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The Forest

by Stewart Edward White · English · Gutenberg #9376 · 316,052 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Forest

Author: Stewart Edward White


        
Release date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #9376]
                Most recently updated: August 10, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FOREST ***




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[Illustration: THE INDIANS WOULD RISE TO THEIR FEET FOR A SINGLE
MOMENT]

THE FOREST

BY

STEWART EDWARD WHITE



CONTENTS


I.     THE CALLING
II.    THE SCIENCE OF GOING LIGHT
III.   THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE
IV.    ON MAKING CAMP
V.     ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT
VI.    THE 'LUNGE
VII.   ON OPEN-WATER CANOE TRAVELLING
VIII.  THE STRANDED STRANGERS
IX.    ON FLIES
X.     CLOCHE
XI.    THE HABITANTS
XII.   THE RIVER
XIII.  THE HILLS
XIV.   ON WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS
XV.    ON WOODS INDIANS
XVI.   ON WOODS INDIANS _(continued)_
XVII.  THE CATCHING OF A CERTAIN FISH
XVIII. MAN WHO WALKS BY MOONLIGHT
XIX.   APOLOGIA

SUGGESTIONS FOR OUTFIT




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


THE INDIANS WOULD RISE TO THEIR FEET FOR A SINGLE MOMENT

THIS OLD SOLDIER HAD COME IN FROM THE LONG TRAIL TO BEAR AGAIN THE FLAG
OF HIS COUNTRY

AT SUCH A TIME YOU WILL MEET WITH ADVENTURES

EACH WAVE WAS SINGLY A PROBLEM, TO FAIL IN WHOSE SOLUTION MEANT INSTANT
SWAMPING

WATCHED THE LONG NORTH-COUNTRY TWILIGHT STEAL UP LIKE A GRAY CLOUD FROM
THE EAST

IN THIS LOVABLE MYSTERY WE JOURNEYED ALL THE REST OF THAT MORNING

NOR NEED YOU HOPE TO POLE A CANOE UPSTREAM AS DO THESE PEOPLE

THEN IN THE TWILIGHT THE BATTLE





THE FOREST





I.

THE CALLING.

"The Red Gods make their medicine again."


Some time in February, when the snow and sleet have shut out from the
wearied mind even the memory of spring, the man of the woods generally
receives his first inspiration. He may catch it from some companion's
chance remark, a glance at the map, a vague recollection of a dim past
conversation, or it may flash on him from the mere pronouncement of a
name. The first faint thrill of discovery leaves him cool, but
gradually, with the increasing enthusiasm of cogitation, the idea gains
body, until finally it has grown to plan fit for discussion.

Of these many quickening potencies of inspiration, the mere name of a
place seems to strike deepest at the heart of romance. Colour, mystery,
the vastnesses of unexplored space are there, symbolized compactly for
the aliment of imagination. It lures the fancy as a fly lures the
trout. Mattágami, Peace River, Kánanaw, the House of the Touchwood
Hills, Rupert's House, the Land of Little Sticks, Flying Post,
Conjuror's House--how the syllables roll from the tongue, what pictures
rise in instant response to their suggestion! The journey of a thousand
miles seems not too great a price to pay for the sight of a place
called the Hills of Silence, for acquaintance with the people who dwell
there, perhaps for a glimpse of the saga-spirit that so named its
environment. On the other hand, one would feel but little desire to
visit Muggin's Corners, even though at their crossing one were assured
of the deepest flavour of the Far North.

The first response to the red god's summons is almost invariably the
production of a fly-book and the complete rearrangement of all its
contents. The next is a resumption of practice with the little pistol.
The third, and last, is pencil and paper, and lists of grub and duffel,
and estimates of routes and expenses, and correspondence with men who
spell queerly, bear down heavily with blunt pencils, and agree to be at
Black Beaver Portage on a certain date. Now, though the February snow
and sleet still shut him in, the spring has draw very near. He can
feel the warmth of her breath rustling through his reviving memories.

There are said to be sixty-eight roads to heaven, of which but one is
the true way, although here and there a by-path offers experimental
variety to the restless and bold. The true way for the man in the woods
to attain the elusive best of his wilderness experience is to go as
light as possible, and the by-paths of departure from that principle
lead only to the slightly increased carrying possibilities of
open-water canoe trips, and permanent camps.

But these prove to be not very independent side paths, never diverging
so far from the main road that one may dare hope to conceal from a
vigilant eye that he is _not_ going light.

To go light is to play the game fairly. The man in the woods matches
himself against the forces of nature. In the towns he is warmed and fed
and clothed so spontaneously and easily that after a time he perforce
begins to doubt himself, to wonder whether his powers are not atrophied
from disuse. And so, with his naked soul, he fronts the wilderness. It
is a test, a measuring of strength, a proving of his essential pluck
and resourcefulness and manhood, an assurance of man's highest potency,
the ability to endure and to take care of himself. In just so far as he
substitutes the ready-made of civilization for the wit-made of the
forest, the pneumatic bed for the balsam boughs, in just so far is he
relying on other men and other men's labour to take care of him. To
exactly that extent is the test invalidated. He has not proved a
courteous antagonist, for he has not stripped to the contest.

To go light is to play the game sensibly. For even when it is not so
earnest, nor the stake so high, a certain common-sense should take the
place on a lower plane of the fair-play sense on the higher. A great
many people find enjoyment in merely playing with nature. Through
vacation they relax their minds, exercise mildly their bodies, and
freshen the colours of their outlook on life. Such people like to live
comfortably, work little, and enjoy existence lazily. Instead of
modifying themselves to fit the life of the wilderness, they modify
their city methods to fit open-air conditions. They do not need to
strip to the contest, for contest there is none, and Indian packers are
cheap at a dollar a day. But even so the problem of the greatest
comfort--defining comfort as an accurate balance of effort expended to
results obtained--can be solved only by the one formula. And that
formula is, again, _go light_, for a superabundance of paraphernalia
proves always more of a care than a satisfaction. When the woods offer
you a thing ready made, it is the merest foolishness to transport that
same thing a hundred miles for the sake of the manufacturer's trademark.

I once met an outfit in the North Woods, plodding diligently across
portage, laden like the camels of the desert. Three Indians swarmed
back and forth a half-dozen trips apiece. An Indian can carry over two
hundred pounds. That evening a half-breed and I visited their camp and
examined their outfit, always with growing wonder. They had tent-poles
and about fifty pounds of hardwood tent pegs--in a wooded country where
such things can be had for a clip of the axe. They had a system of
ringed iron bars which could be so fitted together as to form a low
open grill on which trout could be broiled--weight twenty pounds, and
split wood necessary for its efficiency. They had air mattresses and
camp-chairs and oil lanterns. They had corpulent duffel bags apiece
that would stand alone, and enough changes of clothes to last out
dry-skinned a week's rain. And the leader of the party wore the
wrinkled brow of tribulation. For he had to keep track of everything
and see that package number twenty-eight was not left, and that package
number sixteen did not get wet; that the pneumatic bed did not get
punctured, and that the canned goods did. Beside which, the caravan was
moving at the majestic rate of about five miles a day.

Now tent-pegs can always be cut, and trout broiled beautifully by a
dozen other ways, and candle lanterns fold up, and balsam can be laid
in such a manner as to be as springy as a pneumatic mattress, and
camp-chairs, if desired, can be quickly constructed with an axe, and
clothes can always be washed or dried as long as fire burns and water
runs, and any one of fifty other items of laborious burden could have
been ingeniously and quickly substituted by any one of the Indians. It
was not that we concealed a bucolic scorn of effete but solid comfort;
only it did seem ridiculous that a man should cumber himself with a
fifth wheel on a smoothly macadamized road.

The next morning Billy and I went cheerfully on our way. We were
carrying an axe, a gun, blankets, an extra pair of drawers and socks
apiece, a little grub, and an eight-pound shelter tent. We had been out
a week, and we were having a good time.




II.

THE SCIENCE OF GOING LIGHT.

"Now the Four-Way lodge is opened--now the smokes of Council rise--
Pleasant smokes ere yet 'twixt trail and trail they choose."


You can no more be told how to go light than you can be told how to hit
a ball with a bat. It is something that must be lived through, and all
advice on the subject has just about the value of an answer to a
bashful young man who begged from one of our woman's periodicals help
in overcoming the diffidence felt on entering a crowded room. The reply
read: "Cultivate an easy, graceful manner." In like case I might
hypothecate, "To go light, discard all but the really necessary
articles."

The sticking-point, were you to press me close, would be the definition
of the word "necessary," for the terms of such definition would have to
be those solely and simply of a man's experience. Comforts, even most
desirable comforts, are not necessities. A dozen times a day trifling
emergencies will seem precisely to call for some little handy
contrivance that would be just the thing, were it in the pack rather
than at home. A disgorger does the business better than a pocket-knife;
a pair of oilskin trousers turns the wet better than does kersey; a
camp-stove will burn merrily in a rain lively enough to drown an open
fire. Yet neither disgorger, nor oilskins, nor camp-stove can be
considered in the light of necessities, for the simple reason that the
conditions of their use occur too infrequently to compensate for the
pains of their carriage. Or, to put it the other way, a few moments'
work with a knife, wet knees occasionally, or an infrequent soggy meal
are not too great a price to pay for unburdened shoulders.

Nor on the other hand must you conclude that because a thing is a mere
luxury in town, it is nothing but that in the woods. Most woodsmen own
some little ridiculous item of outfit without which they could not be
happy. And when a man cannot be happy lacking a thing, that thing
becomes a necessity. I knew one who never stirred without borated
talcum powder; another who must have his mouth-organ; a third who was
miserable without a small bottle of salad dressing; I confess to a pair
of light buckskin gloves. Each man must decide for himself--remembering
always the endurance limit of human shoulders.

A necessity is that which, _by your own experience_, you have
found you cannot do without. As a bit of practical advice, however, the
following system of elimination may be recommended. When you return
from a trip, turn your duffel bag upside down on the floor. Of the
contents make three piles--three piles conscientiously selected in the
light of what has happened rather than what ought to have happened, or
what might have happened. It is difficult to do this. Preconceived
notions, habits of civilization, theory for future, imagination, all
stand in the eye of your honesty. Pile number one should comprise those
articles you have used every day; pile number two, those you have used
occasionally; pile number three, those you have not used at all. If you
are resolute and singleminded, you will at once discard the latter two.

Throughout the following winter you will be attacked by misgivings. To
be sure, you wore the mosquito hat but once or twice, and the fourth
pair of socks not at all; but then the mosquitoes might be thicker next
time, and a series of rainy days and cold nights might make it
desirable to have a dry pair of socks to put on at night. The past has
been _x_, but the future might be _y_. One by one the discarded creep
back into the list. And by the opening of next season you have made
toward perfection by only the little space of a mackintosh coat and a
ten-gauge gun.

But in the years to come you learn better and better the simple woods
lesson of substitution or doing without. You find that discomfort is as
soon forgotten as pain; that almost anything can be endured if it is
but for the time being; that absolute physical comfort is worth but a
very small price in avoirdupois. Your pack shrinks.

In fact, it really never ceases shrinking. Only last summer taught me
the uselessness of an extra pair of trousers. It rains in the woods;
streams are to be waded; the wetness of leaves is greater than the
wetness of many rivers. Logically, naturally, inevitably, such
conditions point to change of garments when camp is made. We always
change our clothes when we get wet in the city. So for years I carried
those extra nether garments--and continued in the natural exposure to
sun and wind and camp-fire to dry off before change time, or to hang
the damp clothes from the ridge-pole for resumption in the morning. And
then one day the web of that particular convention broke. We change wet
trousers in the town; we do not in the woods. The extras were relegated
to pile number three, and my pack, already apparently down to a
minimum, lost a few pounds more.

You will want a hat, a _good_ hat to turn rain, with a medium
brim. If you are wise, you will get it too small for your head, and rip
out the lining. The felt will cling tenaciously to your hair, so that
you will find the snatches of the brush and the wind generally
unavailing.

By way of undergarments wear woollen. Buy winter weights even for
midsummer. In travelling with a pack a man is going to sweat in
streams, no matter what he puts on or takes off, and the thick garment
will be found no more oppressive than the thin. And then in the cool of
the woods or of the evening he avoids a chill. And he can plunge into
the coldest water with impunity, sure that ten minutes of the air will
dry him fairly well. Until you have shivered in clammy cotton, you
cannot realize the importance of this point. Ten minutes of cotton
underwear in cold water will chill. On the other hand, suitably clothed
in wool, I have waded the ice water of north country streams when the
thermometer was so low I could see my breath in the air, without other
discomfort than a cold ring around my legs to mark the surface of the
water, and a slight numbness in my feet when I emerged. Therefore, even
in hot weather, wear heavy wool. It is the most comfortable.
Undoubtedly you will come to believe this only by experience.

Do not carry a coat. This is another preconception of civilization,
exceedingly difficult to get rid of. You will never wear it while
packing. In a rain you will find that it wets through so promptly as to
be of little use; or, if waterproof, the inside condensation will more
than equal the rain-water. In camp you will discard it because it will
impede the swing of your arms. The end of that coat will be a brief
half-hour after supper, and a makeshift roll to serve as a pillow
during the night. And for these a sweater is better in every way.

In fact, if you feel you must possess another outside garment, let it
be an extra sweater. You can sleep in it, use it when your day garment
is soaked, or even tie things in it as in a bag. It is not necessary,
however.

One good shirt is enough. When you wash it, substitute the sweater
until it dries. In fact, by keeping the sweater always in your
waterproof bag, you possess a dry garment to change into. Two
handkerchiefs are enough. One should be of silk, for neck, head, or--in
case of cramps or intense cold--the _stomach_; the other of
coloured cotton for the pocket. Both can be quickly washed, and dried
_en route_. Three pairs of heavy wool socks will be enough--one
for wear, one for night, and one for extra. A second pair of drawers
supplements the sweater when a temporary day change is desirable. Heavy
kersey "driver's" trousers are the best. They are cheap, dry very
quickly, and are not easily "picked out" by the brush.

The best blanket is that made by the Hudson's Bay Company for its
servants--a "three-point" for summer is heavy enough. The next best is
our own gray army blanket. One of rubber should fold about it, and a
pair of narrow buckle straps is handy to keep the bundle right and
tight and waterproof. As for a tent, buy the smallest shelter you can
get along with, have it made of balloon silk well waterproofed, and
supplement it with a duplicate tent of light cheesecloth to suspend
inside as a fly-proof defence. A seven-by-seven three-man A-tent, which
would weigh between twenty and thirty pounds if made of duck, means
only about eight pounds constructed of this material. And it is
waterproof. I own one which I have used for three seasons. It has been
employed as tarpaulin, fly, even blanket on a pinch; it has been packed
through the roughest country; I have even pressed it into service as a
sort of canoe lining; but it is still as good as ever. Such a tent
sometimes condenses a little moisture in a cold rain, but it never
"sprays" as does a duck shelter; it never leaks simply because you have
accidentally touched its under-surface; and, best of all, it weighs no
more after a rain than before it. This latter item is perhaps its best
recommendation. The confronting with equanimity of a wet day's journey
in the shower-bath brush of our northern forests requires a degree of
philosophy which a gratuitous ten pounds of soaked-up water sometimes
most effectually breaks down. I know of but one place where such a tent
can be bought. The address will be gladly sent to any one practically
interested.

As for the actual implements of the trade, they are not many, although
of course the sporting goods stores are full of all sorts of "handy
contrivances." A small axe--one of the pocket size will do, if you get
the right shape and balance, although a light regulation axe is better;
a thin-bladed sheath-knife of the best steel; a pocket-knife; a
compass; a waterproof match-safe; fishing-tackle; firearms; and cooking
utensils comprise the list. All others belong to permanent camps, or
open-water cruises--not to "hikes" in the woods.

The items, with the exception of the last two, seem to explain
themselves. During the summer months in the North Woods you will not
need a rifle. Partridges, spruce hens, ptarmigan, rabbits, ducks, and
geese are usually abundant enough to fill the provision list. For them,
of course, a shotgun is the thing; but since such a weapon weighs many
pounds, and its ammunition many more, I have come gradually to depend
entirely on a pistol. The instrument is single shot, carries a six-inch
barrel, is fitted with a special butt, and is built on the graceful
lines of a 38-calibre Smith and Wesson revolver. Its cartridge is the
22 long-rifle, a target size, that carries as accurately as you can
hold for upwards of a hundred yards. With it I have often killed a
half-dozen of partridges from the same tree. The ammunition is light.
Altogether it is a most satisfactory, convenient, and accurate weapon,
and quite adequate to all small game. In fact, an Indian named
Tawabinisáy, after seeing it perform, once borrowed it to kill a moose.

[Illustration: THIS OLD SOLDIER HAD COME IN FROM THE LONG TRAIL TO BEAR
AGAIN THE FLAG OF HIS COUNTRY.]

"I shootum in eye," said he.

