Casting a shining lure into the water, she watched the line play out as she rowed.
A big wave lifted her high. Still the line played out. The boat sank low. She checked the line. Then, watching the rocks that she might not come too close and snag them, she rowed away.
For some time she circled out along the shoals, then back again. She had begun to believe there were no fish, and was musing on other things, phantom violins, black schooners, gray wolves, Old Uncle Ned, when, with a suddenness that was startling, her reel began to sing.
Dropping her oars, she seized the pole and began reeling in rapidly. Next moment she tossed a fine three pound trout into her boat. “You get ’em quick or not at all,” Swen had said to her. She had got this one “quick.”
An hour later four fine trout lay in the stern of her boat. “Enough,” she breathed. “We eat tonight, and so does Dizzy.”
The day was still young. She had not meant to visit Duncan’s Bay, but now the place called to her.
Swen’s short, powerful rifle lay in the prow of her boat. Why had she brought it? Perhaps she could not tell. Now she was glad it was there.
“Go ashore on Duncan’s Bay,” she told herself. “Go hunting phantoms and, perhaps, a gray wolf or two. Wouldn’t mind shooting them, the murderers, not a bit!”
It was a strange wolf she was to come upon in the forest that day.
With corduroy knickers tucked in high laced boots, a flannel shirt open wide at the neck, and a small hat crammed well down on her head, this stalwart girl might have been taken for a man as, rifle under arm, she trudged through the deep shadows of the evergreen forest covering the slope of Greenstone Ridge.
That she was in her element was shown by the spring in her footstep, the glad, eager look in her eyes.
“Life!” she breathed more than once. “Life! How marvelous it is!
“‘I love life!’” She hummed the words of a song she had once heard.
“Life! Life!” she whispered. Here indeed was life in its most primitive form. At times through a narrow opening she caught a glimpse of gray gulls soaring like phantom ships over the water. To her ears came the long, low whistle of some strange bird. She was not surprised when she found herself standing face to face with a magnificent broad-antlered moose. She stood quite still.