Part 3 (1/2)
I told the Indian that we would go to church to Chesuncook this morning, some fifteen miles. It was settled weather at last. A few swallows flitted over the water, we heard Maryland yellow-throats along the sh.o.r.e, the notes of the chickadee, and, I believe, redstarts.
Moose-flies of large size pursued us in midstream.
The Indian thought that we should lie by on Sunday. Said he, ”We come here look.u.m things, look all round, but come Sunday look up all that, and then Monday look again.”
He spoke of an Indian of his acquaintance who had been with some ministers to Katahdin and had told him how they conducted. This he described in a low and solemn voice. ”They make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every meal. Come Sunday, they stop 'em, no go at all that day--keep still--preach all day--first one, then another, just like church. Oh, ver' good men. One day going along a river, they came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while. They go right ash.o.r.e--stop there, go no farther that day--they have meeting there, preach and pray just like Sunday. Then they go back and carry the body with them. Oh, they ver' good men.”
I judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see Katahdin.
However, the Indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we would go along he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he no tak.u.m pay for what he do Sunday then ther's no harm, but if he tak.u.m pay then wrong. I told him that he was stricter than white men.
Nevertheless, I noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the Sundays at last.
He appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud voice, in Indian, kneeling before the camp, morning and evening--sometimes scrambling up in haste when he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity. In the course of the day he remarked, ”Poor man rememberum G.o.d more than rich.”
We soon pa.s.sed the island where I had camped four years before. The deadwater, a mile or two below it, the Indian said was ”a great place for moose.” We saw the gra.s.s bent where a moose came out the night before, and the Indian said that he could smell one as far as he could see him, but he added that if he should see five or six to-day close by canoe he no shoot 'em. Accordingly, as he was the only one of the party who had a gun, or had come a-hunting, the moose were safe.
Just below this a cat owl flew heavily over the stream, and he, asking if I knew what it was, imitated very well the common _hoo, hoo, hoo, hoorer, hoo_, of our woods.
We carried a part of the baggage about Pine Stream Falls, while the Indian went down in the canoe. A Bangor merchant had told us that two men in his employ were drowned some time ago while pa.s.sing these falls in a bateau, and a third clung to a rock all night and was taken off in the morning. There were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on this carry and the neighboring sh.o.r.es. I measured the largest canoe birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the carry. It was fourteen and one half feet in circ.u.mference at two feet from the ground, but at five feet divided into three parts. The Indian cut a small woody k.n.o.b as big as a filbert from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good medicine.
After we had embarked and gone half a mile, my companion remembered that he had left his knife, and we paddled back to get it, against the strong and swift current. This taught us the difference between going up and down the stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter of a mile, we should have gone down a mile and half at least. So we landed, and while he and the Indian were gone back for it, I watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white waterfowl near the sh.o.r.e, forty or fifty rods below. It alternately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being carried round by an eddy.
Immediately below these falls was the Chesuncook Deadwater, caused by the flowing back of the lake. As we paddled slowly over this, the Indian told us a story of his hunting thereabouts, and something more interesting about himself. It appeared that he had represented his tribe at Augusta, and once at Was.h.i.+ngton. He had a great idea of education, and would occasionally break out into such expressions as this, ”Kademy--good thing--I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there. You been college?”
We steered across the northwest end of the lake. It is an agreeable change to cross a lake after you have been shut up in the woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. It is one of the surprises which Nature has in store for the traveler in the forest. To look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water was liberating and civilizing even. The lakes also reveal the mountains, and give ample scope and range to our thought. Already there were half a dozen log huts about this end of the lake, though so far from a road. In these woods the earliest settlements are cl.u.s.tering about the lakes, partly, I think, for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest clearings. Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.
About noon we turned northward up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast corner found the Caucomgomoc River, and after going about a mile from the lake reached the Umbazookskus. Our course was up the Umbazookskus, but as the Indian knew of a good camping-place, that is, a cool place where there were few mosquitoes, about half a mile farther up the Caucomgomoc, we went thither. So quickly we changed the civilizing sky of Chesuncook for the dark wood of the Caucomgomoc. On reaching the Indian's camping-ground on the south side, where the bank was about a dozen feet high, I read on the trunk of a fir tree blazed by an axe an inscription in charcoal which had been left by him. It was surmounted by a drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the sign used by his family always. The drawing, though rude, could not be mistaken for anything but a bear, and he doubted my ability to copy it. The inscription ran thus. I interline the English of his Indian as he gave it to me.
(The figure of a bear in a boat.) July 26 1853
_niasoseb_ We alone Joseph _Polis elioi_ Polis start _sia olta_ for Oldtown _onke ni_ right away _quambi_
July 15 1855 _niasoseb_
He added now below:--
1857 July 26 Jo. Polis
This was one of his homes. I saw where he had sometimes stretched his moose-hides on the sunny north side of the river where there was a narrow meadow.
After we had selected a place for our camp, and kindled our fire, almost exactly on the site of the Indian's last camp here, he, looking up, observed, ”That tree danger.”
It was a dead part, more than a foot in diameter, of a large canoe birch, which branched at the ground. This branch, rising thirty feet or more, slanted directly over the spot which we had chosen for our bed. I told him to try it with his axe, but he could not shake it perceptibly, and, therefore, seemed inclined to disregard it, and my companion expressed his willingness to run the risk. But it seemed to me that we should be fools to lie under it, for though the lower part was firm, the top, for aught we knew, might be just ready to fall, and we should at any rate be very uneasy if the wind arose in the night. It is a common accident for men camping in the woods to be killed by a falling tree. So the camp was moved to the other side of the fire.
The Indian said that the Umbazookskus, being a dead stream with broad meadows, was a good place for moose, and he frequently came a-hunting here, being out alone three weeks or more from Oldtown. He sometimes, also, went a-hunting to the Seboois Lakes, taking the stage, with his gun and ammunition, axe and blankets, hard-bread and pork, perhaps for a hundred miles of the way, and jumped off at the wildest place on the road, where he was at once at home, and every rod was a tavern-site for him. Then, after a short journey through the woods, he would build a spruce-bark canoe in one day, putting but few ribs into it, that it might be light, and, after doing his hunting with it on the lakes, would return with his furs the same way he had come. Thus you have an Indian availing himself of the advantages of civilization, without losing any of his woodcraft, but proving himself the more successful hunter for it.
This man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. Our tent was of a kind new to him, but when he had once seen it pitched it was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time, though I am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered several times.
Now I thought I would observe how he spent his Sunday. While I and my companion were looking about at the trees and river he went to sleep.