By way of cooking utensils, buy aluminium. It is expensive, but so
light and so easily cleaned that it is well worth all you may have to
pay. If you are alone you will not want to carry much hardware. I made
a twenty-day trip once with nothing but a tin cup and a frying-pan.
Dishes, pails, wash-basins, and other receptacles can always be made of
birch bark and cedar withes--by one who knows how. The ideal outfit for
two or three is a cup, fork, and spoon apiece, one tea-pail, two
kettle-pails, and a frying-pan. The latter can be used as a bread-oven.

A few minor items, of practically no weight, suggest themselves--toilet
requisites, fly-dope, needle and thread, a cathartic, pain-killer, a
roll of surgeon's bandage, pipe and tobacco. But when the pack is made
up, and the duffel bag tied, you find that, while fitted for every
emergency but that of catastrophe, you are prepared to "go light."




III.

THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE.


Sometime, no matter how long your journey, you will reach a spot whose
psychological effect is so exactly like a dozen others that you will
recognize at once its kinship with former experience. Mere physical
likeness does not count at all. It may possess a water-front of laths
and sawdust, or an outlook over broad, shimmering, heat-baked plains.
It may front the impassive fringe of a forest, or it may skirt the calm
stretch of a river. But whether of log or mud, stone or unpainted
board, its identity becomes at first sight indubitably evident. Were
you, by the wave of some beneficent wand, to be transported direct to
it from the heart of the city, you could not fail to recognize it. "The
jumping-off place!" you would cry ecstatically, and turn with unerring
instinct to the Aromatic Shop.

For here is where begins the Long Trail. Whether it will lead you
through the forests, or up the hills, or over the plains, or by
invisible water paths; whether you will accomplish it on horseback, or
in canoe, or by the transportation of your own two legs; whether your
companions shall be white or red, or merely the voices of the
wilds--these things matter not a particle. In the symbol of this little
town you loose your hold on the world of made things, and shift for
yourself among the unchanging conditions of nature.

Here the faint forest flavour, the subtle, invisible breath of freedom,
stirs faintly across men's conventions. The ordinary affairs of life
savour of this tang--a trace of wildness in the domesticated berry. In
the dress of the inhabitants is a dash of colour, a carelessness of
port; in the manner of their greeting is the clear, steady-eyed
taciturnity of the silent places; through the web of their gray talk of
ways and means and men's simpler beliefs runs a thread of colour. One
hears strange, suggestive words and phrases--arapajo, capote, arroyo,
the diamond hitch, cache, butte, coulé, muskegs, portage, and a dozen
others coined into the tender of daily use. And occasionally, when the
expectation is least alert, one encounters suddenly the very symbol of
the wilderness itself--a dust-whitened cowboy, an Indian packer with
his straight, fillet-confined hair, a voyageur gay in red sash and
ornamented moccasins, one of the Company's canoemen, hollow-cheeked
from the river--no costumed show exhibit, but fitting naturally into
the scene, bringing something of the open space with him--so that in
your imagination the little town gradually takes on the colour of
mystery which an older community utterly lacks.

But perhaps the strongest of the influences which unite to assure the
psychological kinships of the jumping-off places is that of the
Aromatic Shop. It is usually a board affair, with a broad high sidewalk
shaded by a wooden awning. You enter through a narrow door, and find
yourself facing two dusky aisles separated by a narrow division of
goods, and flanked by wooden counters. So far it is exactly like the
corner store of our rural districts. But in the dimness of these two
aisles lurks the spirit of the wilds. There in a row hang fifty pair of
smoke-tanned moccasins; in another an equal number of oil-tanned;
across the background you can make out snowshoes. The shelves are high
with blankets--three-point, four-point--thick and warm for the
out-of-doors. Should you care to examine, the storekeeper will hook
down from aloft capotes of different degrees of fineness. Fathoms of
black tobacco-rope lie coiled in tubs. Tump-lines welter in a tangle of
dimness. On a series of little shelves is the ammunition, fascinating
in the attraction of mere numbers--44 Winchester, 45 Colt, 40-82,
30-40, 44 S. & W.--they all connote something to the accustomed mind,
just as do the numbered street names of New York.

An exploration is always bringing something new to light among the
commonplaces of ginghams and working shirts, and canned goods and
stationery, and the other thousands of civilized drearinesses to found
in every country store. From under the counter you drag out a mink skin
or so; from the dark corner an assortment of steel traps. In a loft a
birch-bark mokok, fifty pounds heavy with granulated maple sugar,
dispenses a faint perfume.

For this is, above all, the Aromatic Shop. A hundred ghosts of odours
mingle to produce the spirit of it. The reek of the camp-fires is in
its buckskin, of the woods in its birch bark, of the muskegs in its
sweet grass, of the open spaces in its peltries, of the evening meal in
its coffees and bacons, of the portage trail in the leather of the
tump-lines. I am speaking now of the country of which we are to write.
The shops of the other jumping-off places are equally aromatic--whether
with the leather of saddles, the freshness of ash paddles, or the
pungency of marline; and once the smell of them is in your nostrils you
cannot but away.

The Aromatic Shop is always kept by the wisest, the most accommodating,
the most charming shopkeeper in the world. He has all leisure to give
you, and enters into the innermost spirit of your buying. He is of
supernal sagacity in regard to supplies and outfits, and if he does not
know all about routes, at least he is acquainted with the very man who
can tell you everything you want to know. He leans both elbows on the
counter, you swing your feet, and together you go over the list, while
the Indian stands smoky and silent in the background. "Now, if I was
you," says he, "I'd take just a little more pork. You won't be eatin'
so much yourself, but these Injuns ain't got no bottom when it comes to
sow-belly. And I wouldn't buy all that coffee. You ain't goin' to want
much after the first edge is worn off. Tea's the boy." The Indian
shoots a few rapid words across the discussion. "He says you'll want
some iron shoes to fit on canoe poles for when you come back
up-stream," interprets your friend. "I guess that's right. I ain't got
none, but th' blacksmith'll fit you out all right. You'll find him just
below--never mind, don't you bother, I'll see to all that for you."

The next morning he saunters into view at the river-bank. "Thought I'd
see you off," he replies to your expression of surprise at his early
rising. "Take care of yourself." And so the last hand-clasp of
civilization is extended to you from the little Aromatic Shop.

Occasionally, however, though very rarely, you step to the Long Trail
from the streets of a raw modern town. The chance presence of some
local industry demanding a large population of workmen, combined with
first-class railroad transportation, may plant an electric-lighted,
saloon-lined, brick-hoteled city in the middle of the wilderness.
Lumber, mines--especially of the baser metals or commercial
minerals--fisheries, a terminus of water freightage, may one or all
call into existence a community a hundred years in advance of its
environment. Then you lose the savour of the jump-off. Nothing can
quite take the place of the instant plunge into the wilderness, for you
must travel three or four days from such a place before you sense the
forest in its vastness, even though deer may eat the cabbages at the
edge of town. Occasionally, however, by force of crude contrast to the
brick-heated atmosphere, the breath of the woods reaches your cheek,
and always you own a very tender feeling for the cause of it.

Dick and myself were caught in such a place. It was an unfinished
little town, with brick-fronted stores, arc-lights swaying over
fathomless mud, big superintendent's and millowner's houses of bastard
architecture in a blatant superiority of hill location, a hotel whose
office chairs supported a variety of cheap drummers, and stores
screeching in an attempt at metropolitan smartness. We inspected the
standpipe and the docks, walked a careless mile of board walk, kicked a
dozen pugnacious dogs from our setter, Deuce, and found ourselves at
the end of our resources. As a crowd seemed to be gathering about the
wooden railway station, we joined it in sheer idleness.

It seemed that an election had taken place the day before, that one
Smith had been chosen to the Assembly, and that, though this district
had gone anti-Smith, the candidate was expected to stop off an hour on
his way to a more westerly point. Consequently the town was on hand to
receive him.

The crowd, we soon discovered, was bourgeois in the extreme. Young men
from the mill escorted young women from the shops. The young men wore
flaring collars three sizes too large; the young women white cotton
mitts three sizes too small. The older men spat, and talked through
their noses; the women drawled out a monotonous flow of speech
concerning the annoyances of domestic life. A gang of uncouth practical
jokers, exploding in horse-laughter, skylarked about, jostling rudely.
A village band, uniformed solely with cheap carriage-cloth caps, brayed
excruciatingly. The reception committee had decorated, with red and
white silesia streamers and rosettes, an ordinary side-bar buggy, to
which a long rope had been attached, that the great man might be
dragged by his fellow-citizens to the public square.

Nobody seemed to be taking the affair too seriously. It was evidently
more than half a joke. Anti-Smith was more good-humouredly in evidence
than the winning party. Just this touch of buffoonery completed our
sense of the farce-comedy character of the situation. The town was
tawdry in its preparations--and knew it; but half sincere in its
enthusiasm--and knew it. If the crowd had been composed of Americans,
we should have anticipated an unhappy time for Smith; but good, loyal
Canadians, by the limitations of temperament, could get no further than
a spirit of manifest irreverence.

In the shifting of the groups Dick and I became separated, but shortly
I made him out worming his way excitedly toward me, his sketch-book
open in his hand.

"Come here," he whispered. "There's going to be fun. They're going to
open up on old Smith after all."

I followed. The decorated side-bar buggy might be well meant; the
village band need not have been interpreted as an ironical compliment;
the rest of the celebration might indicate paucity of resource rather
than facetious intent; but surely the figure of fun before us could not
be otherwise construed than as a deliberate advertising in the face of
success of the town's real attitude toward the celebration.

The man was short. He wore a felt hat, so big that it rested on his
ears. A gray wool shirt hung below his neck. A cutaway coat miles too
large depended below his knees and to the first joints of his fingers.
By way of official uniform his legs were incased in an ordinary rough
pair of miller's white trousers, on which broad strips of red flannel
had been roughly sewn. Everything was wrinkled in the folds of
too-bigness. As though to accentuate the note, the man stood very
erect, very military, and supported in one hand the staff of an English
flag. This figure of fun, this man made from the slop-chest, this
caricature of a scarecrow, had been put forth by heavy-handed
facetiousness to the post of greatest honour. He was Standard-Bearer to
the occasion! Surely subtle irony could go no further.

A sudden movement caused the man to turn. One sleeve of the faded,
ridiculous old cutaway was empty. He turned again. From under the
ear-flanging hat looked unflinchingly the clear, steady blue eye of the
woodsman. And so we knew. This old soldier had come in from the Long
Trail to bear again the flag of his country. If his clothes were old
and ill-fitting, at least they were his best, and the largeness of the
empty sleeve belittled the too-largeness of the other. In all this
ribald, laughing, irreverent, commonplace, semi-vicious crowd he was
the one note of sincerity. To him this was a real occasion, and the
exalted reverence in his eye for the task he was so simply performing
was Smith's real triumph--if he could have known it. We understood now,
we felt the imminence of the Long Trail. For the first time the little
brick, tawdry town gripped our hearts with the well-known thrill of the
Jumping-Off Place. Suddenly the great, simple, unashamed wilderness
drew near us as with the rush of wings.




IV.

ON MAKING CAMP.

"Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight? Who hath
  heard the birch log burning?
Who is quick to read the noises of the night?
Let him follow with the others, for the young men's feet are turning
To the camps of proved desire and known delight."


In the Ojibway language _wigwam_ means a good spot for camping, a
place cleared for a camp, a camp as an abstract proposition, and a camp
in the concrete as represented by a tent, a thatched shelter, or a
conical tepee. In like manner, the English word _camp_ lends
itself to a variety of concepts. I once slept in a four-poster bed over
a polished floor in an elaborate servant-haunted structure which,
mainly because it was built of logs and overlooked a lake, the owner
always spoke of as his camp. Again, I once slept on a bed of prairie
grass, before a fire of dried buffalo chips and mesquite, wrapped in a
single light blanket, while a good vigorous rain-storm made new cold
places on me and under me all night. In the morning the cowboy with
whom I was travelling remarked that this was "sure a lonesome
proposition as a camp."

Between these two extremes is infinite variety, grading upwards through
the divers bivouacs of snow, plains, pines, or hills to the bark
shelter; past the dog-tent, the A-tent, the wall-tent, to the elaborate
permanent canvas cottage of the luxurious camper, the dug-out winter
retreat of the range cowboy, the trapper's cabin, the great log-built
lumber-jack communities, and the last refinements of sybaritic summer
homes in the Adirondacks. All these are camps. And when you talk of
making camp you must know whether that process is to mean only a search
for rattlesnakes and enough acrid-smoked fuel to boil tea, or a
winter's consultation with an expert architect; whether your camp is to
be made on the principle of Omar's one-night Sultan, or whether it is
intended to accommodate the full days of an entire summer.

But to those who tread the Long Trail the making of camp resolves
itself into an algebraical formula. After a man has travelled all day
through the Northern wilderness he wants to rest, and anything that
stands between himself and his repose he must get rid of in as few
motions as is consistent with reasonable thoroughness. The end in view
is a hot meal and a comfortable dry place to sleep. The straighter he
can draw the line to those two points the happier he is.

Early in his woods experience, Dick became possessed with the desire to
do everything for himself. As this was a laudable striving for
self-sufficiency, I called a halt at about three o'clock one afternoon
in order to give him plenty of time.

Now Dick is a good, active, able-bodied boy, possessed of average
intelligence and rather more than average zeal. He even had theory of a
sort, for he had read various "Boy Campers, or the Trapper's Guide,"
"How to Camp Out," "The Science of Woodcraft," and other able works. He
certainly had ideas enough and confidence enough. I sat down on a log.

At the end of three hours' flusteration, heat, worry, and good hard
work, he had accomplished the following results: A tent, very saggy,
very askew, covered a four-sided area--it was not a rectangle--of very
bumpy ground. A hodge-podge bonfire, in the centre of which an
inaccessible coffee-pot toppled menacingly, alternately threatened to
ignite the entire surrounding forest or to go out altogether through
lack of fuel. Personal belongings strewed the ground near the fire, and
provisions cumbered the entrance to the tent. Dick was anxiously mixing
batter for the cakes, attempting to stir a pot of rice often enough to
prevent it from burning, and trying to rustle sufficient dry wood to
keep the fire going. This diversity of interests certainly made him sit
up and pay attention. At each instant he had to desert his flour-sack
to rescue the coffee-pot, or to shift the kettle, or to dab hastily at
the rice, or to stamp out the small brush, or to pile on more dry
twigs. His movements were not graceful. They raised a scurry of dry
bark, ashes, wood dust, twigs, leaves, and pine needles, a certain
proportion of which found their way into the coffee, the rice, and the
sticky batter, while the smaller articles of personal belonging,
hastily dumped from the duffel-bag, gradually disappeared from view in
the manner of Pompeii and ancient Vesuvius. Dick burned his fingers and
stumbled about and swore, and looked so comically-pathetically
red-faced through the smoke that I, seated on the log, at the same time
laughed and pitied. And in the end, when he needed a continuous steady
fire to fry his cakes, he suddenly discovered that dry twigs do not
make coals, and that his previous operations had used up all the fuel
within easy circle of the camp.

So he had to drop everything for the purpose of rustling wood,
while the coffee chilled, the rice cooled, the bacon congealed, and all
the provisions, cooked and uncooked, gathered entomological specimens.
At the last, the poor bedeviled theorist made a hasty meal of scorched
food, brazenly postponed the washing of dishes until the morrow, and
coiled about his hummocky couch to dream the nightmares of complete
exhaustion.

Poor Dick! I knew exactly how he felt, how the low afternoon sun
scorched, how the fire darted out at unexpected places, how the smoke
followed him around, no matter on which side of the fire he placed
himself, how the flies all took to biting when both hands were
occupied, and how they all miraculously disappeared when he had set
down the frying-pan and knife to fight them. I could sympathize, too,
with the lonely, forlorn, lost-dog feeling that clutched him after it
was all over. I could remember how big and forbidding and unfriendly
the forest had once looked to me in like circumstances, so that I had
felt suddenly thrust outside into empty spaces. Almost was I tempted to
intervene; but I liked Dick, and I wanted to do him good. This
experience was harrowing, but it prepared his mind for the seeds of
wisdom. By the following morning he had chastened his spirit, forgotten
the assurance breathed from the windy pages of the Boy Trapper Library,
and was ready to learn.

Have you ever watched a competent portraitist at work? The infinite
pains a skilled man spends on the preliminaries before he takes one
step towards a likeness nearly always wears down the patience of the
sitter. He measures with his eye, he plumbs, he sketches tentatively,
he places in here a dab, there a blotch, he puts behind him apparently
unproductive hours--and then all at once he is ready to begin something
that will not have to be done over again. An amateur, however, is
carried away by his desire for results. He dashes in a hit-or-miss
early effect, which grows into an approximate likeness almost
immediately, but which will require infinite labour, alteration, and
anxiety to beat into finished shape.

