Lost Pond

Lost Pond was a tradition, a myth. It had never been seen by any living person. Two dead men, it was alleged, had visited it on several occasions while they were yet living.
Wonderful tales were told about that pond for which many persons had hunted, but which no one of the present generation had ever been able to find.
Every guide in Long Lake township talked about Lost Pond and repeated the legends, which through the passing years had probably lost none of their original enticements. Many of these guides had even got the stories at first hand from Captain Parker and Mitchel Sabattis.
Captain Parker, a famous hunter and trapper, had died about ten years ago at the good old age of ninety-four years. Mitchel Sabattis, an Indian, who had married a white woman and had brought up a family of husky half-breeds, was the first settler in the Long Lake country. He was a highly respected citizen, and a mountain and a United States post office had been named after him. Sabattis lived to be a very old man. Many believed him to be past a hundred years when he died, but the family Bible was not available to prove the date of his birth.
Now, all of the natives knew that Lost Pond was somewhere on Seward Mountain, and they apparently believed that the best fishing place in the State was right in that pond. By Mighty! that pond was just alive with speckled trout — big ones. You could catch all you wanted there in a few minutes. The water fairly boiled with the jumping fish. Now, if we could only find it, etc.
To the layman it would seem, possibly a difficult, but certainly not an impossible task, to find that lost pond; and if it was such a remarkable fishing and hunting place as tradition painted it, why had not some one combed out that mountain and recovered the pond?
Seward Mountain, seen from a distance of ten or fifteen miles, looked like a hogback ridge. A nearer view disclosed the fact that it included several peaks and ridges, and really covered a lot of ground. The highest peak was perhaps not more than twenty-five hundred feet above the lake. But if one could draw a straight line through its base eastward from Raquette River to the foot of Sawtooth Mountain, the line would measure about twelve miles. If a similar line could be stretched northward from Cold River to Ampersand Lake, it would be about eight miles.