about eleven o'clock
`` You 're enough to make a fellow feel creepy before ever he starts . I could bear the worst racket on earth better than a dead quiet . '' This dialogue was exchanged in low but excited voices between a young man of about one and twenty , and a lad who was apparently five years his junior , while they waded knee-deep in water among the long , rank grasses and circular pads of water-lilies which border the banks of Squaw Pond , a small lake in the forest region of northern Maine . The hour was somewhere about eleven o'clock . The night was intensely still , without a zephyr stirring among the trees , and of that wavering darkness caused by a half-clouded moon . On the black and green water close to the bank rocked a light birch-bark canoe , a ticklish craft , which a puff might overturn . The young man who had urged the necessity for silence was groping round it , fumbling with the sharp bow , in which he fixed a short pole or `` jack-staff , '' with some object -- at present no one could discern what -- on top .