Deer-Hunting on the An Sable. 245 



up and waiting ! " It was half-past four, and everybody woke up at 

 the summons, as was indeed unavoidable. There was a scratching 

 of matches and a discordant chorus of those sounds which people 

 make when they are forcibly awakened and made to get up in the 

 cold, unusual morning. Down-stairs there was a prodigious sizzling 

 and sputtering going on, and the light through the chinks in the 

 floor betrayed Mrs. Bamfield and her frying-pans and coffee-pot, all 

 in full blast. Somebody projected his head through an immature 

 window into the outer air and brought it in again to remark that it 

 rained. A second observation made it rain and snow, and rain and 

 snow it was, — a light, steady fall of both. We were all down-stairs 

 in a few minutes and outside, making a rudimentary toilet with ice- 

 water and a bar of soap. Breakfast was ready, — plenty of rashers 

 of bacon, fried and boiled potatoes, fried onions, bread and butter, 

 and coffee, hot and strong. These were speedily disposed of. Coats 

 were buttoned up, rubber blankets and ammunition belts slung over 

 shoulders, cartridge magazines filled, hatchets stuck into belts, rifles 

 shouldered, and out we sallied into the darkness, through which the 

 faintest glimmer of gray was just showing in the east. Half an hour 

 or so later, by the time we had gotten to our run-ways, the dogs 

 would be put out. Off we trudged over the wet, packed sand of the 

 tote-road, the gray dawn breaking dismally through the wilderness. 

 Leaving the road, we struck into the pines, and a walk of a mile 

 through the thick sweet-fern, which drenched one to the waist, 

 brought us to the edge of the cedar swamp by the river. The 

 narrow belt of low bottom-land on each side of the river is called 

 Cedar Swamp. It is a jungle through which it is extremely difficult 

 to progress, and in which one may very readily lose one's bearings. 

 Great cedars grow in it up to the water's edge, and as thickly as they 

 can well stand. Among them lie fallen trees in every stage of decay, 

 heaped one upon another in inextricable and hopeless ruin and con- 

 fusion. There are leaning cedars that have partly toppled over and 

 rested against their stouter fellows, and there are cedars that seem 

 to have fallen and only partly risen again. Their trunks run for 

 several feet along the ground and then stretch up toward the light, 

 in a vain effort to become erect once more. These trunks and all 

 the fallen giants are covered with a thick carpet of the softest moss ; 

 everything, in fact, is covered with it, and here and there it opens, 

 1 6a 



