At the Sign of the Fox: A Romance

Robert Stead and Dr. Russell, clad for hunting, tramped down a pent road through the woodland and halted at the bars that separated it from the highway.

Like careful woodsmen, they made sure that their guns were at half-cock before resting them against the tumble-down wall; pulling out pipe and tobacco pouch, they filled and fingered the smooth bowls with the deliberation that is akin to restfulness. Then, face to windward, they applied the match and drew the few rapid puffs that kindle the charmed fire, and leaning on the top rail, looked down the slope to where the river, broad and tranquil as it passed, narrowed and grew more elusive as the eye traced it toward its starting-point in the north country many miles away.

For more than a hundred miles between its throne in the hill country and the sea travels the Moosatuk, and all the land through which it passes is its kingdom. What its stern mood was in the ancient days when as an ice-floe, maybe, it tore a pathway through the granite hills, fortressing them with splintered slabs and tossing huge boulders from its course, man may but guess; but to-day a wild thing, half tamed, it obeys while it still compels. Above, below, confined by dams, it does the will of man; and yet, flow where it will, man follows, with his mills, his factories, his railways, until, by spreading into shallows, it half eludes his greed. For twenty sinuous miles it follows a free, sunlit course, now running swift and lapping the banks of little islands wooded with hemlocks, now stretching itself on the smooth pebbles until it tempts the unwary to the crossing on a bridge of stepping-stones. For all this space the ferns and wood flowers stoop from the slanting banks to snatch its lingering kisses, the wood folk drink from it, the wild fowl sleep on it, and its waters bear no heavier responsibility or weight than driftwood or the duck boat, that steals silently forth, a shadow in the morning twilight, like the Mohican canoes that a mere century ago plied the selfsame waters.

Such is the Moosatuk where it passes Gilead, a peaceful village halfway between Stonebridge and Gordon, with its farmsteads filling the fertile river valley and climbing up the hillside as if to shun railways, until from below the topmost are lost in the trees, like the aeries of some furtive hawk or owl of the woods. This was the scene which lay below the hunters as they paused to rest in the October noon glow before returning to Stead’s lodge on top of Windy Hill.

For a little space neither man spoke. In fact, the last mile of their walk had passed in silence save for the occasional smothered exclamation of the younger hunter, when he came upon a snare, now and then, and broke it. Even the dry leaves lay untouched in their tracks, for the foot of a woodsman seems instinctively to avoid the dead twig and leaf-filled rut.

The dogs, two brown-eyed, mobile Gordon setters, well understanding that the signal of stacked arms and the smell of tobacco meant that the day’s work was over, started unchidden on a private hunting-trip, nosing about through the ground-pine and frost-bleached lady-ferns, and paused with tails swinging in wide circles before a great patch of glossy wintergreen, where a ruffed grouse or shy Bob-white had doubtless made his breakfast on the pungent scarlet berries. Out in the little-used highway, October, herself an Indian in her colour schemes, had set her loom in the grass-divided wheel tracks, a loom of many strands, wherein she wove a careful tapestry of russet, bronze, crimson, gold, and ruby from leaf of beech, sumach, oak, pepperidge, chestnut, birch, and purpling dogwood, only to drop it as a rug for hoof tracks or fling it aloft at random, a bit of gracious drapery for the too stern granite.