The case of the artist in making camps is exactly similar, and the
philosophical reasons for his failure are exactly the same. To the
superficial mind a camp is a shelter, a bright fire, and a smell of
cooking. So when a man is very tired he cuts across lots to those three
results. He pitches his tent, lights his fire, puts over his food--and
finds himself drowned in detail, like my friend Dick.

The following is, in brief, what during the next six weeks I told that
youth, by precept, by homily, and by making the solution so obvious
that he could work it out for himself.

When five or six o'clock draws near, begin to look about you for a good
level dry place, elevated some few feet above the surroundings. Drop
your pack or beach your canoe. Examine the location carefully. You
will want two trees about ten feet apart, from which to suspend your
tent, and a bit of flat ground underneath them. Of course the flat
ground need not be particularly unencumbered by brush or saplings, so
the combination ought not to be hard to discover. Now return to your
canoe. Do not unpack the tent.

With the little axe clear the ground thoroughly. By bending a sapling
over strongly with the left hand, clipping sharply at the strained
fibres, and then bending it as strongly the other way to repeat the axe
stroke on the other side, you will find that treelets of even two or
three inches diameter can be felled by two blows. In a very few
moments you will have accomplished a hole in the forest, and your two
supporting trees will stand sentinel at either end of a most
respectable-looking clearing. Do not unpack the tent.

Now, although the ground seems free of all but unimportant growths, go
over it thoroughly for little shrubs and leaves. They look soft and
yielding, but are often possessed of unexpectedly abrasive roots.
Besides, they mask the face of the ground. When you have finished
pulling them up by the roots, you will find that your supposedly level
plot is knobby with hummocks. Stand directly over each little mound;
swing the back of your axe vigorously against it, adze-wise, between
your legs. Nine times out of ten it will crumble, and the tenth time
means merely a root to cut or a stone to pry out. At length you are
possessed of a plot of clean, fresh earth, level and soft, free from
projections. But do not unpack your tent.

Lay a young birch or maple an inch or so in diameter across a log. Two
clips will produce you a tent-peg. If you are inexperienced, and
cherish memories of striped lawn marquees, you will cut them about six
inches long. If you are wise and old and gray in woods experience, you
will multiply that length by four. Then your loops will not slip off,
and you will have a real grip on mother earth, than which nothing can
be more desirable in the event of a heavy rain and wind squall about
midnight. If your axe is as sharp as it ought to be, you can point
them more neatly by holding them suspended in front of you while you
snip at their ends with the axe, rather than by resting them against a
solid base. Pile them together at the edge of the clearing. Cut a
crotched sapling eight or ten feet long. Now unpack your tent.

In a wooded country you will not take the time to fool with tent-poles.
A stout line run through the eyelets and along the apex will string it
successfully between your two trees. Draw the line as tight as
possible, but do not be too unhappy if, after your best efforts, it
still sags a little. That is what your long crotched stick is for.
Stake out your four corners. If you get them in a good rectangle, and
in such relation to the apex as to form two isosceles triangles of the
ends, your tent will stand smoothly. Therefore, be an artist and do it
right. Once the four corners are well placed, the rest follows
naturally. Occasionally in the North Country it will be found that the
soil is too thin over the rocks to grip the tent-pegs. In that case
drive them at a sharp angle as deep as they will go, and then lay a
large flat stone across the slant of them. Thus anchored, you will
ride out a gale. Finally, wedge your long sapling crotch under the
line--outside the tent, of course--to tighten it. Your shelter is up.
If you are a woodsman, ten or fifteen minutes has sufficed to
accomplish all this.

There remains the question of a bed, and you'd better attend to it now,
while your mind is still occupied with the shelter problem. Fell a
good thrifty young balsam and set to work pulling off the fans. Those
you cannot strip off easily with your hands are too tough for your
purpose. Lay them carelessly crisscross against the blade of your axe
and up the handle. They will not drop off, and when you shoulder that
axe you will resemble a walking haystack, and will probably experience
a genuine emotion of surprise at the amount of balsam that can be thus
transported. In the tent lay smoothly one layer of fans, convex side
up, butts toward the foot. Now thatch the rest on top of this,
thrusting the butt ends underneath the layer already placed in such a
manner as to leave the fan ends curving up and down towards the foot of
your bed. Your second emotion of surprise will assail you as you
realize how much spring inheres in but two or three layers thus
arranged. When you have spread your rubber blanket, you will be
possessed of a bed as soft and a great deal more aromatic and luxurious
than any you would be able to buy in town.

Your next care is to clear a living space in front of the tent. This
will take you about twenty seconds, for you need not be particular as
to stumps, hummocks, or small brush. All you want is room for cooking,
and suitable space for spreading out your provisions. But do not
unpack anything yet.

Your fireplace you will build of two green logs laid side by side. The
fire is to be made between them. They should converge slightly, in
order that the utensils to be rested across them may be of various
sizes. If your vicinity yields flat stones, they build up even better
than the logs--unless they happen to be of granite. Granite explodes
most disconcertingly. Poles sharpened, driven upright into the ground,
and then pressed down to slant over the fireplace, will hold your
kettles a suitable height above the blaze.

Fuel should be your next thought. A roll of birch bark first of all.
Then some of the small, dry, resinous branches that stick out from the
trunks of medium-sized pines, living or dead. Finally, the wood
itself. If you are merely cooking supper, and have no thought for a
warmth-fire or a friendship-fire, I should advise you to stick to the
dry pine branches, helped out, in the interest of coals for frying, by
a little dry maple or birch. If you need more of a blaze, you will
have to search out, fell, and split a standing dead tree. This is not
at all necessary. I have travelled many weeks in the woods without
using a more formidable implement than a one-pound hatchet. Pile your
fuel--a complete supply, all you are going to need--by the side of your
already improvised fireplace. But, as you value your peace of mind, do
not fool with matches.

It will be a little difficult to turn your mind from the concept of
fire, to which all these preparations have compellingly led
it--especially as a fire is the one cheerful thing your weariness needs
the most at this time of day--but you must do so. Leave everything just
as it is, and unpack your provisions.

First of all, rinse your utensils. Hang your tea-pail, with the proper
quantity of water, from one slanting pole, and your kettle from the
other. Salt the water in the latter receptacle. Peel your potatoes,
if you have any; open your little provision sacks; puncture your tin
cans, if you have any; slice your bacon; clean your fish; pluck your
birds; mix your dough or batter; spread your table tinware on your
tarpaulin or a sheet of birch bark; cut a kettle-lifter; see that
everything you are going to need is within direct reach of your hand as
you squat on your heels before the fireplace. Now light your fire.

The civilized method is to build a fire and then to touch a match to
the completed structure. If well done and in a grate or steve, this
works beautifully. Only in the woods you have no grate. The only sure
way is as follows: Hold a piece of birch bark in your hand. Shelter
your match all you know how. When the bark has caught, lay it in your
fireplace, assist it with more bark, and gradually build up, twig by
twig, stick by stick, from the first pin-point of flame, all the fire
you are going to need. It will not be much. The little hot blaze
rising between the parallel logs directly against the aluminium of your
utensils will do the business in a very short order. In fifteen
minutes at most your meal is ready. And you have been able to attain
to hot food thus quickly because you were prepared.

In case of very wet weather the affair is altered somewhat. If the
rain has just commenced, do not stop to clear out very thoroughly, but
get your tent up as quickly as possible, in order to preserve an area
of comparatively dry ground. But if the earth is already soaked, you
had best build a bonfire to dry out by, while you cook over a smaller
fire a little distance removed, leaving the tent until later. Or it
may be well not to pitch the tent at all, but to lay it across slanting
supports at an angle to reflect the heat against the ground.

It is no joke to light a fire in the rain. An Indian can do it more
easily than a white man, but even an Indian has more trouble than the
story-books acknowledge. You will need a greater quantity of birch
bark, a bigger pile of resinous dead limbs from the pine trees, and
perhaps the heart of a dead pine stub or stump. Then, with infinite
patience, you may be able to tease the flame. Sometimes a small dead
birch contains in the waterproof envelope of its bark a species of
powdery, dry touchwood that takes the flame readily. Still, it is easy
enough to start a blaze--a very fine-looking, cheerful, healthy blaze;
the difficulty is to prevent its petering out the moment your back is
turned.

But the depths of woe are sounded and the limit of patience reached
when you are forced to get breakfast in the dripping forest. After the
chill of early dawn you are always reluctant in the best of
circumstances to leave your blankets, to fumble with numbed fingers for
matches, to handle cold steel and slippery fish. But when every leaf,
twig, sapling, and tree contains a douche of cold water; when the
wetness oozes about your moccasins from the soggy earth with every step
you take; when you look about you and realize that somehow, before you
can get a mouthful to banish that before-breakfast ill-humour, you must
brave cold water in an attempt to find enough fuel to cook with, then
your philosophy and early religious training avail you little. The
first ninety-nine times you are forced to do this you will probably
squirm circumspectly through the bush in a vain attempt to avoid
shaking water down on yourself; you will resent each failure to do so,
and at the end your rage will personify the wilderness for the purpose
of one sweeping anathema. The hundredth time will bring you wisdom. You
will do the anathema--rueful rather than enraged--from the tent
opening. Then you will plunge boldly in and get wet. It is not
pleasant, but it has to be done, and you will save much temper, not to
speak of time.

Dick and I earned our diplomas at this sort of work. It rained twelve
of the first fourteen days we were out. Towards the end of that two
weeks I doubt if even an Indian could have discovered a dry stick of
wood in the entire country. The land was of Laurentian rock formation,
running in parallel ridges of bare stone separated by hollows carpeted
with a thin layer of earth. The ridges were naturally ill-adapted to
camping, and the cup hollows speedily filled up with water until they
became most creditable little marshes. Often we hunted for an hour or
so before we could find any sort of a spot to pitch our tent. As for a
fire, it was a matter of chopping down dead trees large enough to have
remained dry inside, of armfuls of birch bark, and of the patient
drying out, by repeated ignition, of enough fuel to cook very simple
meals. Of course we could have kept a big fire going easily enough,
but we were travelling steadily and had not the time for that. In
these trying circumstances, Dick showed that, no matter how much of a
tenderfoot he might be, he was game enough under stress.

But to return to our pleasant afternoon. While you are consuming the
supper you will hang over some water to heat for the dish-washing, and
the dish-washing you will attend to the moment you have finished
eating. Do not commit the fallacy of sitting down for a little rest.
Better finish the job completely while you are about it. You will
appreciate leisure so much more later. In lack of a wash-rag you will
find that a bunch of tall grass bent double makes an ideal swab.

Now brush the flies from your tent, drop the mosquito-proof lining, and
enjoy yourself. The whole task, from first to last, has consumed but a
little over an hour. And you are through for the day.

In the woods, as nowhere else, you will earn your leisure only by
forethought. Make no move until you know it follows the line of
greatest economy. To putter is to wallow in endless desolation. If you
cannot move directly and swiftly and certainly along the line of least
resistance in everything you do, take a guide with you; you are not of
the woods people. You will never enjoy doing for yourself, for your
days will be crammed with unending labour.

It is but a little after seven. The long crimson shadows of the North
Country are lifting across the aisles of the forest. You sit on a log,
or lie on your back, and blow contented clouds straight up into the
air. Nothing can disturb you now. The wilderness is yours, for you have
taken from it the essentials of primitive civilization--shelter,
warmth, and food. An hour ago a rainstorm would have been a minor
catastrophe. Now you do not care. Blow high, blow low, you have made
for yourself an abiding-place, so that the signs of the sky are less
important to you than to the city dweller who wonders if he should take
an umbrella. From your doorstep you can look placidly out on the great
unknown. The noises of the forest draw close about you their circle of
mystery, but the circle cannot break upon you, for here you have
conjured the homely sounds of kettle and crackling flame to keep ward.
Thronging down through the twilight steal the jealous woodland shadows,
awful in the sublimity of the Silent Places, but at the sentry outposts
of your firelit trees they pause like wild animals, hesitating to
advance. The wilderness, untamed, dreadful at night, is all about; but
this one little spot you have reclaimed. Here is something before
unknown to the eerie spirits of the woods. As you sleepily knock the
ashes from the pipe, you look about on the familiar scene with
accustomed satisfaction. You are at home.




V.

ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT.

"Who hath lain alone to hear the wild goose cry?"


About once in so often you are due to lie awake at night. Why this is
so I have never been able to discover. It apparently comes from no
predisposing uneasiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of
too much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or
stimulating conversation. In fact, you turn in with the expectation of
rather a good night's rest. Almost at once the little noises of the
forest grow larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse;
your thoughts drift idly back and forth between reality and dream;
when--_snap!_--you are broad awake!

Perhaps the reservoir of your vital forces is full to the overflow of a
little waste; or perhaps, more subtly, the great Mother insists thus
that you enter the temple of her larger mysteries.

For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is
pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a
delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an
exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip
vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes
they stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose
themselves in the midst of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet
fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel
the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your
faculties receive. Hearing, sight, smell--all are preternaturally keen
to whatever of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad through the
night; and yet at the same time active appreciation dozes, so these
things lie on it sweet and cloying like fallen rose leaves.

In such circumstance you will hear what the _voyageurs_ call the
voices of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak
very soft and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing,
beneath even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality
superimposes them over the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms
swimming across the field of vision, which disappear so quickly when
you concentrate your sight to look at them, and which reappear so
magically when again your gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of your
hazy half-consciousness they speak; when you bend your attention to
listen, they are gone, and only the tumults and the tinklings remain.

But in the moments of their audibility they are very distinct. Just as
often an odour will wake all a vanished memory, so these voices, by the
force of a large impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the
cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall murmur of a
multitude _en fête_, so that subtly you feel the gray old town,
with its walls, the crowded marketplace, the decent peasant crowd, the
booths, the mellow church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted
sun. Or, in the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters,
sound faint and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant
notes of laughter, as though many canoes were working against the
current; only the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices
louder. The _voyageurs_ call these mist people the Huntsmen, and
look frightened. To each is his vision, according to his experience.
The nations of the earth whisper to their exiled sons through the
voices of the rapids. Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest
always peaceful scenes--a harvest field, a street fair, a Sunday
morning in a cathedral town, careless travellers--never the turmoils
and struggles. Perhaps this is the great Mother's compensation in a
harsh mode of life.

Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more
concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water.
And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive
appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring
louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then
outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl
hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl
of some night creature--at once the yellow sunlit French meadows puff
away--you are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through
the texture of your tent.

The voices of the rapids have dropped into the background, as have the
dashing noises of the stream. Through the forest is a great silence,
but no stillness at all. The whippoorwill swings down and up the short
curve of his regular song; over and over an owl says his rapid
_whoo_, _whoo_, _whoo_. These, with the ceaseless dash of the rapids,
are the web on which the night traces her more delicate embroideries
of the unexpected. Distant crashes, single and impressive;
stealthy footsteps near at hand; the subdued scratching of claws; a
faint _sniff! sniff! sniff!_ of inquiry; the sudden clear tin-horn
_ko-ko-ko-óh_ of the little owl; the mournful, long-drawn-out cry
of the loon, instinct with the spirit of loneliness; the ethereal
call-note of the birds of passage high in the air; a _patter_,
_patter_, _patter_ among the dead leaves, immediately stilled;
and then at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the
beautiful silver purity of the white-throated sparrow--the nightingale
of the North--trembling with the ecstasy of beauty, as though a
shimmering moonbeam had turned to sound; and all the while the blurred
figure of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent--these
things combine subtly, until at last the great Silence of which they
are a part overarches the night and draws you forth to contemplation.

No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring water you drink at
such a time; no moment more refreshing than that in which you look
about you at the darkened forest. You have cast from you with the warm
blanket the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness, physical and spiritual,
bathes you from head to foot. All your senses are keyed to the last
vibrations. You hear the littler night prowlers, you glimpse the
greater. A faint, searching woods perfume of dampness greets your
nostrils. And somehow, mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood,
the forces of the world seem in suspense, as though a touch might
crystallize infinite possibilities into infinite power and motion. But
the touch lacks. The forces hover on the edge of action, unheeding the
little noises. In all humbleness and awe, you are a dweller of the
Silent Places.

At such a time you will meet with adventures. One night we put
fourteen inquisitive porcupines out of camp. Near M'Gregor's Bay I
discovered in the large grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping
the herbage like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells me of a fawn
that every night used to sleep outside his tent and within a foot of
his head, probably by way of protection against wolves. Its mother had
in all likelihood been killed. The instant my friend moved toward the
tent opening the little creature would disappear, and it was always
gone by earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not
uncommon. But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and
the woods shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world
forces is a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You
cannot know the night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by
coming into her presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her
face to face in her intimate mood.

The night wind from the river, or from the open spaces of the wilds,
chills you after a time. You begin to think of your blankets. In a few
moments you roll yourself in their soft wool. Instantly it is morning.

