t we sleep beside a forest ranger's cabin where also reposed a litter
of spaniel puppies, who forced an entrance to our packs in the night and
devoured every vestige of grouse except a few of the less nutritious
feathers.

Assuredly that enterprise had no prosperous termination; yet, somehow,
in the illogical way of the woods it seemed to us a success--we had
enjoyed it so!

After all, camping is a queer game, totally inexplicable to the
uninitiated. As with some kinds of sinning, the more you do the more you
desire. Assuredly it is a madness--a species of midsummer madness, in
whose throes the sufferer renounces most of the comforts of
civilization, assuming instead all the discomforts of the wilderness.
These campers are lovers of the Open, and like lovers the world over,
there is no reason in them. In the wooing season they hie in pursuit of
their beckoning mistress, who permits closest approach, seemingly, where
the trails are the least trodden, the timber the tallest, and the
mountains the mightiest.

There are many delightful methods of taking such pilgrimages, but none
more alluring than a-horseback, with all one's worldly goods lashed to
the back of a pack-horse, so that freedom of movement is limited only by
one's will and one's woodcraft.

Typical of western mountain lakes is Cultas, which nestles on the
eastern flanks of the Cascades not far from the summit. A wooded
mountain of its own name rises from its southern rim, and elsewhere it
is bordered by sandy strands as white as Cape Cod beaches, by stretches
of marsh and meadow and by higher banks studded with giant pines, whose
trunks nature painted golden copper and the sun burnishes each day.
There we cast adrift from civilization; the trail ended and our riding
horses took to the water at the lakeside, knee-deep wading over round,
slippery rocks being preferable to battling through the thickets of
lodgepole pine which cluttered the bank.

[Illustration: On the trail in the highlands of the Cascades]

[Illustration: "A sky blue lake set like a sapphire in an emerald
mount"]

A lake of trout and sky-blue water is Cultas, where the leisurely may
pitch permanent camp to their hearts' content, and revel in the luxuries
of perfect outdoor loafing, tempered to suit the taste with fly-casting
excursions 'round on rafts, and hunting tramps through the timber, where
one need go no great way to spy the tracks of deer and occasional bear,
or surprise grouse p