Our Supplies Were Gone, We Lay In A Pond, A Deluge Of Water Was Pouring Down On Us.

This was summer recreation.

The whole thing was so excessively absurd that we laughed again, louder than ever. We had plenty of this sort of amusement. Suddenly through the night we heard a sort of reply that started us bolt upright. This was a prolonged squawk. It was like the voice of no beast or bird with which we were familiar. At first it was distant; but it rapidly approached, tearing through the night and apparently through the tree-tops, like the harsh cry of a web-footed bird with a snarl in it; in fact, as I said, a squawk. It came close to us, and then turned, and as rapidly as it came fled away through the forest, and we lost the unearthly noise far up the mountain-slope.

"What was that, Phelps?" we cried out. But no response came; and we wondered if his spirit had been rent away, or if some evil genius had sought it, and then, baffled by his serene and philosophic spirit, had shot off into the void in rage and disappointment.

The night had no other adventure. The moon at length coming up behind the clouds lent a spectral aspect to the forest, and deceived us for a time into the notion that day was at hand; but the rain never ceased, and we lay wishful and waiting, with no item of solid misery wanting that we could conceive.

Day was slow a-coming, and didn't amount to much when it came, so heavy were the clouds; but the rain slackened. We crawled out of our water-cure "pack," and sought the guide. To our infinite relief he announced himself not only alive, but in a going condition. I looked at my watch. It had stopped at five o'clock. I poured the water out of it, and shook it; but, not being constructed on the hydraulic principle, it refused to go. Some hours later we encountered a huntsman, from whom I procured some gun-grease; with this I filled the watch, and heated it in by the fire. This is a most effectual way of treating a delicate Genevan timepiece.

The light disclosed fully the suspected fact that our bed had been made in a slight depression: the under rubber blanket spread in this had prevented the rain from soaking into the ground, and we had been lying in what was in fact a well-contrived bathtub. While Old Phelps was pulling himself together, and we were wringing some gallons of water out of our blankets, we questioned the old man about the "squawk," and what bird was possessed of such a voice. It was not a bird at all, he said, but a cat, the black-cat of the woods, larger than the domestic animal, and an ugly customer, who is fond of fish, and carries a pelt that is worth two or three dollars in the market. Occasionally he blunders into a sable-trap; and he is altogether hateful in his ways, and has the most uncultivated voice that is heard in the woods.

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