rood away from the place.

Perhaps it was to one of those same little ones that I owe a service
for which I am more than grateful. It was in September, when I was at
a lake ten miles away--the same lake into which a score of frolicking
young loons gathered before moving south, and swam a race or two for
my benefit. I was lost one day, hopelessly lost, in trying to make my
way from a wild little lake where I had been fishing, to the large
lake where my camp was. It was late afternoon. To avoid the long hard
tramp down a river, up which I had come in the early morning, I
attempted to cut across through unbroken forest without a compass.
Traveling through a northern forest in summer is desperately hard
work. The moss is ankle deep, the underbrush thick; fallen logs lie
across each other in hopeless confusion, through and under and over
which one must make his laborious way, stung and pestered by hordes of
black flies and mosquitoes. So that, unless you have a strong instinct
of direction, it is almost impossible to hold your course without a
compass, or a bright sun, to guide you.

I had not gone half the distance before I was astray. The sun was long
obscured, and a drizzling rain set in, without any direction whatever
in it by the time it reached the underbrush where I was. I had begun
to make a little shelter, intending to put in a cheerless night there,
when I heard a cry, and looking up caught a glimpse of Hukweem
speeding high over the tree-tops. Far down on my right came a faint
answering cry, and I hastened in its direction, making an Indian
compass of broken twigs as I went along. Hukweem was a young loon, and
was long in coming down. The crying ahead grew louder. Stirred up from
their day rest by his arrival, the other loons began their sport
earlier than usual. The crying soon became almost continuous, and I
followed it straight to the lake.

Once there, it was a simple matter to find the river and my old canoe
waiting patiently under the alders in the gathering twilight. Soon I
was afloat again, with a sense of unspeakable relief that only one
can appreciate who has been lost and now hears the ripples sing under
him, knowing that the cheerless woods lie behind, and that the
camp-fire beckons beyond yonder point. The loons were hallooing far
away, and I went over--this time in pure gratitude--to see them again.
But my guide was modest and vanished post-haste into the mist the
moment my canoe appeared.

Sinc