Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/862

854 in the water, as his feet touched bottom, I gave him a ball without fatal effect, and landing, we put Carlo on the track, which was marked by occasional drops and clots of blood, and hearing him well off into the woods, and in that furious and deep bay which indicates close pursuit, we went back to our boat and paddled upstream to a run-way Steve knew of, where the deer sometimes crossed the river. We pushed the boat into the overhanging alders which fringe the banks, leaning out into and over the water, and listened to the far-off bay of the hound. It died away and was entirely lost for a few minutes, and then came into hearing from the nearer side of the ridge, which lay back from the river a hundred rods or so, and I cocked my rifle while Steve silently pushed the boat out of the bushes, ready for a start, if the deer should "water." The baying receded again, and this time in the direction of the lake. The blood we had found on the trail was the bright, red, frothy blood which showed that the ball had passed through the lungs, and, as we knew that the deer would not run long before watering, we were sure that this would be his last turn and that he was making in earnest for the lake, where some of the boats would certainly catch him.

The excitement of the hunt had brought me back to a natural state of feeling, and now, as I lay in the stern of the boat, drifting slowly down-stream, and looked up into the hazy blue sky, in the whole expanse of which appeared no fragment of cloud, and the softened sunshine penetrated both soul and body, while the brain, lulled into lethargy by the unbroken silence and monotony of forest around, lost every trace of its midsummer madness,—I looked back to the state of the last evening as to a curious dream. I asked myself wherein it differed from a dream, and instantly my dæmon replied, "In no wise." The instant reply surprised me, without startling me from my lethargy. I responded, as a matter of course, "But if no more than a dream, it amounts to nothing." It answered me, "But when a man dreams wide awake?" I pondered an instant, and it went on: "And how do you know that dreams are nothing? They are real while they last, and your waking life is no more; you wake to one and sleep to the other. Which is the real, and which the false? since you assume that one is false." I only asked myself again the eternal question, "Objective or subjective?" and the dæmon made no further suggestion. At this instant we heard the report of a gun from the lake. "That's the Doctor's shot-gun," said Steve, and pulled energetically down-stream; for we knew, that, if the Doctor had fired, the deer had come in,—and if he had missed the first shot, he had a second barrel, which we should have heard from.

Among the most charming cascades in the world is certainly that which Bog River makes where it falls into Tupper's Lake. Its amber water, black in the deep channel above the fall, dividing into several small streams, slips with a plunge of, it may be, six feet over the granite rocks, into a broad, deep pool, round which tall pines stand, and over which two or three delicate-leaved white-birches lean, from which basin the waters plunge in the final foamy rush of thirty or forty feet over the irregularly broken ledge which makes the bold shore of the lake. Between the two points of rock which confine the stream is thrown a bridge, part of the military road from the Mohawk settlements to those on the St. Lawrence, built during the war of 1812. On this bridge I waited until Steve had carried the boat around, when we reëmbarked for the camp.

Arriving at the landing, we found two of the guides dressing the Doctor's deer, and the others preparing for dinner. As night came on my excitement returned, and I remained in the camp while the others went out on the lake,—not from fear of such an experience as I had the night before, for I enjoyed the wild emotions, as one enjoys the raging of the sea around the rocks he stands on, with a