midnight
He knew the wood as ` twere his own garden , for he had hunted it many times with his cousiri , and so he led me briskly , by a kind of natural path , to the first cairn . Neither there nor at the second did I get answer to my whistle . `` We 'll go up on the third , '' said John , `` and bide there till morning ; scouring a wood in this fashion is like hunting otters in the deep sea . '' We reached the third cairn when the hour was long past midnight I piped again in vain , and having ate part of our coilop , we set us down to wait the dawn . The air , for mid-winter , was almost congenial ; the snow fell no longer ; the north part of the sky was wondrous clear and even jubilant with star . I woke with a shiver at the hour before dawn , that strange hour when the bird turns on the bough to change his dream , when the wild-cat puts out his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur , when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning . M'Iver breathed heavily beside me , rolled in his plaid to the very nose , but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him , too , out of the chamber of sleep , and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier 's drill on his lips , but without opening his eyes .