CHAPTER XI.

TOWARD KATAHDIN.


Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found below mill-ponds.
Analogously in the Maine rivers, below the lakes, rapids are. Rapids
too often compel carries. While we breakfasted without steak of bear
or cutlet of moose, Ripogenus gradually retracted itself, and became
conscious again of what poetry there is in a lake's pause and a rapid's
flow. Fog condensed into water, and water submitting to its destiny went
cascading down through a wild defile where no birch could follow.

The Ripogenus carry is three miles long, a faint path through thickets.

"First half," said Cancut, "'s plain enough; but after that 't would
take a philosopher with his spectacles on to find it."

This was discouraging. Philosophers twain we might deem ourselves; but
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