We sat down to talk it over. Bige said "Le's go home." But I outvoted him and we continued on, taking a northeasterly course, which we followed for what seemed about five miles. When we had passed through a valley between two high peaks we made a sort of ox-bow curve around the one to the right and there laid a straight course with our compass back in the direction from which we had come but a mile or more south of our outward route.
During the afternoon we encountered about all the different kinds of forest travel that it is possible to find anywhere. There were steep rocky ledges which had to be climbed; cedar swamps which must be negotiated; several acres of burnt ground now covered with a dense growth of poplar and wild-cherry saplings; blackberry bushes as high as one's head – oceans of them; balsam groves with deep beds of moss for a carpet; "witch-hopple," which tangles one's feet and gives one a hard fall at unexpected moments; there were steep climbs up and steep slides down; and there were delightful stretches of "big woods," but always the charm of variety.
We were too intent upon our quest and made too much noise in our travels to see much wild life; the animals always had ample notice of our approach and always had convenient hiding places.
About six o'clock we came upon a noisy brook which was tumbling down out of the mountains through a steep valley. The bed of the stream was filled with boulders, and there were numerous short falls and rapids. We heard the noise of the brook long before it came into view, and Bige promptly named it "Roaring Brook."
There was something suggestive about this brook, and we sat down and discussed it while resting. It was a dry season; there had been no rain for two weeks. Surface drainage could not account for all the water coming down that brook. It might come from one of the swamps we had passed through earlier in the day. It would have to be a very large spring or a lot of small ones to keep up the flow of that volume of water. It might be the outlet of a pond. We decided to follow upstream and settle the question of its source.
About a half-mile up, we came upon a level stretch of quiet water, but there was a noise of splashing in the stream ahead. Cautiously we crept forward and peering through a clump of alders saw an old black bear and one cub, wallowing in the shallow water. Neither Bige nor I had lost any bear, old or young, and we had no intention of attacking with our only weapon – a fishing rod – an old mother bear in the presence of her child; so without a conference, but with a common thought, we carefully backed up a few rods and hid behind a clump of bushes through the branches of which we watched the performance.
We were reminded of an old sow and one pig wallowing in a mud hole. The old bear lay down in the water and rolled over in it while the cub climbed upon his mother and took headers off of her back. They were evidently taking their "weekly tub" and were enjoying it immensely.
After some ten minutes of this moving-picture act, the old bear climbed out on the bank and shook herself; the cub followed, stood on his head and rolled and tumbled about on the grassy bank until his mother gave a commanding grunt and started off into the woods with the cub following at her heels.
About twenty rods farther upstream we arrived at the source of Roaring Brook. It was a beautiful sheet of glassy water set in a bowl in the hills, with the bowl tilted on one side until the water spilled over its lower edge into the brook. The pond was about two hundred yards in diameter. Three deer were standing in the shallow water on the opposite edge. The water was clear and cold as ice. We both dropped our packs and shouted in chorus, "This is where we sleep!"
It was getting late, so we hurried our preparations for making camp. I undertook to set up the tent while Bige collected a quantity of dry moss for a bed. This he peeled off of a ledge of rocks on the hillside in great slabs that were three to four inches thick. Over a double layer of moss he placed balsam boughs, sticking the butt end of each bough through the moss in a sloping position and making one course of boughs overlap another like shingles on a roof. The result was most satisfactory. Bige is a wonder in making a camp bed.