noon
So he climbed through the scrub up the mountain-side till he came out upon a grassy slope , two hundred feet above the camp . He was above the tops of the sombre spruce woods now . The slanting sunbeams touched their summits into bronze and ruddy gold . Yet always , beneath the gold , -- as Dusty Star well knew -- lay the heavy green silence that never stirred even at noon , where the furtive feet padded softly over the brown fir-needles , and the furtive eyes glimmered in the gloom . In the valley beneath nothing moved . From a thousand miles of forest and mountain the silence seemed to be oozing into it , filling it to the brim . And at his back , rose Carboona .