Ruth laughed aloud, so that he slipped reproachfully back into the water again and disappeared.
Sime was forever pointing out tracks along the bank: an otter slide, a muskrat’s traces, the skeleton of a fish which a mink had eaten; and when she asked him about sounds heard in the silent nights, he imitated for her the whistle of a coon, the whining bark of a fox, the squealing of a porcupine, the whistle of a deer — sounding ridiculously like the whir of a salmon reel — which had scented you and wondered what you were. She came to love the still nights broken by faint forest sounds, and she often lay long awake, acutely listening. Sometimes she thought she did not sleep at all, yet she always woke rested and fresh.
There were three tents, a large one which Ruth and Ellen shared, and two smaller. Leick and Harland slept in one, and Ruth sometimes heard their low voices as they talked together long after she had gone to bed. Tom and Sime had the other. Tom was the down of the party, full of a boyish pleasure in this expedition. Sime had a quiet humor and an easy smile, but when Tom laughed, the woods rang; and if Harland took a good fish the boy’s shout of delight sent the news broadcast up and down the river. Sime said Tom was to be married upon his return. Going to marry Alice Morrow,’ he explained. ‘That’s why he’s feeling so good.’ Ruth one day led Tom to talk about Alice; but after painfully admitting that she was a nice girl, he lapsed into red and grinning confusion.
They caught at first only trout, small eager fish fit for the pan; but when later they moved downstream the river assumed more substantial proportions and they took many grilse, and then some salmon, keeping only the grilse to eat. Tom usually split them and broiled them with wild onions for garnishing; but Leick one night seared three fish in hot grease and then baked them in the reflector oven with slices of onion and strips of salt pork for flavoring, and Ruth thought she had never tasted anything so delicious.
She found new reason every day to appreciate Leick’s qualities. Till now she had seen him only when he came to Bar Harbor on some errand from Back of the Moon. She liked his obvious loyalty to Harland. In camp, these two forever drew together; and she thought Leick watched over Harland as a proud father watches over a child. He was equally scrupulous in serving Ellen, but there was a difference which Ruth tried to analyze. Sometimes she saw him watching the other girl with eyes she could not read, and she sensed a steady vigilance in him.
Ruth was disturbed by what she saw of the relationship between Harland and Ellen. The constraint between them was clearly Harland’s doing. It was he who had insisted, on the train, that Ruth and Ellen should take the drawing room while he occupied a lower berth in the same car. Here on the river, if they finished dinner while the light still held, Ellen sometimes led him to the canoes and persuaded him to take her to try the near-by waters, leaving the guides behind. On such occasions Leick’s eyes were apt to follow them, and if they went out of sight down river or up, he was ill at ease till they returned. If they fished near, Ruth could sometimes hear the murmur of Ellen’s voice, and Harland’s brief replies; but when they returned they came silently. Sometimes if Harland drew apart alone, Ellen went to him; but Ruth, watching from a distance these two whom she loved saw that Harland did not welcome her. In the morning when they met, and before parting for the night, Ellen might kiss him; but his response was half-hearted, lacking any warmth at all.
So though on the surface their days were pleasant ones, there was an undercurrent of tension. Ruth came to recognize, too, that the guides were uneasy, for reasons of their own. Sime every day commented on the low water, the continued dry weather; and he and the others took pains to extinguish every spark of fire. Once, smoking a cigarette after she and Sime had lunched beside the river, she finished it and tossed the butt toward the water and it fell short. Sime went to stamp it out, and she said: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ he assured her. ‘We get in the habit, that’s all. Specially a summer as dry as this. Fire ever get started in the woods the way they are, and there’d be no stopping it.’
Second-growth spruce as dry as tinder clothed the steep hillsides to the water’s edge. ‘I’d hate to see these woods burn up,’ she agreed.
‘You wouldn’t want to,’ he assured her. ‘It’d be bad.’
– VII –
Toward the end of the second week they moved farther downstream,
below the mouth of the Sedgwick, and camped on a high bank in a bend of the river, close against the forest. The spot was a pleasant one, a tumbling brook coming steeply down from the hills to sing in the night beside the tents; and while the guides made camp, Ruth and Ellen drew apart together, and Ruth said appreciatively:
‘This would be a beautiful place to set a house.’