And, strange to say, you have not to pay by going through the day
unrefreshed. You may feel like turning in at eight instead of nine, and
you may fall asleep with unusual promptitude, but your journey will
begin clear-headedly, proceed springily, and end with much in reserve.
No languor, no dull headache, no exhaustion, follows your experience.
For this once your two hours of sleep have been as effective as nine.




VI.

THE 'LUNGE.

"Do you know the chosen water where the ouananiche is waiting?"


Dick and I travelled in a fifteen-foot wooden canoe, with grub, duffel,
tent, and Deuce, the black-and-white setter dog. As a consequence we
were pretty well down toward the water-line, for we had not realized
that a wooden canoe would carry so little weight for its length in
comparison with a birch-bark. A good heavy sea we could ride--with
proper management and a little baling; but sloppy waves kept us busy.

Deuce did not like it at all. He was a dog old in the wisdom of
experience. It had taken him just twenty minutes to learn all about
canoes. After a single tentative trial he jumped lightly to the very
centre of his place, with the lithe caution of a cat. Then if the water
happened to be smooth, he would sit gravely on his haunches, or would
rest his chin on the gunwale to contemplate the passing landscape. But
in rough weather he crouched directly over the keel, his nose between
his paws, and tried not to dodge when the cold water dashed in on him.
Deuce was a true woodsman in that respect. Discomfort he always bore
with equanimity, and he must often have been very cold and very
cramped.

For just over a week we had been travelling in open water, and the
elements had not been kind to us at all. We had crept up under
rock-cliff points; had weathered the rips of white water to shelter on
the other side; had struggled across open spaces where each wave was
singly a problem to fail in whose solution meant instant swamping; had
baled, and schemed, and figured, and carried, and sworn, and tried
again, and succeeded with about two cupfuls to spare, until we as well
as Deuce had grown a little tired of it. For the lust of travel was on
us.

The lust of travel is a very real disease. It usually takes you when
you have made up your mind that there is no hurry. Its predisposing
cause is a chart or map, and its main symptom is the feverish delight
with which you check off the landmarks of your journey. A fair wind of
some force is absolutely fatal. With that at your back you cannot
stop. Good fishing, fine scenery, interesting bays, reputed game, even
camps where friends might be visited--all pass swiftly astern. Hardly
do you pause for lunch at noon. The mad joy of putting country behind
you eats all other interests. You recover only when you have come to
your journey's end a week too early, and must then search out new
voyages to fill in the time.

All this morning we had been bucking a strong north wind. Fortunately,
the shelter of a string of islands had given us smooth water enough,
but the heavy gusts sometimes stopped us as effectively as though we
had butted solid land. Now about noon we came to the last island, and
looked out on a five-mile stretch of tumbling seas. We landed the canoe
and mounted a high rock.

"Can't make it like this," said I. "I'll take the outfit over and land
it, and come back for you and the dog. Let's see that chart."

We hid behind the rock and spread out the map.

"Four miles," measured Dick. "It's going to be a terror."

We looked at each other vaguely, suddenly tired.

"We can't camp here--at this time of day," objected Dick, to our
unspoken thoughts.

And then the map gave him an inspiration. "Here's a little river,"
ruminated Dick, "that goes to a little lake, and then there's another
little river that flows from the lake and comes out about ten miles
above here."

"It's a good thirty miles," I objected.

"What of it?" asked Dick calmly.

So the fever-lust of travel broke. We turned to the right behind the
last island, searched out the reed-grown opening to the stream, and
paddled serenely and philosophically against the current. Deuce sat up
and yawned with a mighty satisfaction.

We had been bending our heads to the demon of wind; our ears had been
filled with his shoutings, our eyes blinded with tears, our breath
caught away from us, our muscles strung to the fiercest endeavour.
Suddenly we found ourselves between the ranks of tall forest trees,
bathed in a warm sunlight, gliding like a feather from one grassy bend
to another of the laziest little stream that ever hesitated as to which
way the grasses of its bed should float. As for the wind, it was lost
somewhere away up high, where we could hear it muttering to itself
about something.

The woods leaned over the fringe of bushes cool and green and silent.
Occasionally through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of
straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes
jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a
homely rustic companion through the aloofness of patrician multitudes.

Every bend offered us charming surprises. Sometimes a muskrat swam
hastily in a pointed furrow of ripple; vanishing wings, barely sensed
in the flash, left us staring; stealthy withdrawals of creatures, whose
presence we realized only in the fact of those withdrawals, snared our
eager interest; porcupines rattled and rustled importantly and regally
from the water's edge to the woods; herons, ravens, an occasional duck,
croaked away at our approach; thrice we surprised eagles, once a
tassel-eared Canada lynx. Or, if all else lacked, we still experienced
the little thrill of pleased novelty over the disclosure of a group of
silvery birches on a knoll; a magnificent white pine towering over the
beech and maple forest; the unexpected aisle of a long, straight
stretch of the little river.

Deuce approved thoroughly. He stretched himself and yawned and shook
off the water, and glanced at me open-mouthed with doggy good-nature,
and set himself to acquiring a conscientious olfactory knowledge of
both banks of the river. I do not doubt he knew a great deal more
about it than we did. Porcupines aroused his special enthusiasm.
Incidentally, two days later he returned to camp after an expedition of
his own, bristling as to the face with that animal's barbed weapons.
Thenceforward his interest waned.

We ascended the charming little river two or three miles. At a sharp
bend to the east a huge sheet of rock sloped from a round grass knoll
sparsely planted with birches directly down into a pool. Two or three
tree trunks jammed directly opposite had formed a sort of half dam
under which the water lay dark. A tiny grass meadow forty feet in
diameter narrowed the stream to half its width.

We landed. Dick seated himself on the shelving rock. I put my fish-rod
together. Deuce disappeared.

Deuce always disappeared whenever we landed. With nose down, hind
quarters well tucked under him, ears flying, he quartered the forest at
high speed, investigating every nook and cranny of it for the radius of
a quarter of a mile. When he has quite satisfied himself that we were
safe for the moment, he would return to the fire, where he would lie,
six inches of pink tongue vibrating with breathlessness, beautiful in
the consciousness of virtue. Dick generally sat on a rock and thought.
I generally fished.

After a time Deuce returned. I gave up flies, spoons, phantom minnows,
artificial frogs, and crayfish. As Dick continued to sit on the rock
and think, we both joined him. The sun was very warm and grateful, and
I am sure we both acquired an added respect for Dick's judgment.

Just when it happened neither of us was afterwards able to decide.
Perhaps Deuce knew. But suddenly, as often a figure appears in a
cinematograph, the diminutive meadow thirty feet away contained two
deer. They stood knee-deep in the grass, wagging their little tails in
impatience of the flies.

"Look a' there!" stammered Dick aloud.

Deuce sat up on his haunches.

I started for my camera.

The deer did not seem to be in the slightest degree alarmed. They
pointed four big ears in our direction, ate a few leisurely mouthfuls
of grass, sauntered to the stream for a drink of water, wagged their
little tails some more, and quietly faded into the cool shadows of the
forest.

[Illustration: AT SUCH A TIME YOU WILL MEET WITH ADVENTURES.]

An hour later we ran out into reeds, and so to the lake. It was a
pretty lake, forest-girt. Across the distance we made out a moving
object which shortly resolved itself into a birch canoe. The canoe
proved to contain an Indian, an Indian boy of about ten years, a black
dog, and a bundle. When within a few rods of each other we ceased
paddling, and drifted by with the momentum. The Indian was a
fine-looking man of about forty, his hair bound with a red fillet, his
feet incased in silk-worked moccasins, but otherwise dressed in white
men's garments. He smoked a short pipe, and contemplated us gravely.

"Bo' jou', bo' jou'," we called in the usual double-barrelled North
Country salutation.

"Bo' jou', bo' jou," he replied.

"Kée-gons?" we inquired as to the fishing in the lake.

"Áh-hah," he assented.

We drifted by each other without further speech. When the decent
distance of etiquette separated us we resumed our paddles.

I produced a young cable terminated by a tremendous spoon and a solid
brass snell as thick as a telegraph wire. We had laid in this
formidable implement in hopes of a big muscallunge. It had been trailed
for days at a time. We had become used to its vibration, which actually
seemed to communicate itself to every fibre of the light canoe. Every
once in a while we would stop with a jerk that would nearly snap our
heads off. Then we would know we had hooked the American continent. We
had become used to that also. It generally happened when we attempted a
little burst of speed. So when the canoe brought up so violently that
all our tinware rolled on Deuce, Dick was merely disgusted.

"There she goes again," he grumbled. "You've hooked Canada."

Canada held quiescent for about three seconds. Then it started due
south.

"Suffering serpents!" shrieked Dick.

"Paddle, you sulphurated idiot!" yelled I.

It was most interesting. All I had to do was to hang on and try to stay
in the boat. Dick paddled and fumed and splashed water and got more
excited. Canada dragged us bodily backward.

Then Canada changed his mind and started in our direction. I was plenty
busy taking in slack, so I did not notice Dick. Dick was absolutely
demented. His mind automatically reacted in the direction of paddling.
He paddled, blindly, frantically. Canada came surging in, his mouth
open, his wicked eyes flaming, a tremendous indistinct body lashing
foam. Dick glanced once over his shoulder, and let out a frantic howl.

"You've got the sea-serpent!" he shrieked.

I turned to fumble for the pistol. We were headed directly for a log
stranded on shore, and about ten feet from it.

"Dick!" I yelled in warning.

He thrust his paddle out forward just in time. The stout maple bent and
cracked. The canoe hit with a bump that threw us forward. I returned to
the young cable. It came in limp and slack.

We looked at each other sadly.

"No use," sighed Dick at last. "They've never invented the words, and
we'd upset if we kicked the dog."

I had the end of the line in my hands.

"Look here!" I cried. That thick brass wire had been as cleanly bitten
through as though it had been cut with clippers. "He must have caught
sight of you," said I.

Dick lifted up his voice in lamentation. "You had four feet of him out
of water," he wailed, "and there was a lot more."

"If you had kept cool," said I severely, "we shouldn't have lost him.
You don't want to get rattled in an emergency; there's no sense in it."

"What were you going to do with that?" asked Dick, pointing to where I
had laid the pistol.

"I was going to shoot him in the head," I replied with dignity. "It's
the best way to land them."

Dick laughed disagreeably. I looked down. At my side lay our largest
iron spoon.

We skirted the left-hand side of the lake in silence. Far out from
shore the water was ruffled where the wind swept down, but with us it
was as still and calm as the forest trees that looked over into it.
After a time we turned short to the left through a very narrow passage
between two marshy shores, and so, after a sharp bend of but a few
hundred feet, came into the other river.

This was a wide stream, smoothly hurrying, without rapids or tumult.
The forest had drawn to either side to let us pass. Here were the
wilder reaches after the intimacies of the little river. Across
stretches of marsh we could see an occasional great blue heron standing
mid-leg deep. Long strings of ducks struggled quacking from invisible
pools. The faint marsh odour saluted our nostrils from the point where
the lily-pads flashed broadly, ruffling in the wind. We dropped out the
smaller spoon and masterfully landed a five-pound pickerel. Even Deuce
brightened. He cared nothing for raw fish, but he knew their
possibilities. Towards evening we entered the hilly country, and so at
the last turned to the left into a sand cove where grew maples and
birches in beautiful park order under a hill. There we pitched camp,
and, as the flies lacked, built a friendship-fire about which to
forgather when the day was done.

Dick still vocally regretted the muscallunge told him of my big bear.

One day, late in the summer, I was engaged in packing some supplies
along an old fur trail north of Lake Superior. I had accomplished one
back-load, and with empty straps was returning to the cache for
another. The trail at one point emerged into and crossed an open park
some hundreds of feet in diameter, in which the grass grew to the
height of the knee. When I was about halfway across, a black bear arose
to his hind legs not ten feet from me, and remarked _Woof!_ in a
loud tone of voice. Now, if a man were to say _woof_ to you
unexpectedly, even in the formality of an Italian garden or the
accustomedness of a city street, you would be somewhat startled. So I
went to camp. There I told them about the bear. I tried to be
conservative in my description, because I did not wish to be accused of
exaggeration. My impression of the animal was that he and a spruce tree
that grew near enough for ready comparison were approximately of the
same stature. We returned to the grass park. After some difficulty we
found a clear footprint. It was a little larger than that made by a
good-sized coon.

"So, you see," I admonished didactically, "that lunge probably was not
quite so large as you thought."

"It may have been a Chinese bear," said Dick dreamily--"a Chinese lady
bear of high degree."

I gave him up.




VII.

ON OPEN-WATER CANOE TRAVELLING.

"It is there that I am going, with an extra hand to bail her--
Just one single long-shore loafer that I know. He can take his chance
of drowning while I sail and sail and sail her, For the Red Gods call
me out, and I must go."


The following morning the wind had died, but had been succeeded by a
heavy pall of fog. After we had felt our way beyond the mouth of the
river we were forced to paddle north-west by north, in blind reliance
on our compass. Sounds there were none. Involuntarily we lowered our
voices. The inadvertent click of the paddle against the gunwale seemed
to desecrate a foreordained stillness.

Occasionally to the right hand or the left we made out faint
shadow-pictures of wooded islands that endured but a moment and then
deliberately faded into whiteness. They formed on the view exactly as
an image develops on a photographic plate. Sometimes a faint
_lisp-lisp-lisp_ of tiny waves against a shore nearer than it
seemed cautioned us anew not to break the silence. Otherwise we were
alone, intruders, suffered in the presence of a brooding nature only as
long as we refrained from disturbances.

Then at noon the vapours began to eddy, to open momentarily in
revelation of vivid green glimpses, to stream down the rising wind.
Pale sunlight dashed fitfully across us like a shower. Somewhere in the
invisibility a duck quacked. Deuce awoke, looked about him, and
_yow-yow-yowed_ in doggish relief. Animals understand thoroughly
these subtleties of nature.

In half an hour the sun was strong, the air clear and sparkling, and a
freshening wind was certifying our prognostications of a lively
afternoon.

A light canoe will stand almost anything in the way of a sea, although
you may find it impossible sometimes to force it in the direction you
wish to go. A loaded canoe will weather a great deal more than you
might think. However, only experience in balance and in the nature of
waves will bring you safely across a stretch of whitecaps.

With the sea dead ahead you must not go too fast; otherwise you will
dip water over the bow. You must trim the craft absolutely on an even
keel; otherwise the comb of the wave, too light to lift you, will slop
in over one gunwale or the other. You must be perpetually watching your
chance to gain a foot or so between the heavier seas.

With the sea over one bow you must paddle on the leeward side. When the
canoe mounts a wave, you must allow the crest to throw the bow off a
trifle, but the moment it starts down the other slope you must twist
your paddle sharply to regain the direction of your course. The
careening tendency of this twist you must counteract by a corresponding
twist of your body in the other direction. Then the hollow will allow
you two or three strokes wherewith to assure a little progress. The
double twist at the very crest of the wave must be very delicately
performed, or you will ship water the whole length of your craft.

With the sea abeam you must simply paddle straight ahead. The
adjustment is to be accomplished entirely by the poise of the body. You
must prevent the capsize of your canoe when clinging to the angle of a
wave by leaning to one side. The crucial moment, of course, is that
during which the peak of the wave slips under you. In case of a
breaking comber, thrust the flat of your paddle deep in the water to
prevent an upset, and lean well to leeward, thus presenting the side
and half the bottom of the canoe to the shock of water. Your recovery
must be instant, however. If you lean a second too long, over you go.
This sounds more difficult than it is. After a time you do it
instinctively, as a skater balances.

With the sea over the quarter you have merely to take care that the
waves do not slue you around sidewise, and that the canoe does not dip
water on one side or the other under the stress of your twists with the
paddle. Dead astern is perhaps the most difficult of all, for the
reason that you must watch both gunwales at once, and must preserve an
absolutely even keel, in spite of the fact that it generally requires
your utmost strength to steer. In really heavy weather one man only
can do any work. The other must be content to remain passenger, and he
must be trained to absolute immobility. No matter how dangerous a
careen the canoe may take, no matter how much good cold water may pour
in over his legs, he must resist his tendency to shift his weight. The
entire issue depends on the delicacy of the steersman's adjustments, so
he must be given every chance.

The main difficulty rests in the fact that such canoeing is a good deal
like air-ship travel--there is not much opportunity to learn by
experience. In a four-hour run across an open bay you will encounter
somewhat over a thousand waves, no two of which are exactly alike, and
any one of which can fill you up only too easily if it is not correctly
met. Your experience is called on to solve instantly and practically a
thousand problems. No breathing-space in which to recover is permitted
you between them. At the end of the four hours you awaken to the fact
that your eyes are strained from intense concentration, and that you
taste copper.

