Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/306

the rocks, and directly ignited and set fire to the fir leaves, spreading off with great violence and crackling over the mountain, and making us jump for our baggage. Fortunately, it did not burn a foot toward us, for we could not have run in that thicket. It spread particularly fast in the procumbent creeping spruce, scarcely a foot deep, and made a few acres of deers' horns, thus leaving our mark on the mountain side. We thought at first it would run for miles, and Wentworth said it would do no harm,—the more there was burned the better; but such was the direction of the wind that it soon reached the brow of a ridge east of us, and then burned very slowly down its east side. Yet Willey says, p. 23 [of his "Incidents of White Mountain History"], speaking of the dead trees, "bucks' horns," "Fire could not have caused the death of these trees; for fire will not spread here in consequence of the humidity of the whole region at this elevation," and he attributes their death to the cold of 1816. Yet fire did spread above the limit of trees in this ravine.—Finally, we kept on, leaving the fire raging, down to the first little lake, walking in the stream, jumping from rock to rock with it. It may have fallen a thousand feet, within a mile below the snow. We camped on a slightly rising ground between that first little lake and the stream, in a dense