One thing at least will always be wrong. When you have gained the
faculty of ignoring the one disagreeable thing and concentrating your
powers on the compensations, then you will have become a true woodsman,
and to your desires the forest will always be calling.
X.
CLOCHE.
Imagine a many-armed lake, like a starfish, nested among rugged
Laurentian hills, whose brows are bare and forbidding, but whose
concealed ravines harbour each its cool screen of forest growth.
Imagine a brawling stream escaping at one of the arms, to tumble,
intermittently visible among the trees, down a series of cascades and
rapids, to the broad, island-dotted calm of the big lake. Imagine a
meadow at the mouth of this stream, and on the meadow a single white
dot. Thus you will see Cloche, a trading-post of the Honourable the
Hudson's Bay Company, as Deuce and I saw it from the summit of the
hills.
We had accomplished a very hard scramble, which started well enough in
a ravine so leafy and green and impenetrable that we might well have
imagined ourselves in a boundless forest. Deuce had scented sundry
partridges, which he had pointed with entire deference to the good form
of a sporting dog's conventions. As usual, to Deuce's never-failing
surprise and disgust, the birds had proved themselves most uncultivated
and rude persons by hopping promptly into trees instead of lying to
point and then flushing as a well-taught partridge should.
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