While we dined, we talked of our to-morrow’s climb of Katahdin.  We were hopeful.  We disbelieved in obstacles.  To-morrow would be fine.  We would spring early from our elastic bed and stride topwards.  Iglesias nerved himself and me with a history of his ascent some years before, up the eastern side of the mountain.  He had left the house of Mr. Hunt, the outsider at that time of Eastern Maine, with a squad of lumbermen, and with them tramped up the furrow of a land-avalanche to the top, spending wet and ineffective days in the dripping woods, and vowing then to return and study the mountain from our present camping-spot.  I recalled also the first recorded ascent of the Natardin or Catardin Mountain by Mr. Turner in 1804, printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections, and identified the stream up whose valley he climbed with the Ayboljockameegus.  Cancut offered valuable contributions to our knowledge from his recent ascent with our Boston predecessors.  To-morrow we would verify our recollections and our fancies.

And so good-night, and to our spruce bed.

CHAPTER XIII.

UP KATAHDIN.

Next morning, when we awoke, just before the gray of dawn, the sky was clear and scintillating; but there was a white cotton night-cap on the head of Katahdin.  As we inspected him, he drew his night-cap down farther, hinting that he did not wish to see the sun that day.  When a mountain is thus in the sulks after a storm, it is as well not to disturb him:  he will not offer the prize of a view.  Experience taught us this:  but then experience is only an empiric at the best.

Besides, whether Katahdin were bare-headed or cloud-capped, it would be better to blunder upward than lounge all day in camp and eat Sybaritic dinners.  We longed for the nervy climb.  We must have it.  “Up!” said tingling blood to brain.  “Dash through the forest!  Grasp the crag, and leap the cleft!  Sweet flash forth the streamlets from granite fissures.  To breathe the winds that smite the peaks is life.”

As soon as dawn bloomed in the woods we breakfasted, and ferried the river before sunrise.  The ascent subdivides itself into five zones. 1.  A scantily wooded acclivity, where bears abound. 2.  A dense, swampy forest region. 3.  Steep, mossy mountain-side, heavily wooded. 4.  A belt of dwarf spruces, nearly impenetrable. 5.  Ragged rock.

Cancut was our leader to-day.  There are by far too many blueberries in the first zone.  No one, of course, intends to dally, but the purple beauties tempted, and too often we were seduced.  Still such yielding spurred us on to hastier speed, when we looked up after delay and saw the self-denying far ahead.