ose government maps
are good and reliable to show the _approaches_ to this wild country, but
where you need them most they are good for nothing."

[Illustration: The Bears' Home--Laurel and Rhododendron]

"Then," said he, "if I had missed your cabin I would have starved to
death, for I depended on finding a house to the eastward, and would have
followed the trail till I dropped. I have been out in the laurel
thickets, now, three days and two nights; so nothing could have induced
me to leave this trail, once I found it, or until I could see out to a
house on one side or other of the mountain."

"You would see no house on either side from here to beyond Guyot, about
forty miles. Had you no rations at all?"

"I traveled light, expecting to find entertainment among the natives.
Here is what I have left."

He showed me a crumpled buckwheat flapjack, a pinch of tea, and a couple
of ounces of brandy.

"I was saving them for the last extremity; have had nothing to eat since
yesterday morning. Drink the brandy, please; it came from Montreal."

"No, my boy, that liquor goes down your own throat instanter. You're the
chap that needs it. This coffee will boil now in a minute. I won't give
you all the food you want, for it wouldn't be prudent; but by and by you
shall have a bellyful."

Then, as well as he could, he sketched the route he had followed. Where
the trail from Tennessee crosses from Thunderhead to Haw Gap he had
swerved off from the divide, and he discovered his error somewhere in
the neighborhood of Blockhouse. There, instead of retracing his steps,
he sought a short-cut by plunging down to the headwaters of Haw Creek,
thus worming deeper and deeper into the devil's nest. One more day would
have finished him. When I told him that the trip from Clingman to Guyot
would be hard work for a party of experienced mountaineers, and that it
would probably take them a week, during which time they would have to
pack all supplies on their own backs, he agreed that his best course
would be down into Carolina and out to the railroad.

* * * * *

Of animal life in the mountains I was most entertained by the raven.
This extraordinary bird was the first creature Noah liberated from the
ark--he must have known, even at that early period of nature study, that
it was the most sagacious of all winged things. Or perhaps Noah and the
raven did not get on well together and he rid himself of the pest