“You’d never take a prize in a beauty show, but I’m sure glad I got you instead of you getting me,” he muttered. “If I only had some way of making a fire, I believe I’d sample you, ugly as you look, but I don’t believe I can quite go you raw just yet. But that friend of yours had better stay away, unless he wants to get sampled.”
With renewed courage he started off down the stream once more, after pulling his belt up a couple of notches.
“Hope I find something to eat before this belt buckle meets itself,” he grinned.
This time his hopes were realized, for he had gone not more than a hundred yards when he came upon a raspberry patch. The bushes hung red with the big, luscious berries, and his heart leaped for joy as he saw them. It was characteristic of him that before eating a berry he knelt down and whispered a brief but earnest prayer of thankfulness.
“I never knew that anything could taste so good,” he thought, as berry followed berry into his mouth.
He ate as many as he dared, but far from what he wanted, knowing that it would be dangerous to overload his stomach in its present condition. Then he made, not without considerable difficulty, owing to his inexperience, a basket of birch bark, which would hold several quarts. This he filled in a short time, and after eating a few more, he again set off down the stream.
As he trudged along he wondered that his friends had not found him, but he failed to take into account the vastness of the forest and the fact that sound waves, broken by the thickly growing trees, do not carry so far in the woods as in the open.
From the position of the sun he judged it to be about noon, when he suddenly emerged from the thick woods and found himself on the shore of a lake.
“Now the big question is whether or not this is the right lake,” he thought as he looked out upon its surface.
He fancied that it was not so large as the lake where they had camped two nights before, but he could not be sure.