Mud Pond Stream being almost dry, we were forced the next morning to carry our canoes and kit almost a mile, depositing them at last in the stream which flows through the moose barren bordering on Chamberlin Lake.
Here we found ourselves in a wild, desolate country. The stream along which we moved ran through an immense tract of bog, which was dotted here and there with old stumps reaching for a quarter of a mile in every direction. This was bounded in the dim distance by a dead wood forest, which enclosed it completely like a chevaux de frise. Within this was presented a most lugubrious landscape. It was the picture of a region dead to the world and to itself. The old grey stumps scattered about seemed like storm-beaten tombstones which marked the resting-places of perished souls, and the naked, bleached forms of the trees in the palisade like sentinel skeletons guarding a death ground.
OUTLET OF CHAMBERLIN LAKE.
Soon with our three canoes in line we entered the waters of Chamberlin Lake. There we were suddenly startled by hearing a loud splash in the water, and greeted with the vision of an immense bull caribou, which sprang up and instantly disappeared in she woods before we could tender him the slightest compliment at the pleasure of the meeting.
“Confound the luck!” yelled John, throwing aside a rifle in exasperating disappointment.
“Exceedingly impolite of the beast to decamp so suddenly” said the Colonel, as we examined the animal’s tracks; “he would have weighed three hundred pounds, if an ounce!”
CHAMBERLIN FARM.
Chamberlin Lake is eighteen miles long, three miles wide, and is one of the largest bodies of water in Maine. At this point, the preceding year, I turned south through the East Branch of the Penobscot, and landed at Mattawamkeag on the European and North American Railroad. This year our course lay directly to the north.