To write an epic or climb a mountain is merely a dogged thing; the result is more interesting to most than the process.  Mountains, being cloud-compellers, are rain-shedders, and the shed water will not always flow with decorous gayety in dell or glen.  Sometimes it stays bewildered in a bog, and here the climber must plunge.  In the moist places great trees grow, die, fall, rot, and barricade the way with their corpses.  Katahdin has to endure all the ills of mountain being, and we had all the usual difficulties to fight through doggedly.  When we were clumsy, we tumbled and rose up torn.  Still we plodded on, following a path blazed by the Bostonians, Cancut’s late charge, and we grumblingly thanked them.

Going up, we got higher and drier.  The mountain-side became steeper than it could stay, and several land-avalanches, ancient or modern, crossed our path.  It would be sad to think that all the eternal hills were crumbling thus, outwardly, unless we knew that they bubble up inwardly as fast.  Posterity is thus cared for in regard to the picturesque.  Cascading streams also shot by us, carrying light and music.  From them we stole refreshment, and did not find the waters mineral and astringent, as Mr. Turner, the first climber, calumniously asserts.

The trees were still large and surprisingly parallel to the mountain wall.  Deep soft moss covered whatever was beneath, and sometimes this would yield and let the foot measure a crevice.  Perilous pitfalls; but we clambered unharmed.  The moss, so rich, deep, soft, and earthily fragrant, was a springy stair-carpet of a steep stairway.  And sometimes when the carpet slipped and the state of heels over head seemed imminent, we held to the baluster-trees, as one after wassail clings to the lamp-post.

Even on this minor mountain the law of diminishing vegetation can be studied.  The great trees abandoned us, and stayed indolently down in shelter.  Next the little wiry trees ceased to be the comrades of our climb.  They were no longer to be seen planted upon jutting crags, and, bold as standard-bearers, inciting us to mount higher.  Big spruces, knobby with balls of gum, dwindled away into little ugly dwarf spruces, hostile, as dwarfs are said to be always, to human comfort.  They grew man-high, and hedged themselves together into a dense thicket.  We could not go under, nor over, nor through.  To traverse them at all, we must recall the period when we were squirrels or cats, in some former state of being.

Somehow we pierced, as man does ever, whether he owes it to the beast or the man in him.  From time to time, when in this struggle we came to an open point of rock, we would remember that we were on high, and turn to assure ourselves that nether earth was where we had left it.  We always found it in situ, in belts green, white, and blue, a tricolor of woods, water, and sky.  Lakes were there without number, forest without limit.  We could not analyze yet, for there was work to do.  Also, whenever we paused, there was the old temptation, blueberries.  Every out-cropping ledge offered store of tonic, ozone-fed blueberries, or of mountain-cranberries, crimson and of concentrated flavor, or of the white snowberry, most delicate of fruits that grow.