Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found
below mill-ponds. Analogously in the Maine rivers,
below the lakes, rapids are. Rapids too often
compel carries. While we breakfasted without
steak of bear or cutlet of moose, Ripogenus gradually
retracted itself, and became conscious again
of what poetry there is in a lake's pause and a

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rapid's flow. Fog condensed into water, and water
submitting to its destiny went cascading down
through a wild defile where no birch could follow.

The Ripogenus carry is three miles long, a faint
path through thickets.

“First half,” said Cancut, “'s plain enough;
but after that 't would take a philosopher with his
spectacles on to find it.”

This was discouraging. Philosophers twain we
might deem ourselves; but what is a craftsman
without tools? And never a goggle had we.

But the trappers of muskrats had become our
fast friends. They insisted upon lightening our
loads over the brambly league. This was kindly.
Cancut's elongated head-piece, the birch, was his
share of the burden; and a bag of bread, a firkin of
various grub, damp blankets for three, and multitudinous
traps, seemed more than two could carry at
one trip over this longest and roughest of portages.

We paddled from the camp to the lake-foot, and
there, while the others compacted the portables
for portage, Iglesias and I, at cost of a ducking
with mist-drops from the thickets, scrambled up a
crag for a supreme view of the fair lake and the
clear mountain. And we did well. Katahdin, from
the hill guarding the exit of the Penobscot from
Ripogenus, is eminent and emphatic, a signal and
solitary pyramid, grander than any below the
realms of the unchangeable, more distinctly mountainous
than any mountain of those that stop short
of the venerable honors of eternal snow.

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We trod the trail, we others, easier than Cancut.
He found it hard to thread the mazes of an overgrown
path and navigate his canoe at the same
time. “Better,” thought he, as he staggered and
plunged and bumped along, extricating his boatbonnet
now from a bower of raspberry-bushes,
now from the branches of a brotherly birch-tree, —
“better,” thought he, “were I seated in what I
bear, and bounding gayly over the billow. Peril
is better than pother.”

Bushwhacking thus for a league, we circumvented
the peril, and came upon the river flowing
fair and free. The trappers said adieu, and launched
us. Back then they went to consult their traps
and flay their fragrant captives, and we shot forward.

That was a day all poetry and all music. Mountain
airs bent and blunted the noonday sunbeams.
There was shade of delicate birches on either hand,
whenever we loved to linger. Our feather-shallop
went dancing on, fleet as the current, and whenever
a passion for speed came after moments of
luxurious sloth, we could change floating at the
river's will into leaps and chasing, with a few
strokes of the paddle. All was untouched, unvisited
wilderness, and we from bend to bend the
first discoverers. So we might fancy ourselves;
for civilization had been here only to cut pines, not
to plant houses. Yet these fair curves, and liberal
reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered
river were only solitary, not lonely. It is never

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lonely with Nature. Without unnatural men or
unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself.
And so we found her, — a lovely being in perfect
toilet, which I describe, in an indiscriminating,
masculine way, by saying that it was a forest and
a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless
sky, all made resplendent by her judicious disposition
of a most becoming light. Iglesias and I,
being old friends, were received into close intimacy.
She smiled upon us unaffectedly, and had
a thousand exquisite things to say, drawing us out
also, with feminine tact, to say our best things,
and teaching us to be conscious, in her presence,
of more delicate possibilities of refinement and a
tenderer poetic sense. So we voyaged through
the sunny hours, and were happy.

Yet there was no monotony in our progress.
We could not always drift and glide. Sometimes
we must fight our way. Below the placid reaches
were the inevitable “rips” and rapids: some we
could shoot without hitting anything; some would
hit us heavily, did we try to shoot. Whenever
the rocks in the current were only as thick as the
plums in a boarding-school pudding, we could veture
to run the gantlet; whenever they multiplied
to a school-boy's ideal, we were arrested. Just at
the brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy
into a shady pool by the shore. At such spots we
found a path across the carry. Cancut at once
proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling
birch. Iglesias and I took up the packs and

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hurried on with minds intent on berries. Berries we
always found, — blueberries covered with a cloudy
bloom, blueberries pulpy, saccharine, plenteous.

Often, when a portage was not quite necessary,
a dangerous bit of white water would require the
birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her
alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore,
raced through the thick of the forest, tore through
the briers, and plunged through the punk of trees
older than history, now rotting where they fell,
slain by Time the Giganticide. Cancut then had
us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed at
him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made
vague clutches at the thread of discourse. Now
suppose he should take a fancy to drop down
stream and leave us. What then? Berries then,
and little else, unless we had a chance at a trout
or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to be
left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and
with breadths of lake and mountain and Nature,
shaggy and bearish, between man and man. With
the consciousness of a latent shudder in our hearts
at such a possibility, we parted brier and bramble
until the rapid was passed, we scuffled hastily
through to the river-bank, and there always, in
some quiet nook, was a beacon of red-flannel shirt
among the green leaves over the blue and shadowy
water, and always the fast-sailing Cancut awaiting
us, making the woods resound to amicable hails,
and ready again to be joked and to retaliate.

Such alternations made our voyage a charming

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olla. We had the placid glide, the fleet dash, the
wild career, the pause, the landing, the agreeable
interlude of a portage, and the unburdened stampede
along-shore. Thus we won our way, or our
way wooed us on, until, in early afternoon, a lovely
lakelet opened before us. The fringed shores retired,
and, as we shot forth upon wider calm, lo,
Katahdin! unlooked for, at last, as a revolution.
Our boat ruffled its shadow, doing pretty violence
to its dignity, that we might know the greater
grandeur of the substance. There was a gentle
agency of atmosphere softening the bold forms of
this startling neighbor, and giving it distance,
lest we might fear it would topple and crush us.
Clouds, level below, hid the summit and towered
aloft. Among them we might imagine the mountain
rising with thousands more of feet of heavenpiercing
height: there is one degree of sublimity
in mystery, as there is another degree in certitude.

We lay to in a shady nook, just off Katahdin's
reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him.
Meanwhile I, analyzing my view, presently discovered
a droll image in the track of a land-avalanche
down the front. It was a comical fellow, a little
giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and
should have been thrice as tall, had it had any
proper development, — for out of his head grew
two misdirected skeleton legs, “hanging down and
dangling.” The countenance was long, elfin, sneering,
solemn, as of a truculent demon, saddish for
his trade, an ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He

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had two immense erect ears, and in his boisterous
position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing
save an impudent scalp-lock. A very grotesque
personage. Was he the guardian imp, the legendary
Eft of Katahdin, scoffing already at us as
verdant, and warning that he would make us unhappy,
if we essayed to appear in demon realms
and on Brocken heights without initiation?

“A terrible pooty mountain,” Cancut observed;
and so it is.

Not to fail in topographical duty, I record, that
near this lakelet flows in the river Sowadehunk, and
not far below, a sister streamlet, hardly less melodiously
named Ayboljockameegus. Opposite the
latter we landed and encamped, with Katahdin full
in front, and broadly visible.