The fire is only half alive.  The bedding is damp.  Some sit up, if they can find a dry spot to sit on, and smoke.  Heartless observations are made.  A few sleep.  And the night wears on.  The morning opens cheerless.  The sky is still leaking, and so is the shanty.  The guides bring in a half-cooked breakfast.  The roof is patched up.  There are reviving signs of breaking away, delusive signs that create momentary exhilaration.  Even if the storm clears, the woods are soaked.  There is no chance of stirring.  The world is only ten feet square.

This life, without responsibility or clean clothes, may continue as long as the reader desires.  There are, those who would like to live in this free fashion forever, taking rain and sun as heaven pleases; and there are some souls so constituted that they cannot exist more than three days without their worldly—­baggage.  Taking the party altogether, from one cause or another it is likely to strike camp sooner than was intended.  And the stricken camp is a melancholy sight.  The woods have been despoiled; the stumps are ugly; the bushes are scorched; the pine-leaf-strewn earth is trodden into mire; the landing looks like a cattle-ford; the ground is littered with all the unsightly dibris of a hand-to-hand life; the dismantled shanty is a shabby object; the charred and blackened logs, where the fire blazed, suggest the extinction of family life.  Man has wrought his usual wrong upon Nature, and he can save his self-respect only by moving to virgin forests.

And move to them he will, the next season, if not this.  For he who has once experienced the fascination of the woods-life never escapes its enticement:  in the memory nothing remains but its charm.

VII

A WILDERNESS ROMANCE

At the south end of Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks, stands Noon Mark, a shapely peak thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, which, with the aid of the sun, tells the Keene people when it is time to eat dinner.  From its summit you look south into a vast wilderness basin, a great stretch of forest little trodden, and out of whose bosom you can hear from the heights on a still day the loud murmur of the Boquet.  This basin of unbroken green rises away to the south and southeast into the rocky heights of Dix’s Peak and Nipple Top,—­the latter a local name which neither the mountain nor the fastidious tourist is able to shake off.  Indeed, so long as the mountain keeps its present shape as seen from the southern lowlands, it cannot get on without this name.

These two mountains, which belong to the great system of which Marcy is the giant centre, and are in the neighborhood of five thousand feet high, on the southern outposts of the great mountains, form the gate-posts of the pass into the south country.  This opening between them is called Hunter’s Pass.  It is the most elevated and one of the wildest of the mountain passes.  Its summit is thirty-five hundred feet high.  In former years it is presumed the hunters occasionally followed the game through; but latterly it is rare to find a guide who has been that way, and the tin-can and paper-collar tourists have not yet made it a runway.  This seclusion is due not to any inherent difficulty of travel, but to the fact that it lies a little out of the way.