One would think nothing could be easier to find than a big mountain, especially when one is encamped upon a stream which he knows springs out of its very loins.  But for some reason or other we had got an idea that Slide Mountain was a very slippery customer and must be approached cautiously.  We had tried from several points in the valley to get a view of it, but were not quite sure we had seen its very head.  When on the Wittenberg, a neighboring peak, the year before, I had caught a brief glimpse of it only by climbing a dead tree and craning up for a moment from its topmost branch.  It would seem as if the mountain had taken every precaution to shut itself off from a near view.  It was a shy mountain, and we were about to stalk it through six or seven miles of primitive woods, and we seemed to have some unreasonable fear that it might elude us.  We had been told of parties who had essayed the ascent from this side, and had returned baffled and bewildered.  In a tangle of primitive woods, the very bigness of the mountain baffles one.  It is all mountain; whichever way you turn—­and one turns sometimes in such cases before he knows it—­the foot finds a steep and rugged ascent.

The eye is of little service; one must be sure of his bearings and push boldly on and up.  One is not unlike a flea upon a great shaggy beast, looking for the animal’s head; or even like a much smaller and much less nimble creature,—­he may waste his time and steps, and think he has reached the head when he is only upon the rump.  Hence I questioned our host, who had several times made the ascent, closely.  Larkins laid his old felt hat upon the table, and, placing one hand upon one side of it and the other upon the other, said:  “There Slide lies, between the two forks of the stream, just as my hat lies between my two hands.  David will go with you to the forks, and then you will push right on up.”  But Larkins was not right, though he had traversed all those mountains many times over.  The peak we were about to set out for did not lie between the forks, but exactly at the head of one of them; the beginnings of the stream are in the very path of the slide, as we afterward found.  We broke camp early in the morning, and with our blankets strapped to our backs and rations in our pockets for two days, set out along an ancient and in places an obliterated bark road that followed and crossed and recrossed the stream.  The morning was bright and warm, but the wind was fitful and petulant, and I predicted rain.  What a forest solitude our obstructed and dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles of primitive woods before we came to the forks, three miles before we came to the “burnt shanty,” a name merely,—­no shanty there now for twenty-five years past.  The ravages of the barkpeelers were still visible, now in a space thickly strewn with the soft and decayed trunks of hemlock-trees, and overgrown with wild cherry, then in huge mossy logs scattered through the beech and maple woods.  Some of these logs were so soft and mossy that one could sit or recline upon them as upon a sofa.