We were met by a surprise at our camp. Two men sat there, real men, the
first we had seen since we entered the wilderness. Evidently they were
natives by their look--trappers or prospectors of some sort. They turned
out to be bear hunters, and they looked rather hungrily at the
assortment of fish we had brought in--enough for supper and breakfast.
Perhaps they had not been to fish so frequently as to bear. I believe
they were without tackle, or maybe their luck had been poor--I do not
remember. At all events it developed presently that they needed fish,
also that they had a surplus of butter of a more recent period than the
little dab we had left. They were willing to dicker--a circumstance that
filled us with an enthusiasm which we restrained with difficulty. In
fact, Del did not restrain his quite enough. He promptly offered them
all the fish we had brought in for their extra pound of butter, when we
could just as easily have got it for half the number of fish. Of course
the fish did not seem especially valuable to us, and we were willing
enough to make a meal without them. Still, one can never tell what will
happen, and something like six dollars worth of trout--reckoned by New
York prices--seems an unnecessary sum to pay for a pound of butter,
even in the Nova Scotia woods, though possibly trout will never be worth
quite that much there.
All the same, the price had advanced a good deal by next morning, for
the wind had shifted to the northeast and it was bleak and blustery.
Everybody knows the old rhyme about the winds and the fish--how, when
the winds are north or east, the fish bite least, and how, when the
winds are south and west, the fish bite best. There isn't much poetry in
the old rhyme, but it's charged with sterling truth. Just why a
northerly or easterly wind will take away a fish's appetite, I think has
never been explained, or why a southerly and westerly wind will start
him out hunting for food. But it's all as true as scripture. I have seen
trout stop rising with a shifting of the wind to the eastward as
suddenly as if they had been summoned to judgment, and I have seen them
begin after a cold spell almost before the wind had time to get settled
in its new quarter. Of course it had been Del's idea that we could
easily get trout enough for breakfast. That was another mistake--we
couldn't. We couldn't take them from the river, and we couldn't take
them from our bear hunters, for they had gone. We whipped our lines
around in that chill wind, tangled our flies in treetops, endangered our
immortal souls, and went back to the tents at last without a single
thing but our appetites. Then we took turns abusing Del for his
disastrous dicker by which he had paid no less than five dollars and
seventy-five cents a pound too much for butter, New York market
schedule. Our appetites were not especially for trout--only for hearty
food of some kind, and as I have said before, we had reached a place
where fish had become our real staple. The conditions were particularly
hard on Del himself, for he is a hearty man, and next to jars of
marmalade, baskets of trout are his favorite forage.
In fact, we rather lost interest in our camp, and disagreeable as it
was, we decided to drop down the river to Lake Rossignol and cross over
to the mouth of the Liverpool. It was a long six-mile ferriage across
Rossignol and we could devote our waste time to getting over. By the end
of the trip the weather might change.
The Shelburne is rough below Kempton Dam. It goes tearing and foaming in
and out among the black rocks, and there are places where you have to
get out of the canoes and climb over, and the rocks are slippery and
sometimes there is not much to catch hold of. We shot out into the lake
at last, and I was glad. It was a mistake, however, to be glad just
then. It was too soon. The wind had kicked up a good deal of water, and
though our canoes were lighter than when we started, I did not consider
them suited to such a sea. They pitched about and leaped up into the
air, one minute with the bow entirely out of water, and the next with
it half-buried in the billow ahead. Every other second a big wave ran on
a level with the gunwale, and crested its neck and looked over and
hissed, and sometimes it spilled in upon us. It would not take much of
that kind of freight to make a cargo, and anything like an accident in
that wide, gray billowy place was not a nice thing to contemplate. A
loaded canoe would go down like a bullet. No one clad as we were could
swim more than a boat's length in that sea.
As we got farther on shore the waves got worse. If somebody had just
suggested it I should have been willing to turn around and make back for
the Shelburne. Nobody suggested it, and we went on. It seemed to me
those far, dim shores through the mist, five miles or more away, would
never get any closer. I grew tired, too, and my arms ached, but I could
not stop paddling. I was filled with the idea that if I ever stopped
that eternal dabbing at the water, my end of the canoe would never ride
the next billow. Del reflected aloud, now and then, that we had made a
mistake to come out on such a day. When I looked over at the other canoe
and saw it on the top of a big wave with both ends sticking out in the
air, and then saw it go down in a trough of black, ugly water, I
realized that Del was right. I knew our canoe was doing just such
dangerous things as that, and I would have given any reasonable sum for
an adequate life preserver, or even a handy pine plank--for anything,
in fact, that was rather more certain to stay on top of the water than
this billow-bobbing, birch-bark peanut shell of a canoe.
I suppose I became unduly happy, therefore, when at last we entered the
mouth of the Liverpool. I was so glad that I grew gay, and when we
started up the rapids I gave Del a good lift here and there by pushing
back against the rocks with my paddle, throwing my whole weight on it
sometimes, to send the canoe up in style. It is always unwise for me to
have a gay reaction like that, especially on Friday, which is my unlucky
day. Something is so liable to happen. We were going up a particularly
steep piece of water when I got my paddle against a stone on the bottom
and gave an exceptionally strong push. I don't know just what happened
next. Perhaps my paddle slipped. Del says it did. I know I heard him
give a whoop, and I saw the river coming straight up at me. Then it came
pouring in over the side, and in about a minute more most of our things
were floating downstream, with Del grabbing at them, and me clinging to
the upset canoe, trying to drag it ashore.
We camped there. It was a good place, one of the best yet selected.
Still, I do not recommend selecting a camp in that way. If it did not
turn out well, it might be a poor place to get things dry. One needs to
get a good many things dry after a selection like that, especially on a
cold day. It was a cold night, too. I dried my under things and put
them all on.
"Did you ever sleep in your clothes in the woods?" I have been asked.
I did. I put on every dry thing I had that night, and regretted I had
left anything at home.