Probably nothing, however, can more effectively wake you up to the last
fibre of your physical, intellectual, and nervous being. You are filled
with an exhilaration. Every muscle, strung tight, answers immediately
and accurately to the slightest hint. You quiver all over with
restrained energy. Your mind thrusts behind you the problem of the last
wave as soon as solved, and leaps with insistent eagerness to the next.
You attain that superordinary condition when your faculties react
instinctively, like a machine. It is a species of intoxication. After a
time you personify each wave; you grapple with it as with a personal
adversary; you exult as, beaten and broken, it hisses away to leeward.
"Go it, you son of a gun!" you shout. "Ah, you would, would you! think
you can, do you?" and in the roar and rush of wind and water you crouch
like a boxer on the defence, parrying the blows, but ready at the
slightest opening to gain a stroke of the paddle.

In such circumstances you have not the leisure to consider distance.
You are too busily engaged in slaughtering waves to consider your rate
of progress. The fact that slowly you are pulling up on your objective
point does not occur to you until you are within a few hundred yards of
it. Then, unless you are careful, you are undone.

Probably the most difficult thing of all to learn is that the waves to
be encountered in the last hundred yards of an open sweep are exactly
as dangerous as those you dodged so fearfully four miles from shore.
You are so nearly in that you unconsciously relax your efforts. Calmly,
almost contemptuously, a big roller rips along your gunwale. You are
wrecked--fortunately within easy swimming distance. But that doesn't
save your duffel. Remember this: be just as careful with the very last
wave as you were with the others. Get inside before you draw that deep
breath of relief.

Strangely enough, in out-of-door sports, where it would seem that
convention would rest practically at the zero point, the bugbear of
good form, although mashed and disguised, rises up to confuse the
directed practicality. The average man is wedded to his theory. He has
seen a thing done in a certain way, and he not only always does it that
way himself, but he is positively unhappy at seeing any one else
employing a different method. From the swing at golf to the manner of
lighting a match in the wind, this truism applies. I remember once
hearing a long argument with an Eastern man on the question of the
English riding-seat in the Western country.

"Your method is all very well," said the Westerner, "for where it came
from. In England they ride to hunt, so they need a light saddle and
very short stirrups set well forward. That helps them in jumping. But
it is most awkward. Out here you want your stirrups very long and
directly under you, so your legs hang loose, and you depend on your
balance and the grip of your thighs--not your knees. It is less tiring,
and better sense, and infinitely more graceful, for it more nearly
approximates the bareback seat. Instead of depending on stirrups, you
are part of the horse. You follow his every movement. And as for your
rising trot, I'd like to see you accomplish it safely on our mountain
trails, where the trot is the only gait practicable, unless you take
for ever to get anywhere." To all of which the Easterner found no
rebuttal except the, to him, entirely efficient plea that his own
method was good form.

Now, of course, it is very pleasant to do things always accurately,
according to the rules of the game, and if you are out merely for
sport, perhaps it is as well to stick to them. But utility is another
matter. Personally, I do not care at all to kill trout unless by the
fly; but when we need meat and they do not need flies, I never hesitate
to offer them any kind of doodle-bug they may fancy. I have even at a
pinch clubbed them to death in a shallow, land-locked pool. Time will
come in your open-water canoe experience when you will pull into
shelter half full of water, when you will be glad of the fortuity of a
chance cross-wave to help you out, when sheer blind luck, or main
strength and awkwardness, will be the only reasons you can honestly
give for an arrival, and a battered and dishevelled arrival at that. Do
not, therefore, repine, or bewail your awkwardness, or indulge in undue
self-accusations of "tenderfoot." Method is nothing; the arrival is the
important thing. You are travelling, and if you can make time by nearly
swamping yourself, or by dragging your craft across a point, or by
taking any other base advantage of the game's formality, by all means
do so. Deuce used to solve the problem of comfort by drinking the
little pool of cold water in which he sometimes was forced to lie. In
the woods, when a thing is to be done, do not consider how you have
done it, or how you have seen it done, or how you think it ought to be
done, but how it _can_ be accomplished. Absolute fluidity of
expedient, perfect adaptability, is worth a dozen volumes of
theoretical knowledge. "If you can't talk," goes the Western
expression, "raise a yell; if you can't yell, make signs; if you can't
make signs, wave a bush."

And do not be too ready to take advice as to what you can or cannot
accomplish, even from the woods people. Of course the woods Indians or
the _voyageurs_ know all about canoes, and you would do well to
listen to them. But the mere fact that your interlocutor lives in the
forest, while you normally inhabit the towns, does not necessarily give
him authority. A community used to horses looks with horror on the
instability of all water craft less solid than canal boats. Canoemen
stand in awe of the bronco. The fishermen of the Georgian Bay,
accustomed to venture out with their open sailboats in weather that
forces the big lake schooners to shelter, know absolutely nothing about
canoes. Dick and I made an eight-mile run from the Fox island to
Killarney in a trifling sea, to be cheered during our stay at the
latter place by doleful predictions of an early drowning. And this from
a seafaring community. It knew all about boats; it knew nothing about
canoes; and yet the unthinking might have been influenced by the advice
of these men simply because they had been brought up on the water. The
point is obvious. Do not attempt a thing unless you are sure of
yourself; but do not relinquish it merely because some one else is not
sure of you.

The best way to learn is with a bathing-suit. Keep near shore, and try
everything. Don't attempt the real thing until your handling in a heavy
sea has become as instinctive as snap-shooting or the steps of dancing.
Remain on the hither side of caution when you start out. Act at first
as though every wavelet would surely swamp you. Extend the scope of
your operations very gradually, until you know just what you can do.
_Never_ get careless. Never take any _real_ chances. That's
all.




VIII.

THE STRANDED STRANGERS.


As we progressed, the country grew more and more solemnly aloof. In the
Southland is a certain appearance of mobility, lent by the deciduous
trees, the warm sun, the intimate nooks in which grow the commoner
homely weeds and flowers, the abundance of bees and musical insects,
the childhood familiarity of the well-known birds, even the pleasantly
fickle aspects of the skies. But the North wraps itself in a mantle of
awe. Great hills rest not so much in the stillness of sleep as in the
calm of a mighty comprehension. The pines, rank after rank, file after
file, are always trooping somewhere, up the slope, to pause at the
crest before descending on the other side into the unknown. Bodies of
water exactly of the size, shape, and general appearance we are
accustomed to see dotted with pleasure craft and bordered with wharves,
summer cottages, pavilions, and hotels, accentuate by that very fact a
solitude that harbours only a pair of weirdly laughing loons. Like the
hills, these lakes are lying in a deep, still repose, but a repose that
somehow suggests the comprehending calm of those behind the veil. The
whole country seems to rest in a suspense of waiting. A shot breaks the
stillness for an instant, but its very memory is shadowy a moment after
the echoes die. Inevitably the traveller feels thrust in upon himself
by a neutrality more deadly than open hostility would be. Hostility at
least supposes recognition of his existence, a rousing of forces to
oppose him. This ignores. One can no longer wonder at the taciturnity
of the men who dwell here; nor does one fail to grasp the eminent
suitability to the country of its Indian name--the Silent Places.

Even the birds, joyful, lively, commonplace little people that they
are, draw some of this aloofness to themselves. The North is full of
the homelier singers. A dozen species of warblers lisp music-box
phrases, two or three sparrows whistle a cheerful repertoire, the
nuthatches and chickadees toot away in blissful _bourgeoisie_. And
yet, somehow, that very circumstance thrusts the imaginative voyager
outside the companionship of their friendliness. In the face of the
great gods they move with accustomed familiarity. Somehow they possess
in their little experience that which explains the mystery, so that
they no longer stand in its awe. Their everyday lives are spent under
the shadow of the temple whither you dare not bend your footsteps. The
intimacy of occult things isolates also these wise little birds.

The North speaks, however, only in the voices of three--the two
thrushes, and the white-throated sparrow. You must hear these each at
his proper time.

The hermit thrush you will rarely see. But late some afternoon, when
the sun is lifting along the trunks of the hardwood forest, if you are
very lucky and very quiet, you will hear him far in the depth of the
blackest swamps. Musically expressed, his song is very much like that
of the wood thrush--three cadenced liquid notes, a quivering pause,
then three more notes of another phrase, and so on. But the fineness of
its quality makes of it an entirely different performance. If you
symbolize the hermit thrush by the flute, you must call the wood thrush
a chime of little tinkling bells. One is a rendition; the other the
essence of liquid music. An effect of gold-embroidered richness, of
depth going down to the very soul of things, a haunting suggestion of
having touched very near to the source of tears, a conviction that the
just interpretation of the song would be an equally just interpretation
of black woods, deep shadows, cloistered sunlight, brooding
hills--these are the subtle and elusive impressions you will receive in
the middle of the ancient forest.

The olive-backed thrush you will enjoy after your day's work is quite
finished. You will see him through the tobacco haze, perched on a limb
against the evening sky. He utters a loud joyful _chirp_ pauses
for the attention he thus solicits, and then deliberately runs up five
mellow double notes, ending with a metallic "_ting_ chee chee
chee" that sounds as though it had been struck on a triangle. Then a
silence of exactly nine seconds and repeat. As regularly as clock-work
this performance goes on. Time him as often as you will, you can never
convict him of a second's variation. And he is so optimistic and
willing, and his notes are so golden with the yellow of sunshine!

The white-throated sparrow sings nine distinct variations of the same
song. He may sing more, but that is all I have counted. He inhabits
woods, berry-vines, brulés, and clearings. Ordinarily he is cheerful,
and occasionally aggravating. One man I knew he drove nearly crazy. To
that man he was always saying, "_And he never heard the man say drink
and the_----." Toward the last my friend used wildly to offer him a
thousand dollars if he would, if he only _would_, finish that
sentence. But occasionally, in just the proper circumstances, he
forgets his stump corners, his vines, his jolly sunlight, and his
delightful bugs to become the intimate voice of the wilds. It is night,
very still, Very dark. The subdued murmur of the forest ebbs and flows
with the voices of the furtive folk--an undertone fearful to break the
night calm. Suddenly across the dusk of silence flashes a single thread
of silver, vibrating, trembling with some unguessed ecstasy of emotion:
"_Ah! poor Canada Canada Canada Canada!_" it mourns passionately,
and falls silent. That is all.

You will hear at various times other birds peculiarly of the North.
Loons alternately calling and uttering their maniac laughter; purple
finches or some of the pine sparrows warbling high and clear; the
winter wren, whose rapturous ravings never fail to strike the attention
of the dullest passer; all these are exclusively Northern voices, and
each expresses some phase or mood of the Silent Places. But none
symbolizes as do the three. And when first you hear one of them after
an absence, you are satisfied that things are right in the world, for
the North Country's spirit is as it was.

Now ensued a spell of calm weather, with a film of haze over the sky.
The water lay like quicksilver, heavy and inert. Toward afternoon it
became opalescent. The very substance of the liquid itself seemed
impregnated with dyes ranging in shade from wine colour to the most
delicate lilac. Through a smoke veil the sun hung, a ball of red, while
beneath every island, every rock, every tree, every wild fowl floating
idly in a medium apparently too delicate for its support, lurked the
beautiful crimson shadows of the North.

[Illustration: EACH WAVE WAS SINGLY A PROBLEM, TO FAIL IN WHOSE
SOLUTION MEANT INSTANT SWAMPING.]

Hour after hour, day after day, we slipped on. Point after point,
island after island, presented itself silently to our inspection and
dropped quietly astern. The beat of paddles fitted monotonously into
the almost portentous stillness. It seemed that we might be able to go
on thus for ever, lapped in the dream of some forgotten magic that had
stricken breathless the life of the world. And then, suddenly, three
weeks on our journey, we came to a town.

It was not the typical fur town of the Far North, but it lay at the
threshold. A single street, worn smooth by the feet of men and dogs,
but innocent of hoofs, fronted the channel. A board walk, elevated
against the snows, bordered a row of whitewashed log and frame houses,
each with its garden of brilliant flowers. A dozen wharves of various
sizes, over whose edges peeped the double masts of Mackinaw boats,
spoke of a fishing community. Between the roofs one caught glimpses of
a low sparse woods and some thousand-foot hills beyond. We subsequently
added the charm of isolation in learning that the nearest telegraph
line was fifteen miles distant, while the railroad passed some fifty
miles away.

Dick immediately went wild. It was his first glimpse of the mixed
peoples. A dozen loungers, handsome, careless, graceful with the
inimitable elegance of the half-breed's leisure, chatted, rolled
cigarettes, and surveyed with heavy-eyed indolence such of the town as
could be viewed from the shade in which they lay. Three girls, in whose
dark cheeks glowed a rich French comeliness, were comparing purchases
near the store. A group of rivermen, spike-booted, short-trousered,
reckless of air, with their little round hats over one ear, sat
chair-tilted outside the "hotel." Across the dividing fences of two of
the blazoned gardens a pair of old crones gossiped under their breaths.
Some Indians smoked silently at the edge of one of the docks. In the
distance of the street's end a French priest added the quaintness of
his cassock to the exotic atmosphere of the scene. At once a pack of
the fierce sledge-dogs left their foraging for the offal of the
fisheries, to bound challenging in the direction of poor Deuce. That
highbred animal fruitlessly attempted to combine dignity with a
discretionary lurking between our legs. We made demonstrations with
sticks, and sought out the hotel, for it was about time to eat.

We had supper at a table with three Forest Rangers, two lumber-jacks,
and a cat-like handsome "breed" whose business did not appear. Then we
lit up and strolled about to see what we could see.

On the text of a pair of brass knuckles hanging behind the hotel bar I
embroidered many experiences with the lumberjack. I told of a Wisconsin
town where an enforced wait of five hours enabled me to establish the
proportion of fourteen saloons out of a total of twenty frame
buildings. I descanted craftily on the character of the woodsman out of
the woods and in the right frame of mind for deviltry. I related how
Jack Boyd, irritated beyond endurance at the annoyances of a stranger,
finally with the flat of his hand boxed the man's head so mightily that
he whirled around twice and sat down.

"Now," said Jack softly, "be more careful, my friend, or next time I'll
_hit_ you." Or of a little Irishman who shouted to his friends
about to pull a big man from pounding the life quite out of him, "Let
him alone! let him alone! I may be on top myself in a few minutes!" And
of Dave Walker, who fought to a standstill with his bare fists alone
five men who had sworn to kill him. And again of that doughty knight of
the peavie who, when attacked by an axe, waved aside interference with
the truly dauntless cry, "Leave him be, boys; there's an axe between
us!"

I tried to sketch, too, the drive, wherein a dozen times in an hour
these men face death with a smile or a curse--the raging untamed river,
the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with
a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they
herd their brutish multitudes.

There was Jimmy, the river boss, who could not swim a stroke, and who
was incontinently swept over a dam and into the boiling back-set of the
eddy below. Three times, gasping, strangling, drowning, he was carried
in the wide swirl of the circle, sometimes under, sometimes on top.
Then his knee touched a sand-bar, and he dragged himself painfully
ashore. He coughed up a quantity of water, and gave vent to his
feelings over a miraculous escape. "Damn it all!" he wailed, "I lost my
peavie!"

"On the Paint River drive one spring," said I, "a jam formed that
extended up river some three miles. The men were working at the breast
of it, some underneath, some on top. After a time the jam apparently
broke, pulled downstream a hundred feet or so, and plugged again. Then
it was seen that only a small section had moved, leaving the main body
still jammed, so that between the two sections lay a narrow stretch of
open water. Into this open water one of the men had fallen. Before he
could recover, the second or tail section of the jam started to pull.
Apparently nothing could prevent him from being crushed. A man called
Sam--I don't know his last name--ran down the tail of the first
section, across the loose logs bobbing in the open water, seized the
victim of the accident by the collar, desperately scaled the face of
the moving jam, and reached the top just as the two sections ground
together with the brutish noise of wrecking timbers. It was a
magnificent rescue. Any but these men of iron would have adjourned for
thanks and congratulations.

"Still retaining his hold on the other man's collar, Sam twisted him
about and delivered a vigorous kick. '_There_, damn you!' said he.
That was all. They fell to work at once to keep the jam moving."

I instanced, too, some of the feats of river-work these men could
perform. Of how Jack Boyd has been known to float twenty miles without
shifting his feet, on a log so small that he carried it to the water on
his shoulder; of how a dozen rivermen, one after the other, would often
go through the chute of a dam standing upright on single logs; of
O'Donnell, who could turn a somersault on a floating pine log; of the
birling matches, wherein two men on a single log try to throw each
other into the river by treading, squirrel fashion, in faster and
faster rotation; of how a riverman and spiked boots and a saw-log can
do more work than an ordinary man with a rowboat.

I do not suppose Dick believed all this--although it was strictly and
literally true--but his imagination was impressed. He gazed with
respect on the group at the far end of the street, where fifteen or
twenty lumber-jacks were interested in some amusement concealed from
us.

"What do you suppose they are doing?" murmured Dick, awestricken.

"Wrestling, or boxing, or gambling, or jumping," said I.

We approached. Gravely, silently, intensely interested, the
cock-hatted, spikeshod, dangerous men were playing--croquet!

The sight was too much for our nerves. We went away.

