It was raining next morning, but that was not the worst. During the
night I had awakened with a curious, but not entirely unfamiliar
sensation about one of my eyes. There was a slight irritant, itching
tendency, and the flesh felt puffy to the touch. I tried to believe it
was imagination, and went to sleep again.
But there was no doubt next morning. Imagination is a taunting jade, but
I don't believe she could close one of my eyes and fatten up the
other--not in so short a time. It was poison ivy--that was what it
was--and I had it bad.
[Illustration: "Our one looking-glass was not big enough to hold all of
even one eye."]
When Eddie woke, which he did, finally, he took one look at me and dove
back into his sleeping bag out of pure fear. He said I was a sight, and
he was correct. Our one looking-glass was not big enough to hold all of
even one eye, but taking my features in sections I could see that he had
not overstated my appearance. Perhaps the situation was amusing, too--at
least Eddie, and even the guides, professed to be entertained--but for
me, huddled against one side of a six by eight tent--a tent otherwise
packed with bags and bundles and traps of various kinds--Eddie's things,
mostly, and Eddie himself among them--with a chill rain coming down
outside, and with a face swollen and aching in a desperate way with
poison, the quality of the humor to me seemed strained when I tried to
distinguish it with the part of an eye I had left.
Eddie meantime had dived down into his bag of remedies, happy to have a
chance to use any or all of them, and was laying them out on his
sleeping bag in front of him--in his lap, as it were, for he had not
yet arisen--reading the labels and wondering which he should try on me
first. I waited a little, then I said:
"Never mind those, Eddie, give me your alcohol and witch hazel."
But then came an embarrassing moment. Running his eye over the bottles
and cans Eddie was obliged to confess that not one of them contained
either alcohol or witch hazel.
"Eddie," I said reproachfully, "can it be, in a drug store like that,
there is neither alcohol nor witch hazel?"
He nodded dismally.
"I meant to bring them," he said, "but the triple extract of gelsemium
would do such a lot of things, and I thought I didn't need them, and
then you made fun of that, and--and----"
"Never mind, Eddie," I said, "I have an inspiration. If alcohol cures
it, maybe whisky will, and thank Heaven we did bring the whisky!"
We remained two days in that camp and I followed up the whisky treatment
faithfully. It rained most of the time, so the delay did not matter.
Indeed it was great luck that we were not held longer by that
distressing disorder which comes of the malignant three-leaved plant
known as mercury, or poison ivy. Often it has disqualified me for a week
or more. But the whisky treatment was a success. Many times a day I
bathed my face in the pure waters of the lake and then with the
spirits--rye or Scotch, as happened to be handy. By the afternoon of the
first day I could see to put sirup on my flapjacks, and once between
showers I felt able to go out with Eddie in the canoe, during which
excursion he took a wonderful string of trout in a stagnant-looking,
scummy pool where no one would ever expect trout to lie, and where no
one but Eddie could have taken them at all.
By the next morning, after a night of sorrow--for my face always pained
and itched worse when everybody was in bed and still, with nothing to
soothe me but the eternal drip, drip from the boughs and from the eaves
of the tent--the swelling was still further reduced, and I felt able to
travel. And I wish to add here in all seriousness that whatever may be
your scruples against the use of liquors, don't go into the woods
without whisky--rye or Scotch, according to preference. Alcohol, of
course, is good for poison ivy, but whisky is better. Maybe it is
because of the drugs that wicked men are said to put into it. Besides,
whisky has other uses. The guides told us of one perfectly rigid person
who, when he had discovered that whisky was being included in his camp
supplies, had become properly incensed, and commanded that it be left at
home. The guides had pleaded that he need not drink any of it, that they
would attend to that part of what seemed to them a necessary camp duty,
but he was petrified in his morals, and the whisky remained behind.
Well, they struck a chilly snap, and it rained. It was none of your
little summer landscape rains, either. It was a deadly cold, driving,
drenching saturation. Men who had built their houses on the sand, and
had no whisky, were in a bad fix. The waves rose and the tents blew
down, and the rigid, fossilized person had to be carried across an
overflowed place on the back of a guide, lifting up his voice meanwhile
in an effort to convince the Almighty that it was a mistake to let it
rain at this particular time, and calling for whisky at every step.
It is well to carry one's morals into the woods, but if I had to leave
either behind, I should take the whisky.
It was a short carry to Lake Pescawah. Beyond that water we carried
again about a quarter of a mile to a lake called Pebbleloggitch--perhaps
for the reason that the Indian who picked out the name couldn't find a
harder one. From Pebbleloggitch we made our way by a long canal-like
stillwater through a land wherein no man--not even an Indian,
perhaps--has ever made his home, for it lies through a weird, lonely
marsh--a sort of meadow which no reaper ever harvested, where none but
the wild moose ever feeds.
We were nearing the edge of the unknown now. One of the guides, Del, I
think, had been through this stillwater once before, a long time ago. At
the end of it, he knew, lay the upper Shelburne River, which was said to
flow through a sheet of water called Irving Lake. But where the river
entered the lake and where it left it was for us to learn. Already forty
miles or more from our starting point, straight into the wilderness, we
were isolated from all mankind, and the undiscovered lay directly
before. At the end of the stillwater Del said:
"Well, gentlemen, from this on you know as much of the country as I do.
All I know is what I've heard, and that's not much. I guess most of it
we'll have to learn for ourselves."