We were met by a surprise at our camp. Two men sat there, real men, the first we had seen since we entered the wilderness. Evidently they were natives by their look—trappers or prospectors of some sort. They turned out to be bear hunters, and they looked rather hungrily at the assortment of fish we had brought in—enough for supper and breakfast. Perhaps they had not been to fish so frequently as to bear. I believe they were without tackle, or maybe their luck had been poor—I do not remember. At all events it developed presently that they needed fish, also that they had a surplus of butter of a more recent period than the little dab we had left. They were willing to dicker—a circumstance that filled us with an enthusiasm which we restrained with difficulty. In fact, Del did not restrain his quite enough. He promptly offered them all the fish we had brought in for their extra pound of butter, when we could just as easily have got it for half the number of fish. Of course the fish did not seem especially valuable to us, and we were willing enough to make a meal without them. Still, one can never tell what will happen, and something like six dollars worth of trout—reckoned by New York prices—seems an unnecessary sum to pay for a pound of butter, even in the Nova Scotia woods, though possibly trout will never be worth quite that much there.

All the same, the price had advanced a good deal by next morning, for the wind had shifted to the northeast and it was bleak and blustery. Everybody knows the old rhyme about the winds and the fish—how, when the winds are north or east, the fish bite least, and how, when the winds are south and west, the fish bite best. There isn't much poetry in the old rhyme, but it's charged with sterling truth. Just why a northerly or easterly wind will take away a fish's appetite, I think has never been explained, or why a southerly and westerly wind will start him out hunting for food. But it's all as true as scripture. I have seen trout stop rising with a shifting of the wind to the eastward as suddenly as if they had been summoned to judgment, and I have seen them begin after a cold spell almost before the wind had time to get settled in its new quarter. Of course it had been Del's idea that we could easily get trout enough for breakfast. That was another mistake—we couldn't. We couldn't take them from the river, and we couldn't take them from our bear hunters, for they had gone. We whipped our lines around in that chill wind, tangled our flies in treetops, endangered our immortal souls, and went back to the tents at last without a single thing but our appetites. Then we took turns abusing Del for his disastrous dicker by which he had paid no less than five dollars and seventy-five cents a pound too much for butter, New York market schedule. Our appetites were not especially for trout—only for hearty food of some kind, and as I have said before, we had reached a place where fish had become our real staple. The conditions were particularly hard on Del himself, for he is a hearty man, and next to jars of marmalade, baskets of trout are his favorite forage.

In fact, we rather lost interest in our camp, and disagreeable as it was, we decided to drop down the river to Lake Rossignol and cross over to the mouth of the Liverpool. It was a long six-mile ferriage across Rossignol and we could devote our waste time to getting over. By the end of the trip the weather might change.

The Shelburne is rough below Kempton Dam. It goes tearing and foaming in and out among the black rocks, and there are places where you have to get out of the canoes and climb over, and the rocks are slippery and sometimes there is not much to catch hold of. We shot out into the lake at last, and I was glad. It was a mistake, however, to be glad just then. It was too soon. The wind had kicked up a good deal of water, and though our canoes were lighter than when we started, I did not consider them suited to such a sea. They pitched about and leaped up into the air, one minute with the bow entirely out of water, and the next with it half-buried in the billow ahead. Every other second a big wave ran on a level with the gunwale, and crested its neck and looked over and hissed, and sometimes it spilled in upon us. It would not take much of that kind of freight to make a cargo, and anything like an accident in that wide, gray billowy place was not a nice thing to contemplate. A loaded canoe would go down like a bullet. No one clad as we were could swim more than a boat's length in that sea.

As we got farther on shore the waves got worse. If somebody had just suggested it I should have been willing to turn around and make back for the Shelburne. Nobody suggested it, and we went on. It seemed to me those far, dim shores through the mist, five miles or more away, would never get any closer. I grew tired, too, and my arms ached, but I could not stop paddling. I was filled with the idea that if I ever stopped that eternal dabbing at the water, my end of the canoe would never ride the next billow. Del reflected aloud, now and then, that we had made a mistake to come out on such a day. When I looked over at the other canoe and saw it on the top of a big wave with both ends sticking out in the air, and then saw it go down in a trough of black, ugly water, I realized that Del was right. I knew our canoe was doing just such dangerous things as that, and I would have given any reasonable sum for an adequate life preserver, or even a handy pine plank—for anything, in fact, that was rather more certain to stay on top of the water than this billow-bobbing, birch-bark peanut shell of a canoe.

I suppose I became unduly happy, therefore, when at last we entered the mouth of the Liverpool. I was so glad that I grew gay, and when we started up the rapids I gave Del a good lift here and there by pushing back against the rocks with my paddle, throwing my whole weight on it sometimes, to send the canoe up in style. It is always unwise for me to have a gay reaction like that, especially on Friday, which is my unlucky day. Something is so liable to happen. We were going up a particularly steep piece of water when I got my paddle against a stone on the bottom and gave an exceptionally strong push. I don't know just what happened next. Perhaps my paddle slipped. Del says it did. I know I heard him give a whoop, and I saw the river coming straight up at me. Then it came pouring in over the side, and in about a minute more most of our things were floating downstream, with Del grabbing at them, and me clinging to the upset canoe, trying to drag it ashore.

We camped there. It was a good place, one of the best yet selected. Still, I do not recommend selecting a camp in that way. If it did not turn out well, it might be a poor place to get things dry. One needs to get a good many things dry after a selection like that, especially on a cold day. It was a cold night, too. I dried my under things and put them all on.

"Did you ever sleep in your clothes in the woods?" I have been asked.

I did. I put on every dry thing I had that night, and regretted I had left anything at home.