The roar of the rapids was now so loud that it drowned all other sounds. Presently he became aware that they were no longer in mid-stream. With a few powerful strokes the guide shot the canoe into a back eddy and a second later it grounded lightly on a tiny sand beach where Jim held it until Walter could leap out and pull it up securely.
“How’d yer like thet?” shouted the guide as he lifted his pack basket out.
“Great!” replied the boy, his eyes shining with excitement, as he helped take out the duffle.
Big Jim adjusted the basket to his back, lashed the paddles across the thwarts of the canoe so that when they rested on his shoulders, with the canoe inverted over his head, it balanced perfectly, and leaving Walter to follow with the rest of the duffle plunged into what seemed at first glance an almost impenetrable thicket of maple, birch and moosewood.
Walter found, however, that there was a well-defined trail, albeit a rough one. It followed the course of the river, over moss-grown decaying tree trunks, across old skidways, now firm to the foot and again a bed of oozy black swamp muck in which he sank half-way to his knees. After a mile of this they came out on the bank of the river just at the foot of the falls which marked the end of the rapids. The canoe was launched at once and in a few minutes they were again speeding down-stream.
Three and a half miles below they made another portage. This put them in a lake at the upper end of which a shallow stream connected with a string of three small ponds. The last of these was known as Lonesome Pond, and this was their destination.
CHAPTER VIII
LONESOME POND
Lonesome Pond was well named. A mile long by perhaps half a mile wide at its widest point, it lay like a turquoise in an emerald setting between two mountains whose upper slopes were dark with a splendid stand of spruce and pine. A magnificent growth of birch, maple and ash with an occasional pine or hemlock scattered among them grew to the water’s edge, save along the southern end where they had entered. Here for some distance a sphagnum swamp, dotted with graceful tamaracks, extended on either side of the narrow outlet, in places forming a natural open meadow.
The pond was shallow at this end, with great masses of lily-pads, both of the white and the yellow or cow-lily. In contrast to this the shore of the upper end was bold and rocky, heavily wooded to the water’s edge. Here on a tiny patch of shingle, the only break in the rocky shore line, the canoe was beached. A trail led up for a hundred yards into a grove of hemlocks where, completely hidden from the lake, was the camp which was Big Jim’s objective point. Two comfortable lean-tos had been built perhaps ten feet apart and facing each other, with a stout windbreak closing one side between the two. The lean-tos were of hemlock bark, peeled from forest giants and flattened to huge sheets. These sheets formed the sides, back and steeply sloping roofs, the entire front of each, after the manner of all lean-tos, being left open. In the middle, between the two, were the charred embers of old fires, while the matted brown needles of small hemlock and balsam twigs in both lean-tos bore mute witness to the spicy, comfortable beds of other campers. A rough board table stood at one side of the fireplace.