Hunt

Would have been simpler just to walk straight west to the tree-lined edge of the farmer's field just mentioned where we had camped, but apparently I was either too drunk to think of something so simple, or it just seemed too far out of the way.

There was this story about about Mud Lake. Don't know if it was true or not, but we believed it at the time. A hunter got stuck in the low water mud shore of the lake, and he began to sink and could not extricate himself, like quicksand. The sun reflected off the magazine of his gun and someone driving along the highway three miles north saw the reflection and wondered what it was. He became so intrigued he walked out there by way of Hansen's farm. He found the hunter up to his neck when he got there and so saved his life.

The problem for me was that there was a channel that connected Mud with Song Lake, that ran through town, and which snaked back and forth so that I kept running into it. I came to the channel which crossed my direct route. Simply to difficult to follow its course, so I decided I would have to swim or wade it. It was light by this time, a gray low-cloud drizzly haze. The channel was about fifty feet wide and I was already soaked through, thinking I could-not get much wetter. So in I went in holding the gun over my head. Fortunately it was only about chest deep at the middle, and the mud bottom supported my weight, I only sinking in about ankle deep. The problem was I kept running into this muddy channel and so had to keep fording it four or five times.

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