What is that rustling noise outside the tent?  Probably some small creature, a squirrel or a rabbit.  Rabbit stew would be good for breakfast.  But it sounds louder now, almost loud enough to be a fox,—­there are no wolves left in the Adirondacks, or at least only a very few.  That is certainly quite a heavy footstep prowling around the provision-box.  Could it be a panther,—­they step very softly for their size,—­or a bear perhaps?  Sam Dunning told about catching one in a trap just below here. (Ah, my boy, you will soon learn that there is no spot in all the forests created by a bountiful Providence so poor as to be without its bear story.) Where was the rifle put?  There it is, at the foot of the tent-pole.  Wonder if it is loaded?

“Waugh-ho!  Waugh-ho-o-o-o!”

The boy springs from his blankets like a cat, and peeps out between the tent-flaps.  There sits Enos, in the shelter of a leaning tree by the fire, with his head thrown back and a bottle poised at his mouth.  His lonely eye is cocked up at a great horned owl on the branch above him.  Again the sudden voice breaks out: 

“Whoo! whoo! whoo cooks for you all?”

Enos puts the bottle down, with a grunt, and creeps off to his tent.

“De debbil in dat owl,” he mutters.  “How he know I cook for dis camp?  How he know ’bout dat bottle?  Ugh!”

There are hundreds of pictures that flash into light as the boy goes on his course, year after year, through the woods.  There is the luxurious camp on Tupper’s Lake, with its log cabins in the spruce-grove, and its regiment of hungry men who ate almost a deer a day; and there is the little bark shelter on the side of Mount Marcy, where the governor and the boy, with baskets full of trout from the Opalescent River, are spending the night, with nothing but a fire to keep them warm.  There is the North Bay at Moosehead, with Joe La Croix (one more Frenchman who thinks he looks like Napoleon) posing on the rocks beside his canoe, and only reconciled by his vanity to the wasteful pastime of taking photographs while the big fish are rising gloriously out at the end of the point.  There is the small spring-hole beside the Saranac River, where Pliny Robbins and the boy caught twenty-three noble trout, weighing from one to three pounds apiece, in the middle of a hot August afternoon, and hid themselves in the bushes when ever they heard a party coming down the river, because they did not care to attract company; and there are the Middle Falls, where the governor stood on a long spruce log, taking two-pound fish with the fly, and stepping out at every cast a little nearer to the end of the log, until it slowly tipped with him, and he settled down into the river.