These little lakes are probably sixty-five miles from the settlements, allowing for the winding course of the rivers.  Just above, where the river enters, is a dam, built of logs some fifteen feet high, erected by the lumbermen the last winter to hold back the water, so as to float their logs down from this to Tupper’s Lake, and so on down the Rackett to the mills away below.  Around this dam is the last carrying place between this and Mud Lake, over which our boatmen trudged with their boats, like great turtles with their shells upon their backs.  This is still called Bog River, and though above the dam to Mud Lake, where it takes its rise, it is deep and sluggish, yet it is doing it honor overmuch to dignify it by the name of a river.  It was large enough, however, to float our little craft.  We left our baggage-master here with most of our luggage, to perfect his operations in the way of jerking venison, intending to return the next day.  We might have left everything without a guard, so far as human depredations were concerned.  No bolts or bars would be necessary for its protection.  In the first place, nobody would visit the spot, and if they did, our property would be perfectly protected by the law of the woods.  It would be doubtless carefully inspected by any curious banter passing that way, but theft or robbery are unknown here.  True, a bottle of good liquor, if handled by a visitor, might lose somewhat of its contents, but it would be drank to the health of the owner, and in a spirit of good fellowship, and not of theft, all which would be regarded by woodsmen as strictly within rule, there being, as Hank Wood said, “no law agin it.”

We left the first chain of ponds, and rowed some ten miles up the deep and sluggish but narrow channel of the river, startling every little way a deer from its propriety by our presence as it was feeding along the shore.  Few sportsmen ever visit this remote region, and it is above the range of the lumbermen.  We came to some rapids near the outlet of the second chain of ponds, around which we walked, and up which the boatmen pushed their little craft.  These rapids are a quarter of a mile in length, with no great amount of fall, but still enough to prevent the passage up them of a loaded boat.  Directly at the head of these rapids is the “second chain of ponds,” three pleasant little lakelets, of from two to four hundred acres each, surrounded by dense forests, and shores in the main walled in by huge boulders and broken rocks.  We passed through these, in which were several loons, or great northern divers, quietly floating, and as they watched us, sending forth their clear and clarion voices over the water.  We took each a passing shot at them, but with no other effect than to make them dive quicker and deeper, and stay under longer than usual; at the flash of our rifles they would go down, and in a few minutes would be again on the surface sixty rods from us, laughing aloud, as it were, with their clear and quavering voices, at our impotent attempts to shoot them.