This was Old Phelps, whose appetite had failed the day before,--his imagination being in better working order than his stomach: he had eaten little that day, and his legs became so groggy that he was obliged to rest at short intervals.Here was a situation! The afternoon was wearing away.We had six or seven miles of unknown wilderness to traverse, a portion of it swampy, in which a progress of more than a mile an hour is difficult, and the condition of the guide compelled even a slower march.What should we do in that lonesome solitude if the guide became disabled? We couldn't carry him out; could we find our own way out to get assistance? The guide himself had never been there before; and although he knew the general direction of our point of egress, and was entirely adequate to extricate himself from any position in the woods, his knowledge was of that occult sort possessed by woodsmen which it is impossible to communicate.Our object was to strike a trail that led from the Au Sable Pond, the other side of the mountain-range, to an inlet on Mud Pond.We knew that if we traveled southwestward far enough we must strike that trail, but how far? No one could tell.If we reached that trail, and found a boat at the inlet, there would be only a row of a couple of miles to the house at the foot of the lake.If no boat was there, then we must circle the lake three or four miles farther through a cedar-swamp, with no trail in particular.The prospect was not pleasing.We were short of supplies, for we had not expected to pass that night in the woods.The pleasure of the excursion began to develop itself.
We stumbled on in the general direction marked out, through a forest that began to seem endless as hour after hour passed, compelled as we were to make long detours over the ridges of the foothills to avoid the swamp, which sent out from the border of the lake long tongues into the firm ground.The guide became more ill at every step, and needed frequent halts and long rests.Food he could not eat; and tea, water, and even brandy he rejected.Again and again the old philosopher, enfeebled by excessive exertion and illness, would collapse in a heap on the ground, an almost comical picture of despair, while we stood and waited the waning of the day, and peered forward in vain for any sign of an open country.At every brook we encountered, we suggested a halt for the night, while it was still light enough to select a camping-place, but the plucky old man wouldn't hear of it: the trail might be only a quarter of a mile ahead, and we crawled on again at a snail's pace.His honor as a guide seemed to be at stake; and, besides, he confessed to a notion that his end was near, and he didn't want to die like a dog in the woods.And yet, if this was his last journey, it seemed not an inappropriate ending for the old woodsman to lie down and give up the ghost in the midst of the untamed forest and the solemn silences he felt most at home in.There is a popular theory, held by civilians, that a soldier likes to die in battle.I suppose it is as true that a woodsman would like to "pass in his chips,"--the figure seems to be inevitable, struck down by illness and exposure, in the forest solitude, with heaven in sight and a tree-root for his pillow.
The guide seemed really to fear that, if we did not get out of the woods that night, he would never go out; and, yielding to his dogged resolution, we kept on in search of the trail, although the gathering of dusk over the ground warned us that we might easily cross the trail without recognizing it.We were traveling by the light in the upper sky, and by the forms of the tree-stems, which every moment grew dimmer.At last the end came.We had just felt our way over what seemed to be a little run of water, when the old man sunk down, remarking, "I might as well die here as anywhere," and was silent.
Suddenly night fell like a blanket on us.We could neither see the guide nor each other.We became at once conscious that miles of night on all sides shut us in.The sky was clouded over: there wasn't a gleam of light to show us where to step.Our first thought was to build a fire, which would drive back the thick darkness into the woods, and boil some water for our tea.But it was too dark to use the axe.We scraped together leaves and twigs to make a blaze, and, as this failed, such dead sticks as we could find by groping about.The fire was only a temporary affair, but it sufficed to boil a can of water.The water we obtained by feeling about the stones of the little run for an opening big enough to dip our cup in.The supper to be prepared was fortunately simple.It consisted of a decoction of tea and other leaves which had got into the pail, and a part of a loaf of bread.A loaf of bread which has been carried in a knapsack for a couple of days, bruised and handled and hacked at with a hunting-knife, becomes an uninteresting object.But we ate of it with thankfulness, washed it down with hot fluid, and bitterly thought of the morrow.Would our old friend survive the night?
Would he be in any condition to travel in the morning? How were we to get out with him or without him?