Already Mr. Selincourt was in treaty for the purchase of land on both sides of the river.  He wanted to possess the river frontage on each bank of the water, from the bay up to the first portage; but the drawback to this was that ’Duke Radford owned nearly three quarters of a mile of frontage close to the store, so it was not likely that the owner of the fishing fleet would get all the ground into his own hands.

Mary had a fancy for geology, and when her father had no need of her help in forwarding his schemes she spent long days in tramping about the woods and the shore, armed with a hammer and a specimen bag, and accompanied by one or two of the big dogs from the store.  True to her resolve, she had lost no time in making friends with the great, fierce creatures, which roamed as they pleased in summer, as a sort of holiday compensation for the hard work they had to do in winter, when stores had to be transported by sledges.  She had done her work so thoroughly that the dogs became, not merely her friends, but her abject slaves, and were ready at any time to swim the river at her call.

The coast of the bay to the northward was flat and swampy, but southward from Seal Cove it stretched in bold headlands and precipitous rocks for mile on mile, until the mouth of the next river spread acres of swamp ’twixt land and sea.  Beyond the headland on which Mr. Selincourt had erected his fish-flakes there extended miles of broken ground, with split rocks and riven cliffs which might have been the result of volcanic upheaval, but were probably only the product of the intense frost of centuries.  This was Mary’s happy hunting ground, a place full of scientific surprises, and full of dangers too.  For the rocks were slippery, the heights tremendous, and a fall in many places must have meant certain death.

Jervis Ferrars had been in his boat one morning along the coast to a certain bay or inlet much beloved of the black-headed gulls.  These birds were valuable either for their plucked feathers, or for their skins with the feathers left on.  They frequented the inlet in their tens of thousands, and it had occurred to him that it might be good business to secure a couple of thousand skins, and get them dry for packing by the time the next boat arrived, probably in the middle of August.

He had beached his boat, and spent an hour or more wandering round the crags, and planning the campaign against the luckless gulls, which dozed in sleepy content on the sunny slopes of the inlet.  Then, taking to his boat again, he pulled himself back towards Seal Cove, maturing his plans on the way.  He was passing a rocky promontory just before reaching the fish-flakes, when he heard a yelping noise, and, looking up, saw a big dog running to and fro on the rocks in evident distress.  But there were so many big dogs running loose in the woods and the wilds at this time of the year, and as they were mostly in distress over something or other, he took very little notice of the creature, and, working steadily on, arrived in due course at the fish shed.