The bright sunshine of an Indian summer's day brought a reaction and their spirits rose wonderfully; but still the canoe tarried, and as the hours wore away, the veteran grew moody again and the midday meal was a melancholy affair. Early in the afternoon he exclaimed: “Boys, I tell you what it is: I can stand this no longer--something's wrong, and we're going to paddle those two skiffs down to the beaver meadow and find out what we can do, and we're going to start right now. God forgive us if we have been idling here while we should have been yonder!” Two in a boat they went, and the paddles never halted until the channel to the beaver meadow was gained. Dividing forces, they circled in opposite directions round the open, but only the taint of the long-dead moose marked the spot. Then they fired three rifles in rapid succession and listened anxiously, but only the rolling, bursting echoes of the woods answered them. “Guide, where would he probably have gone?” “Wa'al, he told you he'd run the old bull this way from the back lakes--thar's another leetle mash a mile north of us; it's an awful mud-hole, and the bull might possibly hev lit out fur thar. Enyhow, we'd best hunt the closest spots first.” The picture of that marsh will haunt the memories of those three men until their deaths. A few acres of muskeg, with broad reaches of sullen, black, slimy water, its borders bottomless mud, covered with a loathsome green scum, and a few pale-green, sickly-looking larches dotting the open--the whole forming a repulsive blemish, like an ulcer, on the face of the earth. All round rose a silent wall of noble evergreens, rising in massive tiers upon the hills, with here and there a flame of gorgeous color where the frost had touched perishable foliage. Overhead a hazy dome of dreamy blue, with the sun smiling down through the gauzy curtains of the Indian summer. Swinging in easy circles, high in air, were two ravens, challenging each other in hollow tones, their orbits crossing and recrossing as they narrowed in slow-descending spirals. “Look, look at him!” [Illustration: 0124] One bird had stooped like a falling plummet, and now hung about fifty yards above the farther bounds of the muskeg, beating the air with heavy, sable pinions and croaking loudly to his mate above. Closing her wings, she stooped with a whizzing rush to his level, and there the two hung flapping side by side, their broad wings sometimes striking sharply against each other, their hoarse, guttural notes sounding at intervals. A nameless horror seized the men as they looked. Their hunter's instinct told them that death lay below those flapping birds, and with one impulse they hurried round on the firmer ground to the ill-omened spot. The veteran, white-faced but active as a lad, tore his way through the bordering cover first, halted and stared for an instant, then dropped his rifle in the mud, threw up his hands and exclaimed in an agonized voice: “Oh, my God, my God!”