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Chesuncook is a “bulge” of the Penobscot: so
much for its topography. It is deep in the woods,
except that some miles from its opening there is a
lumbering-station, with house and barns. In the
wilderness, man makes for man by a necessity of
human instinct. We made for the log-houses. We
found there an ex-barkeeper of a certain well-known
New York cockney coffee-house, promoted into a
frontiersman, but mindful still of flesh-pots. Poor
fellow, he was still prouder that he had once tossed
the foaming cocktail than that he could now fell
the forest-monarch. Mixed drinks were dearer to
him than pure air. When we entered the long,
low log-cabin, he was boiling doughnuts, as was
to be expected. In certain regions of America
every cook who is not baking pork and beans is
boiling doughnuts, just as in certain other gastronomic
quarters frijoles alternate with tortillas.

Doughnuts, like peaches, must be eaten with the
dew upon them. Caught as they come bobbing
up in the bubbling pot, I will not say that they
are despicable. Woodsmen and canoemen, competent
to pork and beans, can master also the alternative.
The ex-barkeeper was generous with these
brown and glistening langrage-shot, and aimed
volley after volley at our mouths. Nor was he

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content with giving us our personal fill; into every
crevice of our firkin he packed a pellet of future
indigestion. Besides this result of foraging, we
took the hint from a visible cow that milk might be
had. Of this also the ex-barkeeper served us out
galore, sighing that it was not the punch of his
metropolitan days. We put our milk in our teapot,
and thus, with all the ravages of the past
made good, we launched again upon Chesuncook.

Chesuncook, according to its quality of lake, had
no aid to give us with current. Paddling all a
hot August midday over slothful water would be
tame, day-laborer's work. But there was a breeze.
Good! Come, kind Zephyr, fill our red blanketsail!
Cancut's blanket in the bow became a substitute
for Cancut's paddle in the stern. We swept
along before the wind, unsteadily, over Lake Chesuncook,
at sea in a bowl, — “rolled to starboard,
rolled to larboard,” in our keelless craft. Zephyr
only followed us, mild as he was strong, and strong
as he was mild. Had he been puffy, it would have
been all over with us. But the breeze only sang
about our way, and shook the water out of sunny
calm. Katahdin to the north, a fair blue pyramid,
lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent,
yet still so many leagues away that his features
were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable
from the green of his beard of forest.
Every mile, however, as we slid drowsily over the
hot lake, proved more and more that we were not
befooled, — Iglesias by memory, and I by

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anticipation. Katahdin lost nothing by approach, as some
of the grandees do: as it grew bigger, it grew better.

Twenty miles, or so, of Chesuncook, of sun-cooked
Chesuncook, we traversed by the aid of our blanketsail,
pleasantly wafted by the unboisterous breeze.
Undrowned, unducked, as safe from the perils of
the broad lake as we had come out of the defiles
of the rapids, we landed at the carry below the
dam at the lake's outlet.

The skin of many a slaughtered varmint was
nailed on its shingle, and the landing-place was
carpeted with the fur. Doughnuts, ex-barkeepers,
and civilization at one end of the lake, and here
were muskrat-skins, trappers, and the primeval.
Two hunters of moose, in default of their fernhorned,
blubber-lipped game, had condescended
to muskrat, and were making the lower end of
Chesuncook fragrant with muskiness.

It is surprising how hospitable and comrade a
creature is man. The trappers of muskrats were
charmingly brotherly. They guided us across the
carry; they would not hear of our being porters.
“Pluck the superabundant huckleberry,” said
they, “while we, suspending your firkin and your
traps upon the setting-pole, tote them, as the spies
of Joshua toted the grape-clusters of the Promised
Land.”

Cancut, for his share, carried the canoe. He
wore it upon his head and shoulders. Tough work
he found it, toiling through the underwood, and

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poking his way like an elongated and mobile mushroom
through the thick shrubbery. Ever and
anon, as Iglesias and I paused, we would be aware
of the canoe thrusting itself above our heads in the
covert, and a voice would come from an unseen
head under its shell, — “It 's soul-breaking, carrying
is!”

The portage was short. We emerged from the
birchen grove upon the river, below a brilliant cascading
rapid. The water came flashing gloriously
forward, a far other element than the tame, flat
stuff we had drifted slowly over all the dullish
hours. Water on the go is nobler than water on
the stand; recklessness may be as fatal as stagnation,
but it is more heroic.

Presently, over the edge, where the foam and
spray were springing up into sunshine, our canoe
suddenly appeared, and had hardly appeared, when,
as if by one leap, it had passed the rapid, and was
gliding in the stiller current at our feet. One of
the muskrateers had relieved Cancut of his head-piec,
and shot the lower rush of water. We
again embarked, and, guided by the trappers in
their own canoe, paddled out upon Lake Pepogenus.

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