But we were not done with the marching yet. The navigable water ended for good, and once more we were put to footing it through the forest, and suffering from the flies. But the scenery had changed. The birches had gone, and so had the Arctic willows, and around us were nothing but tall gaunt pines, for the most part bleached and dead. A parasite had invaded the forest and was killing it by slow inches. The same thing is seen festooning the timber in Florida and Louisiana and the Gulf States generally, where it is called Spanish moss. It is gray there, and looks dreary enough as it hangs in melancholy wisps from its dead or dying victim. But here it was far darker, being in texture like a harsh wool, almost black; and as it swung in the breeze from those blighted boughs, it reminded one of funeral plumes. Here, too, there was no undergrowth of palmetto and saw-grass to tone down the gloom: at the foot of these doomed trunks was one unvarying carpet of sulphur-coloured moss.
As we marched on (with the never-varying series of halts) the outlines of a path appeared, crossed and recrossed by the spoor of deer. The lemmings grew more shy. Against some of the tree trunks the yellow moss was stacked in columns six feet high to fodder cows in winter. The marks of axes appeared on the timber, and there were stumps new-scarred. And then the gleam of water showed through the tree aisles. Our carriers brisked up; even the humpback straightened himself; and the pace quickened--to something close on three miles an hour. We swung round a bluff of sand, and before us lay a log-house painted dragon's-blood red, with a bay beyond whereon rode a masted boat. That one house made up the town of Ischinlisvuoni, the northernmost port of Enare See.
Now our first thought was to get a boat which would take us over the great lake to Enare town, which was distant some eighty-five miles in crow flight; and here we were in luck's way. The miniature viking ship riding in the bay had just come up from the very place, and her crew jumped at the chance (and the profit) of taking us back. We had to wait, however, till she was refitted. They had met heavy weather on the way up it appeared, and in one squall their high square-sail had split neatly down the whole of one of its seams, and naturally this had to be mended before she could put to sea again. So we went into the red log-house, and took possession of one of the two rooms, which was furnished principally with a large white-washed rubble stove that reached up to the roof beams.