The permanent inhabitants of the place we discovered to be friendly to
a degree.

The Indian strain was evident in various dilution through all. Dick's
enthusiasm grew steadily until his artistic instincts became
aggressive, and he flatly announced his intention of staying at least
four days for the purpose of making sketches. We talked the matter
over. Finally it was agreed. Deuce and I were to make a wide circle to
the north and west as far as the Hudson's Bay post of Cloche, while
Dick filled his notebook. That night we slept in beds for the first
time.

That is to say, we slept until about three o'clock. Then we became
vaguely conscious, through a haze of drowse--as one becomes conscious
in the pause of a sleeping-car--of voices outside our doors. Some one
said something about its being hardly much use to go to bed. Another
hoped the sheets were not damp. A succession of lights twinkled across
the walls of our room, and were vaguely explained by the coughing of a
steamboat. We sank into oblivion until the calling-bell brought us to
our feet.

I happened to finish my toilet a little before Dick, and so descended
to the sunlight until he might be ready. Roosting on a gray old boulder
ten feet outside the door were two figures that made me want to rub my
eyes.

The older was a square, ruddy-faced man of sixty, with neatly trimmed,
snow-white whiskers. He had on a soft Alpine hat of pearl gray, a
modishly cut gray homespun suit, a tie in which glimmered an opal pin,
wore tan gloves, and had slung over one shoulder by a narrow black
strap a pair of field-glasses.

The younger was a tall and angular young fellow, of an eager and
sophomoric youth. His hair was very light and very smoothly brushed,
his eyes blue and rather near-sighted, his complexion pink, with an
obviously recent and superficial sunburn, and his clothes, from the
white Panama to the broad-soled low shoes, of the latest cut and
material. Instinctively I sought his fraternity pin. He looked as
though he might say "Rah! Rah!" something or other. A camera completed
his outfit.

Tourists! How in the world did they get here? And then I remembered the
twinkle of the lights and the coughing of the steamboat. But what in
time could they be doing here? Picturesque as the place was, it held
nothing to appeal to the Baedeker spirit. I surveyed the pair with some
interest.

"I suppose there is pretty good fishing around here," ventured the
elder.

He evidently took me for an inhabitant. Remembering my faded blue shirt
and my floppy old hat and the red handkerchief about my neck and the
moccasins on my feet, I did not blame him.

"I suppose there are bass among the islands," I replied.

We fell into conversation. I learned that he and his son were from New
York.

He learned, by a final direct question which was most significant of
his not belonging to the country, who I was. By chance he knew my name.
He opened his heart.

"We came down on the _City of Flint_," said he. "My son and I are
on a vacation. We have been as far as the Yellowstone, and thought we
would like to see some of this country. I was assured that on this date
I could make connection with the _North Star_ for the south. I
told the purser of the _Flint_ not to wake us up unless the
_North Star_ was here at the docks. He bundled us off here at
three in the morning. The _North Star_ was not here; it is an
outrage!"

He uttered various threats.

"I thought the _North Star_ was running away south around the
Perry Sound region," I suggested.

"Yes, but she was to begin to-day, June 16, to make this connection."
He produced a railroad folder. "It's in this," he continued.

"Did you go by that thing?" I marvelled.

"Why, of course," said he.

"I forgot you were an American," said I. "You're in Canada now."

He looked his bewilderment, so I hunted up Dick. I detailed the
situation. "He doesn't know the race," I concluded. "Soon he will be
trying to get information out of the agent. Let's be on hand."

We were on hand. The tourist, his face very red, his whiskers very
white and bristly, marched importantly to the agent's office. The
latter comprised also the post-office, the fish depot, and a general
store. The agent was for the moment dickering _in re_ two pounds
of sugar. This transaction took five minutes to the pound. Mr. Tourist
waited. Then he opened up. The agent heard him placidly, as one who
listens to a curious tale.

"What I want to know is, where's that boat?" ended the tourist.

"Couldn't say," replied the agent.

"Aren't you the agent of this company?"

"Sure," replied the agent.

"Then why don't you know something about its business and plans and
intentions?"

"Couldn't say," replied the agent.

"Do you think it would be any good to wait for the _North Star_?
Do you suppose they can be coming? Do you suppose they've altered the
schedule?"

"Couldn't say," replied the agent.

"When is the next boat through here?"

I listened for the answer in trepidation, for I saw that another
"Couldn't say" would cause the red-faced tourist to blow up. To my
relief, the agent merely inquired,--

"North or south?"

"South, of course. I just came from the north. What in the name of
everlasting blazes should I want to go north again for?"

"Couldn't say," replied the agent. "The next boat south gets in next
week, Tuesday or Wednesday."

"Next week!" shrieked the tourist.

"When's the next boat north?" interposed the son.

"To-morrow morning."

"What time?"

"Couldn't say; you'd have to watch for her."

"That's our boat, dad," said the young man.

"But we've just _come_ from there!" snorted his father; "it's
three hundred miles back. It'll put us behind two days. I've got to be
in New York Friday. I've got an engagement." He turned suddenly to the
agent. "Here, I've got to send a telegram."

The agent blinked placidly. "You'll not send it from here. This ain't a
telegraph station."

"Where's the nearest station?"

"Fifteen mile."

Without further parley the old man turned and walked, stiff and
military, from the place. Near the end of the broad walk he met the
usual doddering but amiable oldest inhabitant.

"Fine day," chirped the patriarch in well-meant friendliness. "They
jest brought in a bear cub over to Antoine's. If you'd like to take a
look at him, I'll show you where it is."

The tourist stopped short and glared fiercely.

"Sir," said he, "damn your bear!" Then he strode on, leaving grandpa
staring after him.

In the course of the morning we became quite well acquainted, and he
resigned. The son appeared to take somewhat the humorous view all
through the affair, which must have irritated the old gentleman. They
discussed it rather thoroughly, and finally decided to retrace their
steps for a fresh start over a better-known route. This settled, the
senior seemed to feel relieved of a weight. He even saw and relished
certain funny phases of the incident, though he never ceased to
foretell different kinds of trouble for the company, varying in range
from mere complaints to the most tremendous of damage suits.

He was much interested, finally, in our methods of travel, and then, in
logical sequence, with what he could see about him. He watched
curiously my loading of the canoe, for I had a three-mile stretch of
open water, and the wind was abroad. Deuce's empirical boat wisdom
aroused his admiration. He and his son were both at the shore to see me
off.

Deuce settled himself in the bottom. I lifted the stern from the shore
and gently set it afloat. In a moment I was ready to start.

"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" suddenly cried the father.

I swirled my paddle back. The old gentleman was hastily fumbling in his
pockets. After an instant he descended to the water's edge.

"Here," said he, "you are a judge of fiction; take this."

It was his steamboat and railway folder.




IX.

ON FLIES.


All the rest of the day I paddled under the frowning cliffs of the hill
ranges. Bold, bare, scarred, seamed with fissures, their precipice
rocks gave the impression of ten thousand feet rather that only so many
hundreds. Late in the afternoon we landed against a formation of
basaltic blocks cut as squarely up and down as a dock, and dropping off
into as deep water. The waves _chug-chug-chugged_ sullenly against
them, and the fringe of a dark pine forest, drawn back from a breadth
of natural grass, lowered across the horizon like a thunder-cloud.

Deuce and I made camp with the uneasy feeling of being under inimical
inspection. A cold wind ruffled lead-like waters. No comfort was in the
prospect, so we retired early. Then it appeared that the coarse grass
of the park had bred innumerable black flies, and that we had our work
cut out for us.

The question of flies--using that, to a woodsman, eminently connotive
word in its wide embracement of mosquitoes, sandflies, deer-flies,
black flies, and midges--is one much mooted in the craft. On no
subject are more widely divergent ideas expressed. One writer claims
that black flies' bites are but the temporary inconvenience of a
pin-prick; another tells of boils lasting a week as the invariable
result of their attentions; a third sweeps aside the whole question as
unimportant to concentrate his anathemas on the musical mosquito; still
a fourth descants on the maddening midge, and is prepared to defend his
claims against the world. A like dogmatic partisanship obtains in the
question of defences. Each and every man possessed of a tongue
wherewith to speak or a pen wherewith to write, heralds the particular
merits of his own fly-dope, head-net, or mosquito-proof tent-lining.
Eager advocates of the advantages of pork fat, kerosene, pine tar,
pennyroyal, oil of cloves, castor oil, lollacapop, or a half hundred
other concoctions, will assure you, tears in eyes, that his is the only
true faith. So many men, so many minds, until the theorist is confused
into doing the most uncomfortable thing possible--that is, to learn by
experience.

As for the truth, it is at once in all of them and in none of them. The
annoyance of after-effects from a sting depends entirely on the
individual's physical makeup. Some people are so poisoned by mosquito
bites that three or four on the forehead suffice to close entirely the
victim's eyes. On others they leave but a small red mark without
swelling. Black flies caused festering sores on one man I accompanied
to the woods. In my own case they leave only a tiny blood-spot the size
of a pin-head, which bothers me not a bit. Midges nearly drove crazy
the same companion of mine, so that finally he jumped into the river,
clothes and all, to get rid of them. Again, merely my own experience
would lead me to regard them as a tremendous nuisance, but one quite
bearable. Indians are less susceptible than whites; nevertheless I have
seen them badly swelled behind the ears from the bites of the big
hardwood mosquito.

You can make up your mind to one thing: from the first warm weather
until August you must expect to cope with insect pests. The black fly
will keep you busy until late afternoon; the midges will swarm you
about sunset; and the mosquito will preserve the tradition after you
have turned in. As for the deer-fly, and others of his piratical breed,
he will bite like a dog at any time.

To me the most annoying species is the mosquito. The black fly is
sometimes most industrious--I have seen trout fishermen come into camp
with the blood literally streaming from their faces--but his great
recommendation is that he holds still to be killed. No frantic slaps,
no waving of arms, no muffled curses. You just place your finger calmly
and firmly on the spot. You get him every time. In this is great,
heart-lifting joy. It may be unholy joy, perhaps even vengeful, but it
leaves the spirit ecstatic. The satisfaction of _murdering_ the
beast that has had the nerve to light on you just as you are reeling in
almost counterbalances the pain of a sting. The midge, again, or
punkie, or "no-see-'um," just as you please, swarms down upon you
suddenly and with commendable vigour, so that you feel as though
red-hot pepper were being sprinkled on your bare skin; and his
invisibility and intangibility are such that you can never tell whether
you have killed him or not; but he doesn't last long, and dope routs
him totally. Your mosquito, however, is such a deliberate brute. He has
in him some of that divine fire which causes a dog to turn around nine
times before lying down.

Whether he is selecting or gloating I do not know, but I do maintain
that the price of your life's blood is often not too great to pay for
the cessation of that hum.

"Eet is not hees bite," said Billy the half-breed to me once--"eet is
hees sing."

I agree with Billy. One mosquito in a tent can keep you awake for
hours.

As to protection, it is varied enough in all conscience, and always
theoretically perfect. A head-net falling well down over your chest, or
even tied under your arm-pits, is at once the simplest and most
fallacious of these theories. It will keep vast numbers of flies out,
to be sure. It will also keep the few adventurous discoverers in, where
you can neither kill nor eject. Likewise you are deprived of your pipe;
and the common homely comfort of spitting on your bait is totally
denied you. The landscape takes on the prismatic colours of refraction,
so that, while you can easily make out red, white, and blue Chinese
dragons and mythological monsters, you are unable to discover the more
welcome succulence, say, of a partridge on a limb. And the end of that
head-net is to be picked to holes by the brush, and finally to be
snatched from you to sapling height, whence your pains will rescue it
only in a useless condition. Probably then you will dance the war-dance
of exasperation on its dismembered remains. Still, there are times--in
case of straight-away river paddling, or open walking, or lengthened
waiting--when the net is a great comfort. And it is easily included in
the pack.

Next in order come the various "dopes." And they are various. From the
stickiest, blackest pastes to the silkiest, suavest oils they range,
through the grades of essence, salve, and cream. Every man has his own
recipe--the infallible. As a general rule, it may be stated that the
thicker kinds last longer and are generally more thoroughly effective,
but the lighter are pleasanter to wear, though requiring more frequent
application. At a pinch, ordinary pork fat is good. The Indians often
make temporary use of the broad caribou leaf, crushing it between their
palms and rubbing the juices on the skin. I know by experience that
this is effective, but very transitory. It is, however, a good thing to
use when resting on the trail, for, by the grace of Providence, flies
are rarely bothersome as long as you are moving at a fair gait.

This does not always hold good, however, any more than the best
fly-dope is always effective. I remember most vividly the first day of
a return journey from the shores of the Hudson Bay. The weather was
rather oppressively close and overcast.

We had paddled a few miles up river from the fur trading-post, and then
had landed in order to lighten the canoe for the ascent against the
current. At that point the forest has already begun to dwindle towards
the Land of Little Sticks, so that often miles and miles of open
muskegs will intervene between groups of the stunted trees. Jim and I
found ourselves a little over waist deep in luxuriant and tangled
grasses that impeded and clogged our every footstep. Never shall I
forget that country--its sad and lonely isolation, its dull lead sky,
its silence, and the closeness of its stifling atmosphere--and never
shall I see it otherwise than as in a dense brown haze, a haze composed
of swarming millions of mosquitoes. There is not the slightest
exaggeration in the statement. At every step new multitudes rushed into
our faces to join the old. At times Jim's back was so covered with them
that they almost overlaid the colour of the cloth. And as near as we
could see, every square foot of the thousands of acres quartered its
hordes.

We doped liberally, but without the slightest apparent effect. Probably
two million squeamish mosquitoes were driven away by the disgust of our
medicaments, but what good did that do us when eight million others
were not so particular? At the last we hung bandanas under our hats,
cut fans of leaves, and stumbled on through a most miserable day until
we could build a smudge at evening.

For smoke is usually a specific. Not always, however: some midges seem
to delight in it. The Indians make a tiny blaze of birch bark and pine
twigs deep in a nest of grass and caribou leaves. When the flame is
well started, they twist the growing vegetation canopy-wise above it.

In that manner they gain a few minutes of dense, acrid smoke, which is
enough for an Indian. A white man, however, needs something more
elaborate.

The chief reason for your initial failure in making an effective smudge
will be that you will not get your fire well started before piling on
the damp smoke-material. It need not be a conflagration, but it should
be bright and glowing, so that the punk birch or maple wood you add
will not smother it entirely. After it is completed, you will not have
to sit coughing in the thick of fumigation, as do many, but only to
leeward and underneath. Your hat used as a fan will eddy the smoke
temporarily into desirable nooks and crevices. I have slept without
annoyance on the Great Plains, where the mosquitoes seem to go in
organized and predatory bands, merely by lying beneath a smudge that
passed at least five feet above me. You will find the frying-pan a
handy brazier for the accommodation of a movable smoke to be
transported to the interior of the tent. And it does not in the least
hurt the frying-pan. These be hints, briefly spoken, out of which at
times you may have to construct elaborate campaigns.

But you come to grapples in the defence of comfort when night
approaches. If you can eat and sleep well, you can stand almost any
hardship. The night's rest is as carefully to be fore-assured as the
food that sustains you. No precaution is too elaborate to certify
unbroken repose. By dark you will discover the peak of your tent to be
liberally speckled with insects of all sorts. Especially is this true
of an evening that threatens rain. Your smudge-pan may drive away the
mosquitoes, but merely stupefies the other varieties. You are forced to
the manipulation of a balsam fan.

In your use of this simple implement you will betray the extent of your
experience. Dick used at first to begin at the rear peak and brush as
rapidly as possible toward the opening. The flies, thoroughly aroused,
eddied about a few frantic moments, like leaves in an autumn wind,
finally to settle close to the sod in the crannies between the
tent-wall and the ground. Then Dick would lie flat on his belly in
order to brush with equal vigour at these new lurking-places. The flies
repeated the autumn-leaf effect, and returned to the rear peak. This
was amusing to me, and furnished the flies with healthful, appetizing
exercise, but was bad for Dick's soul. After a time he discovered the
only successful method is the gentle one. Then he began at the peak and
brushed forward slowly, very, very slowly, so that the limited
intellect of his visitors did not become confused. Thus when they
arrived at the opening they saw it and used it, instead of searching
frantically for corners in which to hide from apparently vengeful
destruction. Then he would close his tent-flap securely, and turn in at
once. So he was able to sleep until earliest daylight. At that time the
mosquitoes again found him out.

Nine out of ten--perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred--sleep in open
tents. For absolute and perfect comfort proceed as follows:--Have your
tent-maker sew you a tent of cheese-cloth[*] with the same dimensions
as your shelter, except that the walls should be loose and voluminous
at the bottom. It should have no openings.

[Footnote *: Do not allow yourself to be talked into substituting
mosquito-bar or bobinet. Any mesh coarser than cheese-cloth will prove
pregnable to the most enterprising of the smaller species.]

