The meeting of the Club that year was a most successful one; and when it was over, and I was left alone to my painting, I selected a subject in which, for the first time, I introduced a dramatic element. I supposed that a hunter and a buck had had a hand-to-horn fight, and, during it, had fallen together over a ledge of rocks, at the bottom of which both lay dead. A perpendicular ledge of granite, about twenty feet high, mosses and ferns clinging in its crevices, overhanging a level space covered with a heavy growth of luxuriant fern, furnished the background. There I laid the first large buck I killed, and painted him with extreme care, and then painted my guide with his arms locked in the antlers of the deer. The hour was the late afternoon, when the red sunlight slanted through the trees and fell in broken masses on the face of the cliff, catching the leaves here and there in its path. All this was painted carefully from the scene, with as much of the details of the forest as the time permitted, on a canvas twenty-five by thirty inches, on which I worked about two months, till the lake began to freeze and the snow fell. The thermometer was about zero Fahrenheit before I broke off, early in November. I never enjoyed so entirely the forest life as that autumn. I had laid a line of sable traps for miles through the woods, and caught several "prime" sable which I intended as a present to my fiancée, and the long walks over the line in the absolute silence of the great forest, the snowfall, and the gorgeous autumn were more fascinating than ever before. The bears left their tracks around me, and several pumas made themselves heard, but of wolves, which I had heard in other parts of the woods, I heard none. Returning in the gloaming from my traps, one day, I heard at a distance a wailing cry like that of a woman in distress, to which I replied by hallooing at the top of my voice. After a few minutes I heard the cry again, approaching me, and again responded. The cry continued, still nearer and nearer, but slow in its approach; and, wondering why so slow, I finally fired my rifle three times rapidly, which is the conventional signal for help, and at the same time a reply to the call for help; and it was only when this evoked no further call that I remembered that the cry was that of a puma. As usual I lived alone, save for the weekly visit of my guide bringing me bread and my post. It was with the greatest reluctance that I obeyed the necessity to return to the state of civilization, and took leave of that most charming retreat of the natural man from the artificial life. That was my last serious experience of woodland life. The uneasy and thriftless spirit which drove me out, like the possessed of the Scripture, to wander in strange places at times, again drove me that winter to England, putting, as it happened, against my intention or prevision, an end to the American period of my life. CHAPTER XVI ENGLAND AGAIN