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Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful is dawn in the
woods. Sweet the first opalescent stir, as if the
vanguard sunbeams shivered as they dashed along
the chilly reaches of night. And the growth of
day, through violet and rose and all its golden
glow of promise, is tender and tenderly strong, as
the deepening passions of dawning love. Presently
up comes the sun very peremptory, and says to
people, “Go about your business! Laggards not
allowed in Maine! Nothing here to repent of, while
you lie in bed and curse to-day because it cannot
shake off the burden of yesterday; all clear the
past here; all serene the future: into it at once!”

Birch was ready for us. Objects we travel on,
if horses, often stampede or are stampeded; if
wagons, they break down; if shanks, they stiffen;
if feet, they chafe. No such trouble befalls Birch;
leak, however, it will, as ours did this morning.
We gently beguiled it into the position taken tearfully
by unwhipped little boys, when they are
about to receive birch. Then, with a firebrand, the
pitch of the seams was easily persuaded to melt
and spread a little over the leaky spot, and Birch
was sound as a drum.

Staunch and sound Birch needed to be, for presently
Penobscot, always a skittish young racer,

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began to grow lively after he had shaken off the
weighty shadow of Katahdin, and, kicking up his
heels, went galloping down hill, so furiously that
we were at last, after sundry frantic plunges, compelled
to get off his back before worse befell us.
In the balmy morning we made our first portage
through a wood of spruces. How light our firkin
was growing! its pork, its hard-tack, and its condiments
were diffused among us three, and had
passed into muscle. Lake Degetus, as pretty a
pocket lake as there is, followed the carry. Next
came Lake Ambajeejus, larger, but hardly less lovely.
Those who dislike long names may use its
shorter Indian title, Umdo. We climbed a granite
crag draped with moss long as the beard of a
Druid, — a crag on the south side of Ambajeejus, or
Umdo. Thence we saw Katahdin, noble as ever,
unclouded in the sunny morning, near, and yet enchantingly
vague, with the blue sky which surrounded
it. It was still an isolate pyramid rising
with no effect from the fair blue lakes and the fair
green sea of the birch-forest, — a brilliant sea of
woods, gay as the shallows of ocean shot through
with sunbeams and sunlight reflected upward from
golden sands.

We sped along all that exquisite day, best of all
our poetic voyage. Sometimes we drifted and
basked in sunshine, sometimes we lingered in the
birchen shade; we paddled from river to lake, from
lake to river again; the rapids whirled us along,
surging and leaping under us with magnificent

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gallop; frequent carries struck in, that we might not
lose the forester in the waterman. It was a fresh
world that we traversed on our beautiful riverpath, —
new as if no other had ever parted its overhanging
bowers.

At noon we floated out upon Lake Pemadumcook,
the largest bulge of the Penobscot, and irregular
as the verb To Be. Lumbermen name it
Bammydumcook: Iglesias insisted upon this as the
proper reading; and as he was the responsible
man of the party, I accepted it. Woods, woody
hills, and woody mountains surround Bammydumcook.
I have no doubt parts of it are pretty,
and will be famous in good time; but we saw little.
By the time we were fairly out in the lake and
away from the sheltering shore, a black squall to
windward, hiding all the West, warned us to fly,
for birches swamp in squalls. We deemed that
Birch, having brought us through handsomely, deserved
a better fate: swamped it must not be. We
plied paddle valiantly, and were almost safe behind
an arm of the shore when the storm overtook us,
and in a moment more, safe, with a canoe only half-full
of Bammydumcook water.

It is easy to speak in scoffing tone; but when
that great roaring blackness sprang upon us, and
the waves, showing their white teeth, snarled
around, we were far from being in the mood to
scoff. It is impossible to say too much of the
charm of this gentle scenery, mingled with the
charm of this adventurous sailing. And then there

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were no mosquitoes, no alligators, no serpents
uncomfortably hugging the trees, no miasmas lurking
near; and blueberries always. Dust there was
none, nor the things that make dust. But Iglesias
and I were breathing AIR, — Air sweet, tender,
strong, and pure as an ennobling love. It was a
day very happy, for Iglesias and I were near what
we both love almost best of all the dearly-beloveds.
It is such influence as this that rescues the thought
and the hand of an artist from enervating mannerism.
He cannot be satisfied with vague blotches
of paint to convey impressions so distinct and vivid
as those he is forced to take direct from a Nature
like this. He must be true and powerful.

The storm rolled by and gave us a noble view of
Katahdin, beyond a broad, beautiful scope of water,
and rising seemingly directly from it. We fled before
another squall, over another breadth of Bammydumcook,
and made a portage around a great
dam below the lake. The world should know that
at this dam the reddest, spiciest, biggest, thickest
wintergreen-berries in the world are to be found,
beautiful as they are good.

Birch had hitherto conducted himself with perfect
propriety. I, the novice, had acquired such
entire confidence in his stability of character that I
treated him with careless ease, and never listened
to the warnings of my comrades that he would
serve me a trick. Cancut navigated Birch through
some white water below the dam, and Birch went
curveting proudly and gracefully along, evidently

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feeling his oats. When Iglesias and I came to embark,
I, the novice, perhaps a little intoxicated
with wintergreen-berries, stepped jauntily into the
laden boat. Birch, alas! failed me. He tilted; he
turned; he took in Penobscot, — took it in by the
quart, by the gallon, by the barrel; he would have
sunk without mercy, had not Iglesias and Cancut
succeeded in laying hold of a rock and restoring
equilibrium. I could not have believed it of Birch.
I was disappointed, and in consternation; and if I
had not known how entirely it was Birch's fault
that everybody was ducked and everybody now
had a wet blanket, I should have felt personally
foolish. I punished myself for another's fault and
my own inexperience by assuming the wet blankets
as my share at the next carry. I suppose few of
my readers imagine how many pounds of water a
blanket can absorb.

After camps at Katahdin any residence in the
woods without a stupendous mountain before the
door would have been tame. It must have been
this, and not any wearying of sylvan life, that
made us hasten to reach the outermost log-house
at the Millinoket carry before nightfall. The sensation
of house and in-door life would be a new
one, and so satisfying in itself that we should not
demand beautiful objects to meet our first blink of
awakening eyes.

An hour before sunset, Cancut steered us toward
a beach, and pointed out a vista in the woods, evidently
artificial, evidently a road trodden by feet

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and hoofs, and ruled by parallel wheels. A road is
one of the kindliest gifts of brother man to man: if
a path in the wilderness, it comes forward like a
friendly guide offering experience and proposing a
comrade dash deeper into the unknown world; if
a highway, it is the great, bold, sweeping character
with which civilization writes its autograph upon a
continent. Leaving our plunder on the beach, beyond
the reach of plunderers, whose great domain
we were about to enter, we walked on toward the
first house, compelled at parting to believe, that,
though we did not love barbarism less, we loved
civilization more. In the morning, Cancut should,
with an ox-cart, bring Birch and our traps over
the three miles of the carry.