The trees had grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this bare space they had once covered with shadow.
Sharp at the edge of this extension of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern.
Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade.
He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees.
His neck and back and the small of his back rested as he stretched.
The earth felt good against his back.
He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes.
He opened them and looked up again.
There was a wind high up in the branches.
He shut his eyes again and went to sleep.
Nick woke stiff and cramped.
The sun was nearly down.
His pack was heavy and the straps painful as he lifted it on.
He leaned over with the pack on and picked up the leather rod-case and started out from the pine trees across the sweet fern swale, toward the river.
He knew it could not be more than a mile.
He came down a hillside covered with stumps into a meadow.
At the edge of the meadow flowed the river.
Nick was glad to get to the river.
He walked upstream through the meadow.
His trousers were soaked with the dew as he walked.
After the hot day, the dew halt come quickly and heavily.
The river made no sound.
It was too fast and smooth.
At the edge of the meadow, before he mounted to a piece of high ground to make camp, Nick looked down the river at the trout rising.
They were rising to insects come from the swamp on the other side of the stream when the sun went down.
The trout jumped out of water to take them.
While Nick walked through the little stretch of meadow alongside the stream, trout had jumped high out of water.
Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface, for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream.
As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.
The ground rose, wooded and sandy, to overlook the meadow, the stretch of river and the swamp.
Nick dropped his pack and rod case and looked for a level piece of ground.
He was very hungry and he wanted to make his camp before he cooked.
Between two jack pines, the ground was quite level.
He took the ax out of the pack and chopped out two projecting roots.
That leveled a piece of ground large enough to sleep on.
He smoothed out the sandy soil with his hand and pulled all the sweet fern bushes by their roots.
His hands smelled good from the sweet fern.
He smoothed the uprooted earth.
He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets.
When he had the ground smooth, he spread his blankets.
One he folded double, next to the ground.
The other two he spread on top.
With the ax he slit off a bright slab of pine from one of the stumps and split it into pegs for the tent.
He wanted them long and solid to hold in the ground.
With the tent unpacked and spread on the ground, the pack, leaning against a jack pine, looked much smaller.
Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridgepole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the ground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine.
The tent hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on a clothesline.
Nick poked a pole he had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by pegging out the sides.
He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight.
Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes.