They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.
Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his bootheel and sat up.
"All right," he said, "now we'll settle this argument we were having." Ross looked a little shamefaced. "I guess I got too hot about it," he said subduedly. Then added, "But all the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me."
Woodin shook his head calmly. "No, we don't, Ross. When you told us that you'd seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you."
"If we hadn't, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here with you into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?"
"I know, I know," said the aviator unsatisfiedly. "You think I saw something queer and you're taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after."
"But you don’t believe what I've told you about the looks of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don't you?"
For the first time Woodin hesitated in answering. "After all, Ross," he said indirectly, "one's eyes can play tricks when you're only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up."
"Glimpsing them?” echoed Ross. "I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.
"It was near here, too, just east of the forks of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking south in a hurry for I'd been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson's Bay. I wanted to place myself by the river forks so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars.
"Then, down there in a clearing by the river, I saw something glisten and saw—the things. I tell you, they were incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river-forks in the moment or two I stared down at them.
"They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them and when I saw them they were gliding across that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.
"Then they disappeared under the trees. If there'd been a clearing big enough to land in within a hundred miles I'd have landed and looked for them, but there wasn't and I had to go on. But I wanted like the devil to find out what they were and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come up here by canoe to search for them. But I don't think now you've ever fully believed me."
WOODIN looked thoughtfully into the fire. "I think you saw something queer, all right, some queer form of life. That's why I was willing to come up on this search."
"But things such as you describe, jelly-like, translucent, gliding over the ground like that—there's been nothing like that since the first protoplasmic creatures, the beginning of
