So the only thing for me to do was to sit down on an old rotten log, that I had at last stumbled on, and wait for more light. The wild, scared thoughts and weird, horrible sounds that went through my head while I sat on that log in that dark woods that long, long night, can never be described. There were owls, bats, and other solemn birds of the night, sitting on the adjacent trees, hooting in chorus, and flying past a crazy-looking, wild boy of the woods, sitting like a knot on a log, wild-eyed, and with frantic gestures that would become a person with an attack of mania, who attempts blindly to protect and defend himself from imaginary enemies that would fly uncomfortably close.
I didn't see any big game. I didn't want to see any. I was not hunting; but I imagined there was a whole menagerie of such things around me. We hear a great deal about the silence and the majestic grandeur of the forest, but that's all poetry. There are more noises—and the most horrible noises—when alone, to be heard in a deep wood on a still, quiet night than ever I heard in the streets of any city at midnight.
It was these sounds that stirred the blood in my veins and kept the cold chills running down my back, so that I sat there and shook like one with an attack of ague.
When I could stand it no longer, and found it impossible to move in either direction, I climbed a tree. In getting up a pretty good-sized tree, I felt that I was out of the world and away from the danger of crawling and creeping things, though the owls became more curious and inquisitive than ever. That wood was full of owls. I was more afraid of them that night than of panthers—or Rebels either.
Once up in the tree, I was kept busily employed with the necessity for constantly changing my position. I couldn't get "fixed" comfortably on any limb or crotch in that old tree, and I verily believe that I "adapted myself" to every position that it afforded.
From my elevated position in the top branch of the tree I could look out through the tops of adjoining trees. It was before the season for the leaves to be thick in that section.
In one direction, I discovered what I had at first taken for a heavy cloud on the horizon were the outlines of the mountain. There were no signs, from my outlook, of the house and road I had seen last before coming into the woods. There was nothing whatever to serve as a guide, except the little North star. I could only wait for daylight, which must soon come. It seemed as if I had been ages in the woods. I looked eagerly for the breaking of the gray dawn, but I had been straining my eyes in the wrong direction, expecting in my dazed condition to see the first glimmer come from the western horizon. It was when I looked back of me, with a sigh of discouragement, that I first beheld the light of a coming dawn.
"Night's candles were burnt out,
And jocund day stood tiptoe
On the misty mountain top."
In a moment I became renewed with the old life and fire of those boyish days. Only stopping long enough to get a good view of the surrounding hills or mountains, I was able to discover that the Gap, from whence I came, was, apparently, closer than when I had first taken to the woods in the early twilight.
If I didn't know exactly where to go to find the Union pickets, I saw quite plainly where not to go, and knowing that I'd not make any mistake in getting further away from the Gap, I crawled hastily out of the tree, and in another moment was hopping along through the woods, which were yet quite dark down on the ground.