Dr. Cathcart then likewise turned in, weariness and sleep still fighting in his mind with an obscure curiosity to know what it was that had scared Defago about the country up Fifty Island Water way,—­wondering, too, why Punk’s presence had prevented the completion of what Hank had to say.  Then sleep overtook him.  He would know tomorrow.  Hank would tell him the story while they trudged after the elusive moose.

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness.  The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars.  The cold air pricked.  In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter.  White men, with their dull scent, might never have divined them; the fragrance of the wood fire would have concealed from them these almost electrical hints of moss and bark and hardening swamp a hundred miles away.  Even Hank and Defago, subtly in league with the soul of the woods as they were, would probably have spread their delicate nostrils in vain....

But an hour later, when all slept like the dead, old Punk crept from his blankets and went down to the shore of the lake like a shadow—­silently, as only Indian blood can move.  He raised his head and looked about him.  The thick darkness rendered sight of small avail, but, like the animals, he possessed other senses that darkness could not mute.  He listened—­then sniffed the air.  Motionless as a hemlock stem he stood there.  After five minutes again he lifted his head and sniffed, and yet once again.  A tingling of the wonderful nerves that betrayed itself by no outer sign, ran through him as he tasted the keen air.  Then, merging his figure into the surrounding blackness in a way that only wild men and animals understand, he turned, still moving like a shadow, and went stealthily back to his lean-to and his bed.

And soon after he slept, the change of wind he had divined stirred gently the reflection of the stars within the lake.  Rising among the far ridges of the country beyond Fifty Island Water, it came from the direction in which he had stared, and it passed over the sleeping camp with a faint and sighing murmur through the tops of the big trees that was almost too delicate to be audible.  With it, down the desert paths of night, though too faint, too high even for the Indian’s hair-like nerves, there passed a curious, thin odor, strangely disquieting, an odor of something that seemed unfamiliar—­utterly unknown.

The French Canadian and the man of Indian blood each stirred uneasily in his sleep just about this time, though neither of them woke.  Then the ghost of that unforgettably strange odor passed away and was lost among the leagues of tenantless forest beyond.

II