Breakfasting about eight next morning, we made preparations for our tramp through the woods. The guide was very useful to us in knowing what provisions to get. His younger brother, too—himself training for a guide—came along with us, for a consideration, to help carry our load.
Taking one more meal at Washbond’s, we started in the heat of noon. A couple of miles brought us to the woods proper. Here the character of the road changed, of course, and the “pull” began. It was surprising how cool the air of the woods was when we stopped to breathe and sat down with our packs; whereas, wherever the sun got at us through the trees, he “let us know he was there.” But had the fatigue of those first miles through the woods been twice or ten times as great, it would have been more than repaid when, suddenly, a turn in the road brought us in view of the Lower Au Sable Lake.
One of our trio, whom we called Colonel (for we thought it wise to travel incog.—the second being Judge, and myself Doctor), had run on ahead of the guides—a practice he kept up throughout the trip. We heard him shout as he came upon the lake, and he told us afterwards
that he had taken off his hat and thanked God for having lived to see that view. There lay the water in the light of afternoon, long, narrow, and winding out of sight. To either shore sloped a mountain, wooded, clear-cut, precipitous.
It was quite romantic to be told we had to navigate this lake. But first there were the Rainbow Falls to see. Our end of the lake (not included in the above view) was choked up with fallen timber. Crossing on some trunks to the other shore, we had but a few minutes’ walk before we came into a rocky hollow of wildest beauty, where, from a cliff some hundred and fifty feet high, leapt the torrent—scarcely “with delirious bound,” nor, of course, with the bulk it would have had in winter, yet with terrible majesty—into a channel below us. It did not wear the rainbow coronal, the time of day being too late. But the glen was well worth a visit, and deliciously cool from the spray.
The boat we were to voyage in was the property of the guide—a light craft, and rather too crank to be comfortable, particularly with a load of five on board, to say nothing of the dog and the baggage; so that, in fact, our passage along the lake and between the giant slopes was not as pleasant as it might have been. After some difficult navigation at the other end of the lake, the crew was safely landed with the baggage, and the boat hidden in some bushes. Then a trudge through the woods again for a couple of miles at least (distances, by the bye, are peculiar in these regions), till we issued on the bank of the Au Sable River where it leaves the Upper Lake. It was during this march that the Colonel
(who had brought his gun) got a shot at a certain bird, and knocked too many feathers from her not to have killed her, though neither he nor the dog could find her; and this was, positively, the only game he sighted the whole trip through.
But here a second boat was found hidden and ready, and one a little larger than the first. And now came the scene of our excursion. We seemed to have entered an enchanted land—to be floating on a veritable fairy lake. The vision stole over us like a dream. Then, too, it was “the heavenliest hour of heaven” for such a scene: the sun set, and twilight just begun. The picture, as a whole, will ever remain in my memory as, of its kind, the loveliest it has been my happiness to see. But, my dear friend, it “beggars all description.” I can only ask you to imagine it, while I jot down a few points of detail.
The Upper Au Sable differs strikingly from the Lower, although, of course, equally formed by, and a part of, the same river. It is less long, but also less narrow; and while to the left, as you glide up it, there stands but one mountain from shore to sky, to the right you behold other majestic summits towering above the wooded slope. So, again, on looking back, you see a gap of fantastic grandeur, and, fronting you, is a wide opening, relieved by a single peak. This peak, as we then saw it, wore the bewitching blue that distance and evening combine to “lend”—a charm which I, for one (and surely all lovers of nature), can never enough feast my eyes upon. The summits to the right and behind us were also robed in various shades of “purple,” which deepened with the twilight. The glassy water was covered here and there
with yellow-blossomed lilies. Even the green of the woods partook with the sky