noon
At dawn they pushed into the sinuous channel of Lone Moose , breasting its slow current with steady strokes , startling flocks of waterfowl at every bend , gliding hour after hour along this shadowy waterway that split the hushed reaches of the woods . It was very still and very somber and a little uncanny . The creek was but a thread in that illimitable forest which pressed so close on either hand . The sun at high noon could not dissipate the shadows that lurked among the close-ranked trees ; it touched the earth and the creek with patches and streaks of yellow at rare intervals and left untouched the obscurity where the rabbits and the fur-bearing animals and all the wild life of the forest went furtively about its business . Once they startled a cow moose and her calf knee-deep in a shallow . The crash of their hurried retreat rose like a blare of brass horns cutting discordantly into the piping of a flute . But it died as quickly as it had risen .