He was wholly
unfamiliar with any form of introspective inquiry, any analysis of a
mental state. He had never held sad intellectual inquest over a dead
hope, nor groped blindly for a ray of light in the inky blackness of a
soul's despair.
Nevertheless, he was conscious that he felt very much as he might have
felt if, for instance, his guides had stopped anywhere in those somber
woods and without rhyme or reason set him and his goods ashore and
abandoned him forthwith. And when he crawled over the bow of the canoe
and ascended the short, steep bank to a place beside Mike Breyette, this
peculiar sense of being forsaken grew, if anything, more acute, more
appalling.
They stood on the edge of the bank, taking a reconnaissance, so to
speak. The forest flowed about them like a sea. On Thompson's left hand
it seemed to thin a trifle, giving a faint suggestion of open areas
beyond. Beginning where they stood, some time in past years a square
place had been slashed out of the timber, trees felled and partly
burned, the stumps still standing and the charred trunks lying all askew
as they fell. The unlovely confusion of the uncompleted task was
somewhat concealed by a rank growth of weeds and grass.
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