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We swept along before the wind, unsteadily, over Lake Chesuncook, at sea in a bowl, "rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard," in our keelless craft. Zephyr only followed us, mild as he was strong, and strong as he was mild. Had he been puffy, it would have been all over with us. But the breeze only sang about our way, and shook the water out of sunny calm.
Doughnuts, ex-barkeepers, and civilization at one end of the lake, and here were muskrat-skins, trappers, and the primeval. Two hunters of moose, in default of their fern-horned, blubber-lipped game, had condescended to muskrat, and were making the lower end of Chesuncook fragrant with muskiness. It is surprising how hospitable and comrade a creature is man.
The painter being wanted, I reduced these measures that night with equal care to lengths and fractions of my umbrella, beginning with the smallest measures, and untying the knots as I proceeded; and when we arrived at Chesuncook the next day, finding a two- foot rule there, I reduced the last to feet and inches; and, moreover, I made myself a two-foot rule of a thin and narrow strip of black ash which would fold up conveniently to six inches.
Besides this result of foraging, we took the hint from a visible cow that milk might be had. Of this also the ex-barkeeper served us out galore, sighing that it was not the punch of his metropolitan days. We put our milk in our tea-pot, and thus, with all the ravages of the past made good, we launched again upon Chesuncook.
The smith seems to have preceded these and every other mechanic at Chesuncook as well as on Olympus, and his family is the most widely dispersed, whether he be christened John or Ansell. Smith owned two miles down the lake by half a mile in width. There were about one hundred acres cleared here.
After breakfasting on moose-meat, we returned down Pine Stream on our way to Chesuncook Lake, which was about five miles distant. We could see the red carcass of the moose lying in Pine Stream when nearly half a mile off.
For sale by D. Appleton & Co., New York. The first of the papers contained in this book was published in 'The Union Magazine; the second, 'Chesuncook, came out in the 'Atlantic Monthly, in 1858; the last is now for the first time printed. Henry D. Thoreau was an enthusiastic lover of nature, but no blind adorer of her loveliness. He knew her in all her moods, was familiar with all her caprices.
We both needed to be somewhere near the heart of New England's wildest wilderness. We needed to see Katahdin, the distinctest mountain to be found on this side of the continent. Katahdin was known to Iglesias. He had scuffled up its eastern land-slides with a squad of lumbermen. He had birched it down to Lake Chesuncook in by-gone summers, to see Katahdin distant.
After a dinner, at which apple-sauce was the greatest luxury to me, but our moose-meat was oftenest called for by the lumberers, I walked across the clearing into the forest, southward, returning along the shore. For my dessert, I helped myself to a large slice of the Chesuncook woods, and took a hearty draught of its waters with all my senses.
Chesuncook, according to its quality of lake, had no aid to give us with current. Paddling all a hot August mid-day over slothful water would be tame, day-laborer's work. But there was a breeze. Good! Come, kind Zephyr, fill our red blanket-sail! Cancut's blanket in the bow became a substitute for Cancut's paddle in the stern.
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