The morning was depressing and the sky was overcast with low-hanging, heavy clouds, but almost with our start, as if to give us courage for our work and fire our blood, the leaden curtain was drawn aside and the deep blue dome of heaven rose above us. The sun shone warm and bright, and the smell of the fresh damp forest, the incense of the wilderness gods, was carried to us by a puff of wind from the south which enabled Duncan to hoist his sails. The rest of us bent to our paddles, and all were eager to plunge into the unknown and solve the mystery of what lay beyond the horizon.
Our nineteen-foot canoe was manned by Pete in the bow, Stanton in the center and Easton in the stern, while I had the bow and Richards the stern of the eighteen-foot canoe. We paddled along the north shore of the lake, close to land. Stanton, with an eye for fresh meat, espied a porcupine near the water’s edge and stopped to kill it, thus gaining the honor of having bagged the first game of the trip. At twelve o’clock we halted for luncheon, in almost the same spot where Hubbard and I had lunched when going up Grand Lake two years before. While Pete cooked bacon and eggs and made tea, Stanton and Richards dressed the porcupine for supper.
After luncheon we cut diagonally across the lake to the southern shore, passed Cape Corbeau River and landed near the base of Cape Corbeau bluff, that the elevation might be taken and geological specimens secured. After making our observations we turned again toward the northern shore, where more specimens were collected. Here Tom and Henry Blake said goodby to us and turned homeward.
During the afternoon Stanton and I each killed a porcupine, making three in all for the day—a good beginning in the matter of game.
At sunset we landed at Watty’s Brook, a small stream flowing into Grand Lake from the north, and some twenty miles above the rapid. Our progress during the day had been slow, as the wind had died away and we had, several times, to wait for Duncan to overtake us in his slower rowboat.
While the rest of us “made camp” Duncan cut wood for a rousing fire, as the evening was cool, and Pete put a porcupine to boil for supper. We were a hungry crowd when we sat down to eat. I had told the boys how good porcupine was, how it resembled lamb and what a treat we were to have. But all porcupines are not alike, and this one was not within my reckoning. Tough! He was certainly “the oldest inhabitant,” and after vain efforts to chew the leathery meat, we turned in disgust to bread and coffee, and Easton, at least, lost faith forever in my judgment of toothsome game, and formed a particular prejudice against porcupines which he never overcame. Pete assured us, however, that, “This porcupine, he must boil long. I boil him again to-night and boil him again to-morrow morning. Then he very good for breakfast. Porcupine fine. Old one must be cooked long.”
So Pete, after supper, put the porcupine on to cook some more, promising that we should find it nice and tender for breakfast.
As I sat that night by the low-burning embers of our first camp fire I forgot my new companions. Through the gathering night mists I could just discern the dim outlines of the opposite shore of Grand Lake. It was over there, just west of that high spectral bluff, that Hubbard and I, on a wet July night, had pitched our first camp of the other trip. In fancy I was back again in that camp and Hubbard was talking to me and telling me of the “bully story” of the mystic land of won-ders that lay “behind the ranges” he would have to take back to the world.
“We’re going to traverse a section no white man has ever seen,” he exclaimed, “and we’ll add something to the world’s knowledge of geography at least, and that’s worth while. No matter how little a man may add to the fund of human knowledge it’s worth the doing, for it’s by little bits that we’ve learned to know so much of our old world. There’s some hard work before us, though, up there in those hills, and some hardships to meet.”
Ah, if we had only known!