Part 5 (1/2)
The wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes.
She feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her n.o.blest trees.
Many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and all is still again. It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them--to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens. He speaks of a ”berth” of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might.
When the chopper would praise a pine he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. In my mind's eye I can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke binding them together, the brazen-tipped horns betraying their servitude, taking their stand on the stump of each giant pine in succession throughout this whole forest, and chewing their cud there, until it is nothing but an ox-pasture, and run out at that. As if it were good for the oxen, and some medicinal quality ascended into their nostrils. Or is their elevated position intended merely as a symbol of the fact that the pastoral comes next in order to the sylvan or hunter life?
The character of the logger's admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it. If he told all that was in his mind, he would say, ”It was so big that I cut it down, and then a yoke of oxen could stand on its stump.” He admires the log, the carca.s.s or corpse, more than the tree. Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down.
The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness he cuts it down, puts up a ”deestrict” schoolhouse, and introduces Webster's spelling-book.
Below the last dam, the river being swift and shallow, we two walked about half a mile to lighten the canoe. I made it a rule to carry my knapsack when I walked, and also to keep it tied to a crossbar when in the canoe, that it might be found with the canoe if we should upset.
I heard the dog-day locust here, a sound which I had a.s.sociated only with more open, if not settled countries.
We were now fairly on the Allegash River. After perhaps two miles of river we entered Heron Lake, scaring up forty or fifty young sheldrakes, at the entrance, which ran over the water with great rapidity, as usual in a long line.
This lake, judging from the map, is about ten miles long. We had entered it on the southwest side, and saw a dark mountain northeast over the lake which the Indian said was called Peaked Mountain, and used by explorers to look for timber from. The sh.o.r.es were in the same ragged and unsightly condition, enc.u.mbered with dead timber, both fallen and standing, as in the last lake, owing to the dam on the Allegash below.
Some low points or islands were almost drowned.
I saw something white a mile off on the water, which turned out to be a great gull on a rock, which the Indian would have been glad to kill and eat. But it flew away long before we were near; and also a flock of summer ducks that were about the rock with it. I asking him about herons, since this was Heron Lake, he said that he found the blue heron's nests in the hard-wood trees.
Rounding a point, we stood across a bay toward a large island three or four miles down the lake. We met with shadflies midway, about a mile from the sh.o.r.e, and they evidently fly over the whole lake. On Moosehead I had seen a large devil's-needle half a mile from the sh.o.r.e, coming from the middle of the lake, where it was three or four miles wide at least. It had probably crossed.
We landed on the southeast side of the island, which was rather elevated, and densely wooded, with a rocky sh.o.r.e, in season for an early dinner. Somebody had camped there not long before and left the frame on which they stretched a moose-hide. The Indian proceeded at once to cut a canoe birch, slanted it up against another tree on the sh.o.r.e, tying it with a withe, and lay down to sleep in its shade. We made this island the limit of our excursion in this direction.
The next dam was about fifteen miles farther north down the Allegash. We had been told in Bangor of a man who lived alone, a sort of hermit, at that dam, to take care of it, who spent his time tossing a bullet from one hand to the other, for want of employment. This sort of t.i.t-for-tat intercourse between his two hands, bandying to and fro a leaden subject, seems to have been his symbol for society.
There was another island visible toward the north end of the lake, with an elevated clearing on it; but we learned afterward that it was not inhabited, had only been used as a pasture for cattle which summered in these woods. This unnaturally smooth-shaven, squarish spot, in the midst of the otherwise uninterrupted forest, only reminded us how uninhabited the country was. You would sooner expect to meet a bear than an ox in such a clearing. At any rate, it must have been a surprise to the bears when they came across it. Such, seen far or near, you know at once to be man's work, for Nature never does it. In order to let in the light to the earth he clears off the forest on the hillsides and plains, and sprinkles fine gra.s.s seed like an enchanter, and so carpets the earth with a firm sward.
Polis had evidently more curiosity respecting the few settlers in those woods than we. If nothing was said, he took it for granted that we wanted to go straight to the next log hut. Having observed that we came by the log huts at Chesuncook, and the blind Canadian's at the Mud Pond carry, without stopping to communicate with the inhabitants, he took occasion now to suggest that the usual way was, when you came near a house, to go to it, and tell the inhabitants what you had seen or heard, and then they told you what they had seen; but we laughed and said that we had had enough of houses for the present, and had come here partly to avoid them.
In the meanwhile, the wind, increasing, blew down the Indian's birch and created such a sea that we found ourselves prisoners on the island, the nearest sh.o.r.e being perhaps a mile distant, and we took the canoe out to prevent its drifting away. We did not know but we should be compelled to spend the rest of the day and the night there. At any rate, the Indian went to sleep again, my companion busied himself drying his plants, and I rambled along the sh.o.r.e westward, which was quite stony, and obstructed with fallen bleached or drifted trees for four or five rods in width.
Our Indian said that he was a doctor, and could tell me some medicinal use for every plant I could show him. I immediately tried him. He said that the inner bark of the aspen was good for sore eyes; and so with various other plants, proving himself as good as his word. According to his account, he had acquired such knowledge in his youth from a wise old Indian with whom he a.s.sociated, and he lamented that the present generation of Indians ”had lost a great deal.”
He said that the caribou was a ”very great runner,” that there were none about this lake now, though there used to be many, and, pointing to the belt of dead trees caused by the dams, he added: ”No lik.u.m stump. When he sees that he scared.”
Pointing southeasterly over the lake and distant forest, he observed, ”Me go Oldtown in three days.”
I asked how he would get over the swamps and fallen trees. ”Oh,” said he, ”in winter all covered, go anywhere on snowshoes, right across lakes.”
What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impa.s.sable in summer!
Here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered face of nature. From the Allegash River, across great Apmoojenegamook, he takes his way under the bear-haunted slopes of Katahdin to Pamadumcook and Millinocket's inland seas, and so to the forks of the Nicketow, ever pus.h.i.+ng the boughs of the fir and spruce aside, with his load of furs, contending day and night, night and day, with the s.h.a.ggy demon vegetation, traveling through the mossy graveyard of trees. Or he could go by ”that rough tooth of the sea” Kineo, great source of arrows and of spears to the ancients, when weapons of stone were used. Seeing and hearing moose, caribou, bears, porcupines, lynxes, wolves, and panthers.
Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States--never hear of America.
There is a lumberer's road called the Eagle Lake Road from the Seboois to the east side of this lake. It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be pa.s.sable, even in winter, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually pa.s.sing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway. I am told that in the Aroostook country the sleds are required by law to be of one width, four feet, and sleighs must be altered to fit the track, so that one runner may go in one rut and the other follow the horse. Yet it is very bad turning out.