Ellen looked at the hills which came steeply down behind them and shivered with distaste. ‘It’s too cramped,’ she said. ‘The hills try to push you into the water. I like space around me, level places.’
‘Was it level at Back of the Moon?’
‘No, but the hills were friendly, not too steep and high.’ There lay suddenly a tragic sorrow in her tones. ‘We were so darned happy there,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t suppose Richard will ever want to go back — but I want to, some day.’
Ruth wished they might go back together. Perhaps there or in some like retreat they could recapture what they had lost; and after the next day’s fishing — she and Sime had gone down river — she came back to camp in a fine excitement.
‘I’ve found a place where someone really ought to build a cabin,’ she told them at dinner. ‘Down where Sime and I fished today. It’s an old intervale, I suppose; a level tract shaped like a triangle, running way back from the river. But it’s high enough to be dry, and there are a lot of elms along the water, beautiful great trees; and the forest is so open it’s almost like a park.’ She proposed that they move camp down there. ‘It’s ever so much nicer than this,’ she said; and she called to Sime: ‘How far is it down to where we fished today?’
‘Four-five miles.’
Ellen listened indifferently, but Harland asked questions, and Ruth saw his interest was caught, and thought he might create another Back of the Moon where he and Ellen could be happy together as they once had been. She elaborated her description. ‘I didn’t explore it, of course, but even from the river we could see its possibilities. It could be made into a regular Garden of Eden.’
Harland smiled at her enthusiasm. ‘Only Adam and Eve need apply?’ he suggested; and he said: ‘We’ll look it over. Plenty of fishing for all of us, down there, Sime?’
‘Plenty of fishing,’ Sime assured him. ‘But I don’t know as there’s many fish. They wouldn’t do anything today, with this danged low water. What we need’s a good rain, to raise the river.’
‘Well then, we’ll pass up the fishing and go exploring,’ Harland declared; and Ruth, realizing that Ellen had asked no question, had taken no part in their conversation, said eagerly:
‘You’ll love it, Ellen.’
‘Oh, I’ll stay here,’ Ellen told her. ‘You two go. Leick and I will keep camp, maybe fish a while in the afternoon. I want to try the big pool up at the mouth of the Sedgwick.’
‘You go with Dick and I’ll keep camp,’ Ruth urged. ‘Sime can tell Leick and Tom the place I mean. You’ll want to see it, Ellen.’
But Ellen persisted in her decision; and in the morning Ruth and Sime, young Tom Pickett and Harland, set off down river together. The day was still, and promised to be hot, and Sime said: ‘There was smoke in the air yest’day. I could smell it. Fire somewhere off to the south of us, I’d judge.’ There was in fact a faint haze between them and the sun.
They fished a pool or two on the way downstream, and Ruth got into a fine salmon of twenty pounds or better. She lost it after fifteen minutes, and Harland — he and Tom had paused to watch her — called his sympathy; but she was more relieved than otherwise. ‘I love it when they take the fly, and while they’re fighting,’ she said. ‘But when they’re tired out and it’s just a question of hauling them in, I’d rather see them get away.’
‘You’re not like Ellen,’ he commented. ‘She hates to lose them.’
She laughed. ‘I guess I just haven’t got the killer instinct,’ she confessed, and was puzzled by the sudden shadow in his eyes.
The salmon took that morning, though half-heartedly. Ruth got fast to another, Harland to two; but they all rose short, were lightly hooked, and so escaped. While he played the last, Ruth and Sime went on to the spot she remembered; and Sime set a fire going, and when the others arrived to report the salmon’s escape, he was ready to serve broiled grilse and canned peas and toast and marmalade and good black tea.
The haze across the sky had thickened, and the sun itself was a red and angry ball, and Sime said thoughtfully: ‘There’s a fire not far off. I can smell smoke plain. Looks like the wind’s coming up from the south, too. If it does, that fire’ll move this way.’
But a rampart of high hills walled the river on the south, and any wind that blew was high above them. The air here by the water scarce stirred at all, so Ruth and Harland were unconcerned; and after lunch they went exploring, plunging into the forest, breaking through the fringe of small, close-grown young spruces which above their luncheon ground bordered the river. The little trees, their tenacious branches interlaced, formed a stubborn barricade; but these two fought their way, scratched and panting, to larger growth, to more open ground. Ruth lost her hat, and when she stooped to recover it her hair became entangled and Harland came to free it.
