Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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Such is the Moosatuk where it passes Gilead, a peaceful village halfway between Stonebridge and Gordon, with its farmsteads filling the fertile river valley and climbing up the hillside as if to shun railways, until from below the topmost are lost in the trees, like the aeries of some furtive hawk or owl of the woods. This was the scene which lay below the hunters as they paused to rest in the October noon glow before returning to Stead’s lodge on top of Windy Hill.

For a little space neither man spoke. In fact, the last mile of their walk had passed in silence save for the occasional smothered exclamation of the younger hunter, when he came upon a snare, now and then, and broke it. Even the dry leaves lay untouched in their tracks, for the foot of a woodsman seems instinctively to avoid the dead twig and leaf-filled rut.

The dogs, two brown-eyed, mobile Gordon setters, well understanding that the signal of stacked arms and the smell of tobacco meant that the day’s work was over, started unchidden on a private hunting-trip, nosing about through the ground-pine and frost-bleached lady-ferns, and paused with tails swinging in wide circles before a great patch of glossy wintergreen, where a ruffed grouse or shy Bob-white had doubtless made his breakfast on the pungent scarlet berries. Out in the little-used highway, October, herself an Indian in her colour schemes, had set her loom in the grass-divided wheel tracks, a loom of many strands, wherein she wove a careful tapestry of russet, bronze, crimson, gold, and ruby from leaf of beech, sumach, oak, pepperidge, chestnut, birch, and purpling dogwood, only to drop it as a rug for hoof tracks or fling it aloft at random, a bit of gracious drapery for the too stern granite.