ACCEPTING THE SITUATION.
Through the woods you stumble, pressing the wet branches aside, which in their recoil push away your rubber clothing, from which the buttons are fast disappearing and the rents appearing, and whose special protection is sadly deficient, until the repetition of such circumstances as thoroughly drenches you as if you had been without them. The water is dripping from off your hat to your neck and rolling down your back in icy rills. The position of your arms in carrying your “kit” is such as to lead a looker-on to imagine you are striving hard to fill your sleeves with the rain, which you know is a mistake, but there is no help for it. You clutch tightly to your rifle as your pack begins to slip, striving to keep the locks from the rain, while your boots have been innocently occupied in catching every scanty drop which fell from your clothing, and you have every appearance, if not the feeling, of the oft-quoted “drowned rat.” You would not have your wife, or other friend, see you at this moment for anything. How they would laugh, and hurl at you many of your pet quotations regarding the “poetry, pleasure, and romance of life in the woods,” until you had rather endure another storm than their irony.
Then comes the raising of the wet tent into position, the repeated attempts to start the fire, and the holding of every individual fir branch in the flame to dry before performing the duty of bed.
Two forked sticks with one across are placed before the fire, and on them you hang boots, socks, blankets, and other articles of your belongings, and, while the guides are cleaning your guns, you examine the provision boxes to see if they have escaped the drenching.
It is amusing how stoical and indifferent one grows to these circumstances in the woods, and soon makes but little of them, retaining as serene and unruffled a disposition as if they were of no account, while after a warm supper and a social pipe they pass from memory.
Stair Falls
I will not weary the reader by a description of the passage of each fall from day to day on our route, some of which we ran, and past others we “carried,” letting the canoes, as before, over the difficulties by long ropes from the cliffs above. After passing Spring Brook Gravel Bed Falls, we paddled through a mile or two of heavy “rips” and entered some two miles of “dead water.”