what is a craftsman without tools? And never a goggle had we.

But the trappers of muskrats had become our fast friends. They insisted
upon lightening our loads over the brambly league. This was kindly.
Cancut's elongated head-piece, the birch, was his share of the burden;
and a bag of bread, a firkin of various grub, damp blankets for three,
and multitudinous traps, seemed more than two could carry at one trip
over this longest and roughest of portages.

We paddled from the camp to the lake-foot, and there, while the others
compacted the portables for portage, Iglesias and I, at cost of a
ducking with mist-drops from the thickets, scrambled up a crag for a
supreme view of the fair lake and the clear mountain. And we did
well. Katahdin, from the hill guarding the exit of the Penobscot from
Ripogenus, is eminent and emphatic, a signal and solitary pyramid,
grander than any below the realms of the unchangeable, more distinctly
mountainous than any mountain of those that stop short of the venerable
honors of eternal snow.

We trod the trail, we others, easier than Cancut. He found it hard to
thread the mazes of an overgrown path and navigate his canoe at the
same time. "Better," thought he, as he staggered and plunged and bumped
along, extricating his boat-bonnet now from a bower of raspberry-bushes,
now from the branches of a brotherly birch-tree,--"better," thought he,
"were I seated in what I bear, and bounding gayly over the billow. Peril
is better than pother."

Bushwhacking thus for a league, we circumvented the peril, and came upon
the river flowing fair and free. The trappers said adieu, and launched
us. Back then they went to consult their traps and flay their fragrant
captives, and we shot forward.

That was a day all poetry and all music. Mountain airs bent and blunted
the noonday sunbeams. There was shade of delicate birches on either
hand, whenever we loved to linger. Our feather-shallop went dancing
on, fleet as the current, and whenever a passion for speed came after
moments of luxurious sloth, we could change floating at the river's
will into leaps and chasing, with a few strokes of the paddle. All was
untouched, unvisited wilderness, and we from bend to bend the first
discoverers. So we might fancy ourselves; for civilization had been
here only to cut pines, not to plant houses. Yet these fair curves, and
liberal reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered river were
only solitary, not lonely.