The Eternal Masculine by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

My young brother-in-law, Bob Morgan, is two yards long by an approximate three-quarters wide; his brother, my husband, is as long and wider; and the two frolic together, amid thunders of furniture, like kittens. Bob is that joyful-hearted thing, a sophomore at Yale, and the elder barbarian rises, playing with him, to the same glorious and irresponsible level. It is lucky that the appointments of our camp in Canada are of a sort suited to men of the stone age. Short of knocking down the stovepipe, a real tragedy is difficult, and after six years of connection with the Morgans no variation of giant gambols now surprises. So that the "God Pan" photograph, which might once have seemed against etiquette, did not startle me.

The photograph introduced the episode of this story, so it is fitting to begin with it. The three of us, Walter, Bob, and I, old comrades in the woods, had left that centre of civilization, our log camp on Lac Lumière, for three days in tents early in September. We hoped for caribou or moose, or both. All day we travelled a lonely stream, the Rivière à la Poêle, or Frying-pan River, paddling up sunny, still reaches between rocky shores, or through gold-green rustling water grass; then, as rocks thickened and the rapids came crashing in hoarse sweetness, we disembarked into a portage opening like a door into black forest; we followed the trail up the hurrying water, seeing through the trees the tumbling foam or the brown, white-speckled whirlpools; hearing it above the leaves' whispering. All day we followed the stream.