Suspend this affair inside your tent by means of cords or tapes. Drop
it about you. Spread it out. Lay rod-cases, duffel-bags, or rocks along
its lower edges to keep it spread. You will sleep beneath it like a
child in winter. No driving out of reluctant flies; no enforced early
rising; no danger of a single overlooked insect to make the midnight
miserable. The cheese-cloth weighs almost nothing, can be looped up out
of the way in the daytime, admits the air readily. Nothing could fill
the soul with more ecstatic satisfaction than to lie for a moment
before going to sleep listening to a noise outside like an able-bodied
sawmill that indicates the _ping-gosh_ are abroad.

It would be unfair to leave the subject without a passing reference to
its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper
mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual
experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure
fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the human mind is
capable.

The picture rises before my mind of the cabin of a twenty-eight-foot
cutter-sloop just before the dawn of a midsummer day. The sloop was
made for business, and the cabin harmonized exactly with the
sloop--painted pine, wooden bunks without mattresses, camp-blankets,
duffel-bags slung up because all the floor place had been requisitioned
for sleeping purposes. We were anchored a hundred feet off land from
Pilot Cove, on the uninhabited north shore. The mosquitoes had
adventured on the deep. We lay half asleep.

"On the middle rafter," murmured the Football Man, "is one old fellow
giving signals."

"A quartette is singing drinking-songs on my nose," muttered the Glee
Club Man.

"We won't need to cook," I suggested somnolently. "We can run up and
down on deck with our mouths open and get enough for breakfast."

The fourth member opened one eye. "Boys," he breathed, "we won't be
able to go on to-morrow unless we give up having any more biscuits."

After a time some one murmured, "Why?"

"We'll have to use all the lard on the mast. They're so mad because
they can't get at us that they're biting the mast. It's already swelled
up as big as a barrel. We'll never be able to get the mainsail up. Any
of you boys got any vaseline? Perhaps a little fly-dope--"

But we snored vigorously in unison. The Indians say that when Kitch'
Manitou had created men he was dissatisfied, and so brought women into
being. At once love-making began, and then, as now, the couples sought
solitude for their exchanges of vows, their sighings to the moon, their
claspings of hands. Marriages ensued. The situation remained unchanged.
Life was one perpetual honeymoon. I suppose the novelty was fresh and
the sexes had not yet realized they would not part as abruptly as they
had been brought together. The villages were deserted, while the woods
and bushes were populous with wedded and unwedded lovers. Kitch'
Manitou looked on the proceedings with disapproval. All this was most
romantic and beautiful, no doubt, but in the meantime mi-dáw-min, the
corn, mi-nó-men, the rice, grew rank and uncultivated; while bis-íw,
the lynx, and swingwáage, the wolverine, and me-én-gan, the wolf,
committed unchecked depredations among the weaker forest creatures. The
business of life was being sadly neglected. So Kitch' Manitou took
counsel with himself, and created sáw-gi-may, the mosquito, to whom he
gave as dwelling the woods and bushes. That took the romance out of the
situation. As my narrator grimly expressed it, "Him come back, go to
work."

Certainly it should be most effective. Even the thick-skinned moose is
not exempt from discomfort. At certain seasons the canoe voyager in the
Far North will run upon a dozen in the course of a day's travel,
standing nose-deep in the river merely to escape the insect pests.

However, this is to be remembered: after the first of August they
bother very little; before that time the campaign I have outlined is
effective; even in fly season the worst days are infrequent. In the
woods you must expect to pay a certain price in discomfort for a very
real and very deep pleasure. Wet, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, difficult
travel, insects, hard beds, aching muscles--all these at one time or
another will be your portion. If you are of the class that cannot have
a good time unless everything is right with it, stay out of the woods.
One thing at least will always be wrong. When you have gained the
faculty of ignoring the one disagreeable thing and concentrating your
powers on the compensations, then you will have become a true woodsman,
and to your desires the forest will always be calling.




X.

CLOCHE.


Imagine a many-armed lake, like a starfish, nested among rugged
Laurentian hills, whose brows are bare and forbidding, but whose
concealed ravines harbour each its cool screen of forest growth.
Imagine a brawling stream escaping at one of the arms, to tumble,
intermittently visible among the trees, down a series of cascades and
rapids, to the broad, island-dotted calm of the big lake. Imagine a
meadow at the mouth of this stream, and on the meadow a single white
dot. Thus you will see Cloche, a trading-post of the Honourable the
Hudson's Bay Company, as Deuce and I saw it from the summit of the
hills.

We had accomplished a very hard scramble, which started well enough in
a ravine so leafy and green and impenetrable that we might well have
imagined ourselves in a boundless forest. Deuce had scented sundry
partridges, which he had pointed with entire deference to the good form
of a sporting dog's conventions. As usual, to Deuce's never-failing
surprise and disgust, the birds had proved themselves most uncultivated
and rude persons by hopping promptly into trees instead of lying to
point and then flushing as a well-taught partridge should. I had
refused to pull pistol on them. Deuce's heart was broken. Then,
finally, we came to cliffs up which we had to scale, and boulders which
we had to climb, and fissures which we had to jump or cross on fallen
trees, and wide, bare sweeps of rock and blueberry bushes which we had
to cover, until at last we stood where we could look all ways at once.

The starfish thrust his insinuating arms in among the distant hills to
the north. League after league, rising and falling and rising again
into ever bluer distance, forest-covered, mysterious, other ranges and
systems lifted, until at last, far out, nearly at the horizon-height of
my eye, flashed again the gleam of water. And so the starfish arms of
the little lake at my feet seemed to have plunged into this wilderness
tangle only to reappear at greater distance. Like swamp-fire, it lured
the imagination always on and on and on through the secret waterways of
the uninhabited North. It was as though I stood on the dividing ridge
between the old and the new. Through the southern haze, hull down, I
thought to make out the smoke of a Great Lake freighter; from the
shelter of a distant cove I was not surprised a moment later to see
emerge a tiny speck whose movements betrayed it as a birch canoe. The
great North was at this, the most southern of the Hudson's Bay posts,
striking a pin-point of contact with the world of men.

Deuce and I angled down the mountain toward the stream. Our arrival
coincided with that of the canoe. It was of the Ojibway three-fathom
pattern, and contained a half-dozen packs, a sledge-dog, with whom
Deuce at once opened guarded negotiations, an old Indian, a squaw, and
a child of six or eight. We exchanged brief greetings. Then I sat on a
stump and watched the portage.

These were evidently "Woods Indians," an entirely different article
from the "Post Indians." They wore their hair long, and bound by a
narrow strip or fillet; their faces were hard and deeply lined, with a
fine, bold, far-seeing look to the eyes which comes only from long
woods dwelling. They walked, even under heavy loads, with a sagging,
springy gait, at once sure-footed and swift. Instead of tump-lines the
man used his sash, and the woman a blanket knotted loosely together at
the ends. The details of their costumes were interesting in combination
of jeans and buckskin, broadcloth and blanket, stroud and a material
evidently made from the strong white sacking in which flour intended
for frontier consumption is always packed. After the first
double-barrelled "bo' jou', bo' jou'," they paid no further attention
to me. In a few moments the portage was completed. The woman thrust her
paddle against the stream's bottom and the canoe, and so embarked. The
man stepped smoothly to his place like a cat leaping from a chair. They
shot away with the current, leaving behind them a strange and
mysterious impression of silence.

I followed down a narrow but well-beaten trail, and so at the end of a
half-mile came to the meadow and the post of Cloche.

The building itself was accurately of the Hudson Bay type--a steep,
sloping roof greater in front than behind, a deep recessed veranda,
squared logs sheathed with whitewashed boards. About it was a little
garden, which, besides the usual flowers and vegetables, contained such
exotics as a deer confined to a pen and a bear chained to a stake. As I
approached, the door opened and the Trader came out.

Now, often along the southern fringe your Hudson's Bay Trader will
prove to be a distinct disappointment. In fact, one of the historic old
posts is now kept by a pert little cockney Englishman, cringing or
impudent as the main chance seems to advise. When you have penetrated
further into the wilderness, however, where the hardships of winter and
summer travel, the loneliness of winter posts, the necessity of dealing
directly with savage men and savage nature, develops the quality of a
man or wrecks him early in the game, you will be certain of meeting
your type. But here, within fifty miles of the railroad!

The man who now stepped into view, however, preserved in his appearance
all the old traditions. He was, briefly, a short black-and-white man
built very square. Immense power lurked in the broad, heavy shoulders,
the massive chest, the thick arms, the sturdy, column-like legs. As for
his face, it was almost entirely concealed behind a curly square black
beard that grew above his cheek-bones nearly to his eyes. Only a thick
hawk nose, an inscrutable pair of black eyes under phenomenally heavy
eyebrows, and a short black pipe showed plainly from the hirsute
tangle. He was lock, stock, and barrel of the Far North, one of the old
_régime_. I was rejoiced to see him there, but did not betray a
glimmer of interest. I knew my type too well for that.

"How are you?" he said grudgingly.

"Good-day," said I.

We leaned against the fence and smoked, each contemplating carefully
the end of his pipe. I knew better than to say anything. The Trader was
looking me over, making up his mind about me. Speech on my part would
argue lightness of disposition, for it would seem to indicate that I
was not also making up my mind about him.

In this pause there was not the least unfriendliness. Only, in the
woods you prefer to know first the business and character of a chance
acquaintance. Afterwards you may ingratiate to his good will. All of
which possesses a beautiful simplicity, for it proves that good or bad
opinion need not depend on how gracefully you can chatter assurances.
At the end of a long period the Trader inquired, "Which way you
headed?"

"Out in a canoe for pleasure. Headed almost anywhere."

Again we smoked.

"Dog any good?" asked the Trader, removing his pipe and pointing to the
observant Deuce.

"He'll hunt shade on a hot day," said I tentatively. "How's the fur in
this district?"

We were off. He invited me in and showed me his bear. In ten minutes we
were seated chair-tilted on the veranda, and slowly, very cautiously,
in abbreviated syncopation, were feeling our way toward an intimacy.

Now came the Indians I had seen at the lake to barter for some flour
and pork. I was glad of the chance to follow them all into the
trading-room. A low wooden counter backed by a grill divided the main
body of the room from the entrance. It was deliciously dim. All the
charm of the Aromatic Shop was in the place, and an additional flavour
of the wilds. Everything here was meant for the Indian trade: bolts of
bright-patterned ginghams, blankets of red or blue, articles of
clothing, boxes of beads for decoration, skeins of brilliant silk, lead
bars for bullet-making, stacks of long brass-bound "trade guns" in the
corner, small mirrors, red and parti-coloured worsted sashes with
tassels on the ends, steel traps of various sizes, and a dozen other
articles to be desired by the forest people. And here, unlike the
Aromatic Shop, were none of the products of the Far North. All that, I
knew, was to be found elsewhere, in another apartment, equally dim, but
delightful in the orderly disorder of a storeroom.

Afterwards I made the excuse of a pair of moccasins to see this other
room. We climbed a steep, rough flight of stairs to emerge through a
sort of trap-door into a space directly under the roof. It was lit only
by a single little square at one end. Deep under the eaves I could make
out row after row of boxes and chests. From the rafters hung a dozen
pair of snow-shoes. In the centre of the floor, half overturned, lay an
open box from which tumbled dozens of pairs of moose-hide snow-shoe
moccasins.

Shades of childhood, what a place! No one of us can fail to recall with
a thrill the delights of a rummage in the attic--the joy of pulling
from some half-forgotten trunk a wholly forgotten shabby garment, which
nevertheless has taken to itself from the stillness of undisturbed
years the faint aroma of romance; the rapture of discovering in the
dusk of a concealed nook some old spur or broken knife or rusty pistol
redolent of the open road. Such essentially commonplace affairs they
are, after all, in the light of our mature common sense, but such
unspeakable ecstasies to the romance-breathing years of fancy. Here
would no fancy be required. To rummage in these silent chests and boxes
would be to rummage, not in the fictions of imagination, but the facts
of the most real picturesque. In yonder square box are the smoke-tanned
shoes of silence; that velvet dimness would prove to be the fur of a
bear; this birch-bark package contains maple sugar savoured of the
wilds. Buckskin, both white and buff, bears' claws in strings, bundles
of medicinal herbs, sweet-grass baskets fragrant as an Eastern tale,
birch-bark boxes embroidered with stained quills of the porcupines,
bows of hickory and arrows of maple, queer half-boots of stiff sealskin
from the very shores of the Hudson Bay, belts of beadwork, yellow and
green, for the Corn Dance, even a costume or so of buckskin complete
for ceremonial--all these the fortunate child would find were he to
take the rainy-day privilege in this, the most wonderful attic in all
the world. And then, after he had stroked the soft fur, and smelled the
buckskin and sweet grasses, and tasted the crumbling maple sugar, and
dressed himself in the barbaric splendours of the North, he could
flatten his little nose against the dim square of light and look out
over the glistening yellow backs of a dozen birchbark canoes to the
distant, rain-blurred hills, beyond which lay the country whence all
these things had come. Do you wonder that in after years that child
hits the Long Trail? Do you still wonder at finding these strange,
taciturn, formidable, tender-hearted men dwelling lonely in the Silent
Places?

The Trader yanked several of the boxes to the centre and prosaically
tumbled about their contents. He brought to light heavy moose-hide
moccasins with high linen tops for the snow; lighter buckskin
moccasins, again with the high tops, but this time of white tanned
doeskin; slipper-like deer-skin moccasins with rolled edges, for the
summer; oil-tanned shoepacs, with and without the flexible leather
sole; "cruisers" of varying degree of height--each and every sort of
footgear in use in the Far North, excepting and saving always the
beautiful soft doeskin slippers finished with white fawnskin and
ornamented with the Ojibway flower pattern for which I sought. Finally
he gave it up.

"I had a few pair. They must have been sent out," said he.

We rummaged a little further for luck's sake, then descended to the
outer air. I left him to fetch my canoe, but returned in the afternoon.
We became friends. That evening we sat in the little sitting-room and
talked far into the night.

He was a true Hudson's Bay man, steadfastly loyal to the Company. I
mentioned the legend of _La Longue Traverse_; he stoutly asserted
he had never heard of it. I tried to buy a mink-skin or so to hang on
the wall as souvenir of my visit; he was genuinely distressed, but had
to refuse because the Company had not authorized him to sell, and he
had nothing of his own to give. I mentioned the River of the Moose, the
Land of Little Sticks; his deep eyes sparkled with excitement, and he
asked eagerly a multitude of details concerning late news from the
northern posts.

And as the evening dwindled, after the manner of Traders everywhere, he
began to tell me the "ghost stories" of this station of Cloche. Every
post has gathered a mass of legendary lore in the slow years, but this
had been on the route of the _voyageurs_ from Montreal and Quebec
at the time when the lords of the North journeyed to the scenes of
their annual revels at Fort Williams. The Trader had much to say of the
magnificence and luxury of these men--their cooks, their silken tents,
their strange and costly foods, their rare wines, their hordes of
French and Indian canoemen and packers. Then Cloche was a halting-place
for the night. Its meadows had blossomed many times with the gay tents
and banners of a great company. He told me, as vividly as though he had
been an eye-witness, of how the canoes must have loomed up suddenly
from between the islands. By-and-by he seized the lamp and conducted me
outside, where hung ponderous ornamental steelyards, on which in the
old days the peltries were weighed.

"It is not so now," said he. "We buy by count, and modern scales weigh
the provisions. And the beaver are all gone."

We re-entered the house in silence. After a while he began briefly to
sketch his own career. Then, indeed, the flavour of the Far North
breathed its crisp, bracing ozone through the atmosphere of the room.

He had started life at one of the posts of the Far North-West. At the
age of twelve he enlisted in the Company. Throughout forty years he had
served her. He had travelled to all the strange places of the North,
and claimed to have stood on the shores of that half-mythical lake of
Yamba Tooh.

"It was snowing at the time," he said prosaically; "and I couldn't see
anything, except that I'd have to bear to the east to get away from
open water. Maybe she wasn't the lake. The Injins said she was, but I
was too almighty shy of grub to bother with lakes."

Other names fell from him in the course of talk, some of which I had
heard and some not, but all of which rang sweet and clear with no
uncertain note of adventure. Especially haunts my memory an impression
of desolate burned trees standing stick-like in death on the shores of
Lost River.

He told me he had been four years at Cloche, but expected shortly to be
transferred, as the fur was getting scarce, and another post one
hundred miles to the west could care for the dwindling trade. He hoped
to be sent into the North-West, but shrugged his shoulders as he said
so, as though that were in the hands of the gods. At the last he fished
out a concertina and played for me. Have you ever heard, after dark, in
the North, where the hills grow big at sunset, _à la Claire
Fontaine_ crooned to such an accompaniment, and by a man of
impassive bulk and countenance, but with glowing eyes?

I said good-night, and stumbled, sight-dazed, through the cool dark to
my tent near the beach. The weird minor strains breathed after me as I
went.

