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.  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.  Katahdin to the North, a fair blue pyramid, lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent, yet still so many leagues away that his features were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable from the green of his beard of forest.  Every mile, however, as we slid drowsily over the hot lake, proved more and more that we were not befooled,—­Iglesias by memory, and I by anticipation.  Katahdin lost nothing by approach, as some of the grandees do:  as it grew bigger, it grew better.

Twenty miles, or so, of Chesuncook, of sun-cooked Chesuncook, we traversed by the aid of our blanket-sail, pleasantly wafted by the unboisterous breeze.  Undrowned, unducked, as safe from the perils of the broad lake as we had come out of the defiles of the rapids, we landed at the carry below the dam at the lake’s outlet.

The skin of many a slaughtered varmint was nailed on its shingle, and the landing-place was carpeted with the fur.  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 trappers of muskrats were charmingly brotherly.  They guided us across the carry; they would not hear of our being porters.  “Pluck the superabundant huckleberry,” said they, “while we, suspending your firkin and your traps upon the setting-pole, tote them, as the spies of Joshua toted the grape-clusters of the Promised Land.”

Cancut, for his share, carried the canoe.  He wore it upon his head and shoulders.  Tough work he found it, toiling through the underwood, and poking his way like an elongated and mobile mushroom through the thick shrubbery.  Ever and anon, as Iglesias and I paused, we would be aware of the canoe thrusting itself above our heads in the covert, and a voice would come from an unseen head under its shell,—­“It’s soul-breaking, carrying is!”

The portage was short.  We emerged from the birchen grove upon the river, below a brilliant cascading rapid.  The water came flashing gloriously forward, a far other element than the tame, flat stuff we had drifted slowly over all the dullish hours.  Water on the go is nobler than water on the stand; recklessness may be as fatal as stagnation, but it is more heroic.