Soon a dog came out of the dense forest, followed by a man who bore upon his shoulders the hind-quarters of a deer which he had killed.  He bade us welcome, while he remarked that there were no Sundays in these parts, where one day was just like another; and then presenting us with half his venison, regretted that he had not been aware of our arrival, as he could have killed another deer, his dog having started fifteen during a short ramble in the woods.  In the thickets of “ti-ti,” which are almost as dense as cane-brakes, the deer, panthers, and bears take refuge; and in this great wilderness of St. Andrew’s Bay expert hunters can find venison almost any day.

On Monday morning we rowed through West Bay, across the southern end of North Bay, and skirted the north coast of the East Bay of St. Andrew’s, with its picturesque groves of cabbage-palms, for a few miles, when we turned southward into the inlet through which the tidal waters of the Gulf pass in and out of the sound.

We were now close to the sea, with a few narrow sandy islands only intervening between us and the Gulf of Mexico, and upon these ocean barriers we found breezy camping-grounds.  Our course was by the open sea for six or eight miles, when we reached a narrow beach thoroughfare, called Crooked Island Bay, through which we rowed, with Crooked Island on our right hand, until we arrived at the head of the bay, where we expected to find an outlet to the sea.  Being overtaken by darkness, we staked our boats on the quiet sheet of water, and at sunrise pushed on to find the opening through the beach.  Not a sign of human life had been seen since we had left the western end of the East Bay of St. Andrew’s Sound, and we now discovered that no outlet to the sea existed, and that Crooked Island was not an island, but a long strip of beach land which was joined to the main coast by a narrow neck of sandy territory, and that the interior watercourse ended in a creek.

Our portage to the sea now loomed up as a laborious task.  We needed at least one man to assist us, and we were fully half a day’s row from the nearest cabin to the west of us, while we might look in vain to the eastward, where the uninhabited coast-line stretched away with its shining sands and shimmering waters for thirty miles to Cape San Blas.  There, upon a low sand-bar, against which the waves lashed out their fury, rose a tall light-tower, the only friend of the mariner in all this desolate region.  We could not look to that distant light for help, however, and were thrown entirely upon our own feeble resources.

Going systematically to work, we surveyed the best route across Crooked Island, which was over the bed of an old inlet; for a hurricane, many years before, washed out a passage through the sand-spit, and for years the tide flowed in and out of the interior bay.  Another hurricane afterwards repaired the breach by filling up the new inlet with sand; so Crooked Island enjoyed but a short-lived notoriety, and again became an integral part of the continent.