“You have left me little,” I replied, “to add to what you have already said, in expressing the sources of my enjoyment among these beautiful lakes.  Fishing and hunting, considered in the abstract, are things I care but little about.  They are pleasant enough in their way, but what brings me here is the strong desire as well as necessity for the repose of which you speak.  There is a luxury in intellectual rest, when the brain is wearied with protracted toil, which far surpasses the mere animal enjoyment which follows relaxation from physical labor.  That rest I cannot find in society.  I must seek it among wild and primeval solitudes, where I can be alone with nature in her unadorned simplicity, away from the barbarisms, so to speak, of civilization, where I can act and talk and think as a natural, and not an artificial man, where I can be off my guard, and free from the weight of that armor which the conventionalities of life, the captions espionage of the world compels us to wear, un-tempted by the thousand enticements which society everywhere presents to lure us into unrest.”

We drifted leisurely down the left hand channel, and entered the Rackett, bidding good-bye to the beautiful lake as a bend in the river hid it from our view.  A mile below the junction, the river runs square against a precipice some sixty feet in height, wheeling off at a right angle, and stretching away though a natural meadow on either hand, of hundreds of acres in extent.  At the base of this precipice, formed by the rocky point of a hill, the water is of unknown depth.  Above, and fifty feet from the surface of the river, there are ledges of a foot or two in width, like shelves, along which the fox, the fisher, and possibly the panther, creep, instead of travelling over the high ridge extending back into the forest.  As we rounded a point which brought us in view of this precipice, Spalding, who was in the forward boat, discovered a black object making its way along the face of the rocks.  A signal for silence was given, and the boats were permitted to float with the current in the direction of the precipice.  We were forty rods distant, and the animal, whatever it was, had no suspicion of danger.  It paused midway across the rocks, looked about, nosing out over the water, and sat down upon its haunches, as if enjoying the beauty of the scenery around it.  In the meantime, the boats had drifted within twenty rods, and Spalding, taking deliberate aim, fired.  At the crack of the rifle, the animal leapt dear of the ledge, struck once against the face of the rock some twenty feet below, and then went, end over end, thirty feet into the river.  As he struck the water he commenced swimming round and round in a circle, evidently bewildered by Spalding’s bullet, or the effect of his involuntary plunge down the rocks.  Our men bent to their oars, and had got within five or six rods of it, when it straightened up in alarm for the shore.

“Hold on, Cullen,” said I, “lay steady for a moment.”  I drew upon the animal, and just as it reached the shore, fired, and it turned over dead.  We found it to be a black fox, that had walked out upon the ledge, and thus been added another victim to the indulgence of an idle curiosity.  Spalding’s bullet had grazed its belly, raking off the hair and graining the skin; mine had gone through its head.