oatmen labouring
if the fancy took them, or resting their paddles across their thighs
and letting their canoes drift on the current. Now and again they
met a train of bateaux labouring up with reinforcements, that had
heard of the victory from the leading boats and hurrahed as they
passed, or shouted questions which Barboux answered as a conscious
hero of the fight and with no false modesty. But for hour after hour
John lived alone with his own boat's company and the interminable
procession of the woods.

They descended to the river, these woods, and overhung it--each bank
a mute monotonous screen of foliage, unbroken by glade or clearing;
pine and spruce and hemlock, maple and alder; piled plumes of green,
motionless, brooding, through which no sunrays broke, though here and
there a silver birch drew a shaft of light upon their sombre
background. Here were no English woodlands, no stretches of pale
green turf, no vistas opening beneath flattened boughs, with blue
distant hills and perhaps a group of antlers topping the bracken.
The wild life of these forests crawled among thickets or lurked in
sinister shadows. No bird poured out its heart in them; no lark
soared out of them, breasting heaven. At rare intervals a note fell
on the ear--the scream of hawk or eagle, the bitter cackling laugh of
blue jay or woodpecker, the loon's ghostly cry--solitary notes, and
unhappy, as though wrung by pain out of the choking silence; or away
on the hillside a grouse began drumming, or a duck went whirring down
the long waterway until the sound sank and was overtaken again by the
river's slow murmur.

When night had hushed down these noises, the forest would be silent
for an hour or two, and then awake more horribly with the howling of
wolves. John slept little of nights; not on account of the wolves,
but because the mosquitoes allowed him no peace. (They were torture
to a wounded man; but he declared afterwards that they cured his
wounded arm willynilly, for they forced him to keep it active under
pain of being eaten alive.) By day he dozed, lulled by the eternal
woods, the eternal dazzle on the water, the eternal mutter of the
flood, the paddle-strokes, M. le Chameau's singing.

They were now six in the canoe--the sergeant, le Chameau, the two
Indians, John a Cleeve and the elder Highlander, Corporal Hugh
McQuarters.

By this time--that is to say, having seen him--John understood the
meaning of M. le Chameau's queer name