Late that afternoon the travel for a half mile became exceedingly difficult.  The stream took on the character of a mountain brook.  It hardly paid to float the canoe in the tiny holes among the rocks, miniature cascades, and tortuous passages.  The forest grew to the very banks, and arched over to exclude the sun.  Every few feet was to be avoided a tree, half clinging to the bank, leaning at a perilous slant out over the creek.  Fortunately the spring freshets in this country of the great snows were powerful enough to sweep out the timber actually fallen, so the course of the stream itself was clear of jams.  At length the travellers reached a beaver-dam, and so to a little round lake among the hills.  They had come to the head waters of the Mattawishguia.

In the lake stood two moose, old and young.  Dick succeeded in killing the yearling, though it took two shots from his Winchester.  It was decided to camp here over one day in order that the meat might be saved.

A circle of hills surrounded the little body of water.  On them grew maples and birches, among which scattered a few hemlocks and an occasional pine.  At the edge of the water were cedars leaning out to look at their reflections.  A deep and solemn peace seemed to brood over the miniature lake.  Such affairs as bird songs, the slap of a paddle, the shots from Dick’s rifle could not break this strange stillness.  They spoke hastily, and relapsed to silence, like the rare necessary voices in a room where one lies dead.  The hush, calm and primal, with the infinity of the wilderness as its only measure of time, took no account of the shock of a second’s interruption.  Two loons swam like ghosts.  Everywhere and nowhere among the trees, in the hills, over the water, the finer senses were almost uneasily conscious of a vast and awful presence.  It was as yet aloof, unheeding, buddhistic, brooding in nirvanic calm, still unawakened to put forth the might of its displeasure.  Under its dreaming eyes men might, fearfully and with reverence, carry on their affairs,—­fearfully and with reverence, catching the breath, speaking low, growing silent and stern in the presence of the North.

At the little camp under the cedars, Dick Herron and Sam Bolton, assisted by the Ojibway girl, May-may-gwan, cut the moose-meat into thin strips, salted, and dried it in the bright sun.  And since the presence of loons argued fish, they set their nets and lines.  Several days thus passed.

In their relations the three promptly settled back into a species of routine.  Men who travel in the Silent Places speedily take on the colour of their surroundings.  They become silent also.  A band of voyageurs of sufficient strength may chatter and sing; they have by the very force of numbers created an atmosphere of their own.  But two are not enough for this.  They have little to say, for their souls are laved by the great natural forces.