In Which We Have an Adventure

Our band of hardy adventurers arose with the sun on the morning
following our first night in bivouac, and by noon of that day, thanks,
perhaps, in some measure to my own work at the oars, and a sail which
we rigged from a corner of the tent, we had passed into and through
the lake which our map had showed us. Now we were below the edge of
the pine woods, and our stream ran more sluggishly, between banks of
cattails or of waving marsh grasses. We put out a trolling line, and
took a bass or so; and once Lafitte, firing chance-medley into a
passing flock of plover, knocked down a half-dozen, so that we bade
fair to have enough for dinner that night. It was all a new world for
us. No one might tell what lay around the next bend of our widening
waterway. We were explorers. A virgin world lay before us. The nature
of the country along the stream kept the settlements back a distance;
so that to us, now, in reality, retracing one of the ancient
fur-trading routes, we might almost have been the first to break these
silences.

Toward nightfall we came into a more rolling and more park-like
region; our prow was now heading to the westward, for the general
course of the great river beyond. I had no notion to visit the city of
Chicago, and our route lay far above that which must be taken by any
large craft bound for the Mississippi route to the Gulf.