He had not imagined that it would be so difficult to find one’s way, unaided, in this wilderness of endless trees and underbrush, through whose changing aspects ran the same mystifying thread as if the gold-brown gloom of a shadowy hill-slope,—where only the sunbeams waltzing on dry pine-needles seemed alive,—or the jeweled twilight of a grassy alley bound a gossamer handkerchief about one’s eyes, so that one groped blindfold against a blank wall of uncertainty.
“Say! but I wish I had brought my pocket compass with me,” groaned the scout. “Guess I didn’t live up to our scout motto: Be Prepared! But then—” he looked at his cousin—”we started out with the intention of going down the river and you objected to my trotting back for it, Marcoo, when we determined on a hike through the woods.”
“I was afraid that if the men knew what we were planning, they’d have headed us off as Toiney tried to do,” confessed Marcoo candidly.
“Well, I wish now that I had gone back; I could have packed the luncheon into my knapsack; it would have been much more easily carried than in this basket. I miss my staff too!” Nixon deposited the lunch-basket, with which he was now impeded, on the ground in a green woodland glade where the noble forest trees, red oak, cedar, maple, interspersed with an occasional pine, hemlock, or balsam fir, rose to a height of from sixty to a hundred feet, bordering a patch of open ground, starred with wildflowers, dotted with berries.
Delicate queen’s lace, purple gentians, starry wood-asters, waxen Indian pipes, made it seem as if this must be the wood-fairies’ dancing-ground, where at night they rode a moonbeam from flower to flower, and sipped juice from the milk-berries, bunch-berries or scarlet fox-berries that strayed at intervals along the ground.
“I’d like to stay here forever.” Colin stretched himself upon a bank of moss, his mind going back to the explorer’s longing, to the wood-hunger which had consumed him, as he lay upon the fragrant marsh-grass some hours before. He was getting his wish now—and not everybody gets that without having to pay for it. “The trees look kind o’ fatherly an’ protecting; don’t they?” he murmured lazily.
Yes, here one felt admitted to the companionship of those noble trees,—the greatest story-tellers that ever were, when one listens and interprets their conversations with the breeze. A “Hurrah for the woods!” was on every tongue as the boys chewed a berry or smoked a pearly orchid pipe.
Moods changed a little as they took up their wandering again and presently waded, single file, through a jungle of bushes, scrub oak, dwarf pine, pigmy cedar and birch, laced with brambles. Here the trees overhead were of less magnitude and the tall leafy undergrowth foamed about their ears, giving them somewhat the distracted feeling of being cast away on a trackless sea—each sequestered in his own little boat—with emerald billows shutting out all view of port.