Reporter Mark Shanahan drags his canoe through shoreline mud while preparing to cross Mud Pond en route to Chamberlain Lake. Thoreau's Penobscot Indian guide called this ''the wettest carry in the state,'' but this year's arid summer helped dry the 1.75-mile trail between Umbazooksus Lake and Mud Pond. Thoreau ended up missing the pond, but not the wetlands, by wandering in the wrong direction. Staff photo by John Ewing.

Maybe, I suggested to my editor, it would be possible to retrace Henry David Thoreau's route without doing the Mud Pond Carry. Except for a few Thoreau fanatics, who's going to know we bypassed this hell on earth?

But think of the story possibilities, my editor replied. I had, I said, and they all began the same way: ''A foolhardy newspaper reporter stuck in the mud for several days was finally, and mercifully, devoured Friday by a giant, hairy slug.''

So what's the problem?, my editor asked.

In the end, photographer John Ewing and I did the Mud Pond Carry - 1.75 miles of mostly mud that runs between Umbazooksus Lake and the best-known of the state's 69 Mud Ponds. And guess what? It wasn't that bad.

Thoreau's Penobscot Indian guide, Joe Polis, called this ''the wettest carry in the state,'' and normally it is. But the arid early summer and the streak of sunny days that preceded our trip helped to dry the trail.

We also were helped by John Richardson, owner of Nugent's Chamberlain Lake Camps, who met us beforehand and ferried around all of our gear except for our knapsacks and the 80-pound, 16-foot-9-inch fiberglass canoe.

Most of the trail resembles a stream bed, a 3-foot-wide mud channel that meanders through the woods. John and I carried the canoe on our shoulders, taking frequent breaks to rest, drink water and pick raspberries.

In places, our feet did disappear in mud, but the flies were not bad and the blow-downs that sometimes block the trail had been cleared away, presumably by snowmobilers who use this trail to travel between Umbazooksus and Chamberlain lakes.

Our walk across the carry was easy compared with Thoreau's. In July 1857, with Polis and a friend from Concord, Mass., the author did the Mud Pond Carry and found the conditions miserable - wet and extremely buggy.

''I now first began to be seriously molested by the black-fly, a very small but perfectly formed fly of that color . . . which I first felt, and then saw, in swarms about me,'' Thoreau wrote. ''The hunters tell bloody stories about them - how they settle in a ring about your neck, before you know, and are wiped off in great numbers with your blood.''

Thoreau lagged behind Polis, who was carrying the canoe, and soon lost the trail. He wandered nearly four miles in the wrong direction, wading through an endless wetland and missing Mud Pond altogether.

He didn't miss much. Mud Pond, which appears completely devoid of plant or animal life, is only about 3 feet deep, and the bottom is the color and consistency of peanut butter. Where the trail and the pond meet, John and I sank into mud that was over our knees and, we later learned, full of leeches.

Thoreau had a similar experience in the terrain near Mud Pond:

''We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than that a musquash (muskrat) leaves in similar places, when he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places.

''We concluded that if Mud Pond was as muddy as the approach to it was wet, it certainly deserved its name.''

We paddled across the pond to a rocky brook that leads eventually to Chamberlain Lake. At the lake, I paused to look over my shoulder, knowing there was an excellent chance I'd never do it.that again.

Thoreau, covered in mud and bug bites, had a similar reaction upon reaching the lake.

''We were rejoiced to see such dry things in that part of the world,'' he wrote. ''But at first we did not attend to dryness so much as to mud and wetness. We all three walked into the lake up to our middle to wash our clothes.''

Reflecting on the Mud Pond Carry later, Thoreau wrote, ''I would not have missed that walk for a good deal.''

On this, we disagree.