‘“Absalom, my son, my son,”’ he said laughingly. ‘Say, you’re a wreck! I thought you said this place was like a park! Some park!’
‘It opens out farther on,’ she promised. ‘You’ll see!’ And when they had gone a few rods more she cried triumphantly: ‘There! Now you can see down river.’
This was true. Tall hardwoods, beech and maple and an occasional oak, grew here more sparingly; and between their trunks he caught at some distance the gleam of water. ‘It’s pretty good at that,’ he admitted. ‘And it’s well above flood level too.’ But the ground was a tangle of underbrush, and the rotting trunks of trees fallen long ago made many a barricade, and he pointed this out.
‘Well, I couldn’t see them from the river,’ she admitted. ‘But they could all be cleared away, and you’d cut some of the standing trees, to make vistas.’ She was eager, for Ellen’s sake and for his too, to impart to him her enthusiasm; and she said in gay challenge: ‘Come on, don’t keep finding fault! Let’s pretend we’re pioneers, choosing our own land in the wilderness. If pioneers were discouraged by a little underbrush they’d never get anywhere!’
He laughed agreeably. ‘Well, it has some possibilities, at that,’ he assented. ‘Now let’s see. Where would we build our cabin?’
‘We must look for just the right place,’ she reminded him, and they explored, floundering through boggy pockets, clambering over windfalls, brushing aside the tangle of young growth, till they found a knoll with drainage on all sides. She was sure this was the perfect spot, but he pointed out that they must build near water. So they pushed on, and discovered a hidden brook where the tiny pools were alive with small trout, and they dropped twigs on the water, laughing when the fingerlings struck at them hungrily; and Ruth declared she could almost see the disgusted disappointment on their little fish faces.
‘Let’s not tease them any more,’ she begged. ‘Come on.’
So they went deeper into the forest till they reached steeply rising ground, and Harland estimated that they were half a mile or more from the river, that there were here sixty or seventy acres of level, fertile, well-drained soil.
‘There’s enough for a real farm,’ he exclaimed. ‘A man could raise his own corn and beans and peas, everything he’d need, and a couple of pigs, and a cow or two.’ His eyes were shining, and Ruth saw that he was happier than he had been in these months — almost a year now — since Danny’s death; and she wished Ellen were here in her place. But since Ellen was not here, she shared his pleasure.
They wandered for an hour or two, playing this game of make believe together as gaily as children, forgetful of time. Ruth saw everything through his eyes, and Harland was increasingly pleased with each new discovery. The brook plunged down from the hills over a cascade a dozen feet high. ‘There’s your water power,’ he cried. ‘I
f there’s as much current as that even in a dry season, there’d always be plenty for light and heat and cooking, all you’d need. You know, Ruth, a man really could make a fine place here, with a little time and work.’
‘It’s a long way from everything,’ she suggested, seeking by raising objections to stimulate his eager imagination.
‘It’s not a long way from a salmon river,’ he reminded her gleefully. ‘Nor from a trout brook! Nor from good hunting! And besides, there’s room to put in a runway long enough for small planes. Run it toward the river and you could take off over the water. The fair weather wind here is apt to be that way.’
His word reminded them that the wind was stirring in the tops of the trees above their heads. They had been till now too absorbed to notice this. ‘It’s getting dark, too,’ he said, and looked at his watch. ‘Only half past three. Must be clouding up! Maybe we’ll get a rain to raise the river.’
‘I smell smoke pretty strongly,’ she remarked, remembering Sime’s concern. ‘Do you suppose that fire is near us?’
‘I guess not,’ he said, and he lay prone to drink from the brook. In this moment’s silence she heard, or thought she heard, a distant call. When he stood up, wiping his wet lips, she asked:
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No. Say, that water’s cold as ice.’
‘I think I did. Listen!’
The call did not come again, but the wind blew harder, and a thread of warmer air came searching through the trees. She felt it on her cheek, and she saw that Harland felt it too; for he turned sharply, looking toward the river. But he did not speak of it. Instead, so casually that she knew he was uneasy, he said: ‘Well, the boys will be wondering where we are. We’d better be getting back.’ He looked around almost wistfully: ‘But I hate to leave this place. I’ll come here again some day.’
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