or so up the stream. Thompson's canoemen carried with them a rag of a
sail. This they hoisted to a fair wind that held through the morning
hours. Between that and steady paddling they made the creek mouth by
sundown. There they lay overnight on a jutting sandbar where the
mosquitoes plagued them less than on the brushy shore.

At dawn they pushed into the sinuous channel of Lone Moose, breasting
its slow current with steady strokes, startling flocks of waterfowl at
every bend, gliding hour after hour along this shadowy waterway that
split the hushed reaches of the woods. It was very still and very somber
and a little uncanny. The creek was but a thread in that illimitable
forest which pressed so close on either hand. The sun at high noon could
not dissipate the shadows that lurked among the close-ranked trees; it
touched the earth and the creek with patches and streaks of yellow at
rare intervals and left untouched the obscurity where the rabbits and
the fur-bearing animals and all the wild life of the forest went
furtively about its business. Once they startled a cow moose and her
calf knee-deep in a shallow. The crash of their hurried retreat rose
like a blare of brass horns cutting discordantly into the piping of a
flute. But it died as quickly as it had risen. Even the beasts bowed
before the invisible altars of silence.

About four in the afternoon Mike Breyette turned the nose of the canoe
sharply into the bank.

The level of the forest floor lifted ten feet above Thompson's head so
that he could see nothing beyond the earthy rim save the tops of trees.
He kept his seat while Mike tied the bow to a birch trunk with a bit of
rope. He knew that they expected to land him at his destination before
evening fell. This did not impress him as a destination. He did not know