I knew that catamount well.  One night when we lay in the bogs of the South Beaver Meadow, under a canopy of mosquitoes, the serene midnight was parted by a wild and humanlike cry from a neighboring mountain.  “That’s a cat,” said the guide.  I felt in a moment that it was the voice of “modern cultchah.”  “Modern culture,” says Mr. Joseph Cook in a most impressive period,—­“modern culture is a child crying in the wilderness, and with no voice but a cry.”  That describes the catamount exactly.  The next day, when we ascended the mountain, we came upon the traces of this brute,—­a spot where he had stood and cried in the night; and I confess that my hair rose with the consciousness of his recent presence, as it is said to do when a spirit passes by.

Whatever consolation the absence of catamount in a dark, drenched, and howling wilderness can impart, that I experienced; but I thought what a satire upon my present condition was modern culture, with its plain thinking and high living!  It was impossible to get much satisfaction out of the real and the ideal,—­the me and the not-me.  At this time what impressed me most was the absurdity of my position looked at in the light of modern civilization and all my advantages and acquirements.  It seemed pitiful that society could do absolutely nothing for me.  It was, in fact, humiliating to reflect that it would now be profitable to exchange all my possessions for the woods instinct of the most unlettered guide.  I began to doubt the value of the “culture” that blunts the natural instincts.

It began to be a question whether I could hold out to walk all night; for I must travel, or perish.  And now I imagined that a spectre was walking by my side.  This was Famine.  To be sure, I had only recently eaten a hearty luncheon:  but the pangs of hunger got hold on me when I thought that I should have no supper, no breakfast; and, as the procession of unattainable meals stretched before me, I grew hungrier and hungrier.  I could feel that I was becoming gaunt, and wasting away:  already I seemed to be emaciated.  It is astonishing how speedily a jocund, well-conditioned human being can be transformed into a spectacle of poverty and want, Lose a man in the Woods, drench him, tear his pantaloons, get his imagination running on his lost supper and the cheerful fireside that is expecting him, and he will become haggard in an hour.  I am not dwelling upon these things to excite the reader’s sympathy, but only to advise him, if he contemplates an adventure of this kind, to provide himself with matches, kindling wood, something more to eat than one raw trout, and not to select a rainy night for it.