The boys averaged not quite five miles a day on the trip, and it was the last day of August before the camping place at the foot of North Bluff was reached.
The first day of their arrival was spent in arranging camp; putting up the tent, digging the shallow well in the sand at the marsh’s edge, and building moss-lined pole-pens in which to store the berries as they should be picked. Cranberry harvest and the arrival of frost are usually too close together to allow any time to be taken away from the one occupation of picking. So the boys would sort over and clean the berries and then barrel them after the frosts had come.
The bog was a wonder to the Allen boys. Around the edge, for perhaps ten rods out into the marsh, were growing tamarack trees, from little switches a dozen feet high that could be easily pulled up by hand, to older ones six inches in diameter, and thirty feet in height. Further out, beyond the line of tamaracks, the bog looked much like a prairie covered with moss, with here and there a sandy mound upon which blackberry vines, huckleberry bushes, and a few scattering pine trees were growing.
When they had walked out into the marsh several rods over shoe-top deep in the moss, Dauphin called out, “Stand still a minute, boys, I want to show you something,” and he began to spring up and down in rhythmic motion. In a few moments, at first slightly, then in increasing motion the trees began to sway and bend, and the surface of the bog, for many rods around, could be seen in regular, wave-like motion, trees and all rising and falling, bending and rolling as if on the bosom of a rolling sea.
“It is like this,” said Dauphin in answer to the boys’ astonished questioning, “this marsh is really a lake over which the moss has grown until it is now completely covered. Here, near the edge where it started in to grow and spread over the water, the old moss falling down each year has been succeeded by the new growing up, and so for ages, until there is now quite a solid covering at the surface, enough even to support the trees, but, as you see, it is only after all a floating cover to a lake. Not all over is the moss so thick as here, and there are places dangerous to try to walk over. One might easily drop through. Then--”