in theory it is elastic and consoling.Upon it are spread the blankets.The sleepers, of all sexes and ages, are to lie there in a row, their feet to the fire, and their heads under the edge of the sloping roof.Nothing could be better contrived.The fire is in front: it is not a fire, but a conflagration--a vast heap of green logs set on fire--of pitch, and split dead-wood, and crackling balsams, raging and roaring.By the time, twilight falls, the cook has prepared supper.Everything has been cooked in a tin pail and a skillet,--potatoes, tea, pork, mutton, slapjacks.You wonder how everything could have been prepared in so few utensils.When you eat, the wonder ceases: everything might have been cooked in one pail.It is a noble meal; and nobly is it disposed of by these amateur savages, sitting about upon logs and roots of trees.Never were there such potatoes, never beans that seemed to have more of the bean in them, never such curly pork, never trout with more Indian-meal on them, never mutton more distinctly sheepy; and the tea, drunk out of a tin cup, with a lump of maple-sugar dissolved in it,--it is the sort of tea that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to anecdote and hilariousness.There is no deception about it: it tastes of tannin and spruce and creosote.Everything, in short, has the flavor of the wilderness and a free life.It is idyllic.And yet, with all our sentimentality, there is nothing feeble about the cooking.The slapjacks are a solid job of work, made to last, and not go to pieces in a person's stomach like a trivial bun: we might record on them, in cuneiform characters, our incipient civilization; and future generations would doubtless turn them up as Acadian bricks.Good, robust victuals are what the primitive man wants.
Darkness falls suddenly.Outside the ring of light from our conflagration the woods are black.There is a tremendous impression of isolation and lonesomeness in our situation.We are the prisoners of the night.The woods never seemed so vast and mysterious.The trees are gigantic.There are noises that we do not understand,--mysterious winds passing overhead, and rambling in the great galleries, tree-trunks grinding against each other, undefinable stirs and uneasinesses.The shapes of those who pass into the dimness are outlined in monstrous proportions.The spectres, seated about in the glare of the fire, talk about appearances and presentiments and religion.The guides cheer the night with bear-fights, and catamount encounters, and frozen-to-death experiences, and simple tales of great prolixity and no point, and jokes of primitive lucidity.We hear catamounts, and the stealthy tread of things in the leaves, and the hooting of owls, and, when the moon rises, the laughter of the loon.Everything is strange, spectral, fascinating.
By and by we get our positions in the shanty for the night, and arrange the row of sleepers.The shanty has become a smoke-house by this time: waves of smoke roll into it from the fire.It is only by lying down, and getting the head well under the eaves, that one can breathe.No one can find her "things"; nobody has a pillow.At length the row is laid out, with the solemn protestation of intention to sleep.The wind, shifting, drives away the smoke.
Good-night is said a hundred times; positions are readjusted, more last words, new shifting about, final remarks; it is all so comfortable and romantic; and then silence.Silence continues for a minute.The fire flashes up; all the row of heads is lifted up simultaneously to watch it; showers of sparks sail aloft into the blue night; the vast vault of greenery is a fairy spectacle.How the sparks mount and twinkle and disappear like tropical fireflies, and all the leaves murmur, and clap their hands! Some of the sparks do not go out: we see them flaming in the sky when the flame of the fire has died down.Well, good-night, goodnight.More folding of the arms to sleep; more grumbling about the hardness of a hand-bag, or the insufficiency of a pocket-handkerchief, for a pillow.Good-night.Was that a remark?--something about a root, a stub in the ground sticking into the back."You couldn't lie along a hair?"---"Well, no: here's another stub.It needs but a moment for the conversation to become general,--about roots under the shoulder, stubs in the back, a ridge on which it is impossible for the sleeper to balance, the non-elasticity of boughs, the hardness of the ground, the heat, the smoke, the chilly air.Subjects of remarks multiply.
The whole camp is awake, and chattering like an aviary.The owl is also awake; but the guides who are asleep outside make more noise than the owls.Water is wanted, and is handed about in a dipper.
Everybody is yawning; everybody is now determined to go to sleep in good earnest.A last good-night.There is an appalling silence.It is interrupted in the most natural way in the world.Somebody has got the start, and gone to sleep.He proclaims the fact.He seems to have been brought up on the seashore, and to know how to make all the deep-toned noises of the restless ocean.He is also like a war-horse; or, it is suggested, like a saw-horse.How malignantly he snorts, and breaks off short, and at once begins again in another key! One head is raised after another.
"Who is that?"
"Somebody punch him."
"Turn him over."
"Reason with him."