"A la claire fontaine
M'en allant promener,
J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle
Que je m'y suis baigné,
Il y a longtemps que je t'aime
Jamais je ne t'oublierai."

The next day, with the combers of a howling north-westerly gale
clutching at the stern of the canoe, I rode in a glory of spray and
copper-tasting excitement back to Dick and his half-breed settlement.

But the incident had its sequel. The following season, as I was sitting
writing at my desk, a strange package was brought me. It was wrapped in
linen sewn strongly with waxed cord. Its contents lie before me now--a
pair of moccasins fashioned of the finest doeskin, tanned so
beautifully that the delicious smoke fragrance fills the room, and so
effectively that they could be washed with soap and water without
destroying their softness. The tongue-shaped piece over the instep is
of white fawnskin heavily ornamented in five colours of silk. Where it
joins the foot of the slipper it is worked over and over into a narrow
cord of red and blue silk. The edge about the ankle is turned over,
deeply scalloped, and bound at the top with a broad band of blue silk
stitched with pink. Two tiny blue bows at either side the ankle
ornament the front. Altogether a most magnificent foot-gear. No word
accompanied them, apparently, but after some search I drew a bit of
paper from the toe of one of them. It was inscribed simply--"Fort la
Cloche."




XI.

THE HABITANTS.


During my absence Dick had made many friends. Wherein lies his secret I
do not know, but he has a peculiar power of ingratiation with people
whose lives are quite outside his experience or sympathies. In the
short space of four days he had earned joyous greetings from every one
in town. The children grinned at him cheerfully; the old women cackled
good-natured little teasing jests to him as he passed; the pretty,
dusky half-breed girls dropped their eyelashes fascinatingly across
their cheeks, tempering their coyness with a smile; the men painfully
demanded information as to artistic achievement which was evidently as
well meant as it was foreign to any real thirst for knowledge they
might possess; even the lumber-jacks addressed him as "Bub." And withal
Dick's methods of approach were radically wrong, for he blundered upon
new acquaintance with a beaming smile, which is ordinarily a sure
repellent to the cautious, taciturn men of the woods. Perhaps their
keenness penetrated to the fact that he was absolutely without guile,
and that his kindness was an essential part of himself. I should be
curious to know whether Billy Knapp of the Black Hills would surrender
his gun to Dick for inspection.

"I want you to go out this afternoon to see some friends of mine," said
Dick. "They're on a farm about two miles back in the brush. They're
ancestors."

"They're what?" I inquired.

"Ancestors. You can go down to Grosse Point near Detroit, and find
people living in beautiful country places next the water, and after
dinner they'll show you an old silhouette or a daguerreotype or
something like that, and will say to you proudly, 'This is old Jules,
my ancestor, who was a pioneer in this country. The Place has been in
the family ever since his time.'"

"Well?"

"Well, this is a French family, and they are pioneers, and the family
has a place that slopes down to the water through white birch trees,
and it is of the kind very tenacious of its own land. In two hundred
years this will be a great resort; bound to be--beautiful, salubrious,
good sport, fine scenery, accessible--"

"Railroad fifty miles away; boat every once in a while," said I
sarcastically.

"Accessible in two hundred years, all right," insisted Dick serenely.
"Even Canada can build a quarter of a mile of railway a year.
Accessible," he went on; "good shipping-point for country now
undeveloped."

"You ought to be a real estate agent," I advised.

"Lived two hundred years too soon," disclaimed Dick. "What more
obvious? These are certainly ancestors."

"Family may die out," I suggested.

"It has a good start," said Dick sweetly. "There are eighty-seven in it
now."

"What!" I gasped.

"One great-grandfather, twelve grandparents, thirty-seven parents, and
thirty-seven children," tabulated Dick.

"I should like to see the great-grandfather," said I; "he must be very
old and feeble."

"He is eighty-five years old," said Dick, "and the last time I saw him
he was engaged with an axe in clearing trees off his farm."

All of these astonishing statements I found to be absolutely true.

We started out afoot soon after dinner, through a scattering growth of
popples that alternately drew the veil of coyness over the blue hills
and caught our breath with the delight of a momentary prospect. Deuce,
remembering autumn days, concluded partridges, and scurried away on the
expert diagonal, his hind legs tucked well under his flanks. The road
itself was a mere cutting through the miniature woods, winding to right
or left for the purpose of avoiding a log-end or a boulder, surmounting
little knolls with an idle disregard for the straight line, knobby with
big, round stones, and interestingly diversified by circular mud holes
a foot or so in diameter. After a mile and a half we came to the corner
of a snake fence. This, Dick informed me, marked the limits of the
"farm."

We burst through the screen of popples definitely into the clear. A
two-storied house of squared logs crested a knoll in the middle
distance. Ten acres of grass marsh, perhaps twenty of ploughed land,
and then the ash-white-green of popples. We dodged the grass marsh and
gained the house. Dick was at once among friends.

The mother had no English, so smiled expansively, her bony arms folded
across her stomach. Her oldest daughter, a frail-looking girl in the
twenties, but with a sad and spiritual beauty of the Madonna in her big
eyes and straight black hair, gave us a shy good-day. Three boys, just
alike in their slender, stolid Indian good looks, except that they
differed in size, nodded with the awkwardness of the male. Two babies
stared solemnly. A little girl with a beautiful, oval face, large
mischievous gray eyes behind long black lashes, a mischievously quirked
mouth to match the eyes, and black hair banged straight, both front and
behind, in almost mediaeval fashion, twirked a pair of brown bare legs
all about us. Another light-haired, curly little girl, surmounted by an
old yachting-cap, spread apart sturdy shoes in an attitude at once
critical and expectant.

Dick rose to the occasion by sorting out from some concealed recess of
his garments a huge paper parcel of candy.

With infinite tact, he presented this bag to Madame rather than the
children. Madame instituted judicious distribution and appropriate
reservation for the future. We entered the cabin.

Never have I seen a place more exquisitely neat. The floor had not only
been washed clean; it had been scrubbed white. The walls of logs were
freshly whitewashed. The chairs were polished. The few ornaments were
new, and not at all dusty or dingy or tawdry. Several religious
pictures, a portrait of royalty, a lithographed advertisement of some
buggy, a photograph or so--and then just the fresh, wholesome
cleanliness of scrubbed pine. Madame made us welcome with smiles--a
faded, lean woman with a remnant of beauty peeping from her soft eyes,
but worn down to the first principles of pioneer bone and gristle by
toil, care, and the bearing of children. I spoke to her in French,
complimenting her on the appearance of the place. She was genuinely
pleased, saying in reply that one did one's possible, but that
children!--with an expressive pause.

Next we called for volunteers to show us to the great-grandfather. Our
elfish little girls at once offered, and went dancing off down the
trail like autumn leaves in a wind. Whether it was the Indian in them,
or the effects of environment, or merely our own imaginations, we both
had the same thought--that in these strange, taciturn, friendly,
smiling, pirouetting little creatures was some eerie, wild strain akin
to the woods and birds and animals. As they danced on ahead of us,
turning to throw us a delicious smile or a half-veiled roguish glance
of nascent coquetry, we seemed to swing into an orbit of experience
foreign to our own. These bright-eyed woods people were in the last
analysis as inscrutable to us as the squirrels.

We followed our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another
clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they
stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a
startlingly sudden repose.

"V'la le gran'père," said they in unison.

At the words a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and
confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened
and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a
Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide,
clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His
movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand
across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the
quality of his work--a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause,
a painful recovery--labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but
wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without
haste, without pause, inevitable as the years slowly closing about the
toiler. His mental processes would be of the same fibre. The apparent
hesitation might seem to waste the precious hours remaining, but in the
end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly
along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes,
like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame,
gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of
Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble
seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of
another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to
exchange slow sentences on the body politic. Indeed, the fact that his
seat was of fallen pine, and his draperies of butternut brown, and his
audience two half-breed children, an artist, and a writer, and his body
politic two hundred acres in the wilderness, did not filch from him the
impressiveness of his estate. He was a Patriarch. It did not need the
park of birch trees, the grass beneath them sloping down to the water,
the wooded knoll fairly insisting on a spacious mansion, to
substantiate Dick's fancy that he had discovered an ancestor.

Neat piles of brush, equally neat piles of cord-wood, knee-high stumps
as cleanly cut as by a saw, attested the old man's efficiency. We
conversed.

Yes, said he, the soil was good. It is laborious to clear away the
forest. Still, one arrives. M'sieu has but to look. In the memory of
his oldest grandson, even, all this was a forest. Le bon Dieu had
blessed him. His family was large. Yes, it was as M'sieu said,
eighty-seven--that is, counting himself. The soil was not wonderful. It
is indeed a large family and much labour, but somehow there was always
food for all. For his part he had a great pity for those whom God had
not blessed. It must be very lonesome without children.

We spared a private thought that this old man was certainly in no
danger of loneliness.

Yes, he went on, he was old--eighty-five. He was not as quick as he
used to be; he left that for the young ones. Still, he could do a day's
work. He was most proud to have made these gentlemen's acquaintance. He
wished us good-day.

We left him seated on the pine log, his axe between his knees, his
great, gnarled brown hands hanging idly. After a time we heard the
_whack_ of his implement; then after another long time we heard it
_whack_ again. We knew that those two blows had gone straight and
true and forceful to the mark. So old a man had no energy to expend in
the indirections of haste.

Our elfish guides led us back along the trail to the farmhouse. A girl
of thirteen had just arrived from school. In the summer the little ones
divided the educational advantages among themselves, turn and turn
about.

The newcomer had been out into the world, and was dressed accordingly.
A neat dark-blue cloth dress, plainly made, a dull red and blue checked
apron; a broad, round hat, shoes and stockings, all in the best and
quietest taste--marked contrast to the usual garish Sunday best of the
Anglo-Saxon. She herself exemplified the most striking type of beauty
to be found in the mixed bloods. Her hair was thick and glossy and
black in the mode that throws deep purple shadows under the rolls and
coils. Her face was a regular oval, like the opening in a wishbone. Her
skin was dark, but rich and dusky with life and red blood that ebbed
and flowed with her shyness. Her lips were full, and of a dark cherry
red. Her eyes were deep, rather musing, and furnished with the most
gloriously tangling of eyelashes. Dick went into ecstasies, took
several photographs which did not turn out well, and made one sketch
which did. Perpetually did he bewail the absence of oils. The type is
not uncommon, but its beauty rarely remains perfect after the fifteenth
year.

We made our ceremonious adieus to the Madame, and started back to town
under the guidance of one of the boys, who promised us a short cut.

This youth proved to be filled with the old, wandering spirit that
lures so many of his race into the wilderness life. He confided to us
as we walked that he liked to tramp extended distances, and that the
days were really not made long enough for those who had to return home
at night.

"I is been top of dose hills," he said. "Bime by I mak' heem go to dose
lak' beyon'."

He told us that some day he hoped to go out with the fur traders. In
his vocabulary "I wish" occurred with such wistful frequency that
finally I inquired curiously what use he would make of the Fairy Gift.

"If you could have just one wish come true, Pierre," I asked, "what
would you desire?"

His answer came without a moment's hesitation.

"I is lak' be one giant," said he.

"Why?" I demanded.

"So I can mak' heem de walk far," he replied simply.

I was tempted to point out to him the fact that big men do not outlast
the little men, and that vast strength rarely endures, but then a
better feeling persuaded me to leave him his illusions. The power, even
in fancy, of striding on seven-league boots across the fascinations
spread out below his kindling vision from "dose hills" was too precious
a possession lightly to be taken away.

Strangely enough, though his woodcraft naturally was not
inconsiderable, it did not hold his paramount interest. He knew
something about animals and their ways and their methods of capture,
but the chase did not appeal strongly to him, nor apparently did he
possess much skill along that line. He liked the actual physical
labour, the walking, the paddling, the tump-line, the camp-making, the
new country, the companionship of the wild life, the wilderness as a
whole rather than in any one of its single aspects as Fish Pond, Game
Preserve, Picture Gallery. In this he showed the true spirit of the
_voyageur_. I should confidently look to meet him in another ten
years--if threats of railroads spare the Far North so long--girdled
with the red sash, shod in silent moccasins, bending beneath the
portage load, trolling _Isabeau_ to the silent land somewhere
under the Arctic Circle. The French of the North have never been great
fighters nor great hunters, in the terms of the Anglo-Saxon
frontiersmen, but they have laughed in farther places.




XII.

THE RIVER.


At a certain spot on the North Shore--I am not going to tell you
where--you board one of the two or three fishing-steamers that collect
from the different stations the big ice-boxes of Lake Superior
whitefish. After a certain number of hours--I am not going to tell you
how many--your craft will turn in toward a semicircle of bold,
beautiful hills, that seem at first to be many less miles distant than
the reality, and at the last to be many more miles remote than is the
fact. From the prow you will make out first a uniform velvet green;
then the differentiation of many shades; then the dull neutrals of
rocks and crags; finally the narrow white of a pebble beach against
which the waves utter continually a rattling undertone. The steamer
pushes boldly in. The cool green of the water underneath changes to
gray. Suddenly you make out the bottom, as through a thick green glass,
and the big suckers and catfish idling over its riffled sands,
inconceivably far down through the unbelievably clear liquid. So
absorbed are you in this marvellous clarity that a slight, grinding jar
alone brings you to yourself. The steamer's nose is actually touching
the white strip of pebbles!

Now you can do one of a number of things. The forest slants down to
your feet in dwindling scrub, which half conceals an abandoned log
structure. This latter is the old Hudson's Bay post. Behind it is the
Fur Trail, and the Fur Trail will take you three miles to Burned Rock
Pool, where are spring water and mighty trout. But again, half a mile
to the left, is the mouth of the River. And the River meanders
charmingly through the woods of the flat country over numberless
riffles and rapids, beneath various steep gravel banks, until it sweeps
boldly under the cliff of the first high hill. There a rugged precipice
rises sheer and jagged and damp-dark to overhanging trees clinging to
the shoulder of the mountain. And precisely at that spot is a bend
where the water hits square, to divide right and left in whiteness, to
swirl into convolutions of foam, to lurk darkly for a moment on the
edge of tumult before racing away. And there you can stand hip-deep,
and just reach the eddy foam with a cast tied craftily of Royal
Coachman, Parmachenee Belle, and Montreal.

From that point you are with the hills. They draw back to leave wide
forest, but always they return to the River--as you would return season
after season were I to tell you how--throwing across your
woods-progress a sheer cliff forty or fifty feet high, shouldering you
incontinently into the necessity of fording to the other side. More and
more jealous they become as you penetrate, until at the Big Falls they
close in entirely, warning you that here they take the wilderness to
themselves. At the Big Falls anglers make their last camp. About the
fire they may discuss idly various academic questions--as to whether
the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the
legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether
it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by
sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above the Falls;
and so on.

These questions, as I have said, are merely academic. Your true angler
is a philosopher. Enough is to him worth fifteen courses, and if the
finite mind of man could imagine anything to be desired as an addition
to his present possessions on the River, he at least knows nothing of
it. Already he commands ten miles of water--swift, clear water--running
over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he
has forgotten what it means to guard his back cast. It is to be waded
in the riffles, so that he can cross from one shore to the other as the
mood suits him. One bank is apt to be precipitous, the other to stretch
away in a mile or so of the coolest, greenest, stillest primeval forest
to be imagined. Thus he can cut across the wide bends of the River,
should he so desire and should haste be necessary to make camp before
dark. And, last, but not least by any manner of means, there are trout.

I mean real trout--big fellows, the kind the fishers of little streams
dream of but awake to call Morpheus a liar, just as they are too polite
to call you a liar when you are so indiscreet as to tell them a few
plain facts. I have one solemnly attested and witnessed record of
twenty-nine inches, caught in running water. I saw a friend land on one
cast three whose aggregate weight was four and one half pounds. I
witnessed, and partly shared, an exciting struggle in which three fish
on three rods were played in the same pool at the same time. They
weighed just fourteen pounds. One pool, a backset, was known as the
Idiot's Delight, because any one could catch fish there. I have lain on
my stomach at the Burned Rock Pool and seen the great fish lying so
close together as nearly to cover the bottom, rank after rank of them,
and the smallest not under a half pound. As to the largest--well, every
true fisherman knows him!

So it came about for many years that the natural barrier interposed by
the Big Falls successfully turned the idle tide of anglers'
exploration. Beyond them lay an unknown country, but you had to climb
cruelly to see it, and you couldn't gain above what you already had in
any case. The nearest settlement was nearly sixty miles away, so even
added isolation had not its usual quickening effect on camper's effort.
The River is visited by few, anyway. An occasional adventurous steam
yacht pauses at the mouth, fishes a few little ones from the shallow
pools there, or a few big ones from the reefs, and pushes on. It never
dreams of sending an expedition to the interior. Our own people, and
two other parties, are all I know of who visit the River regularly. Our
camp-sites alone break the forest; our blazes alone continue the
initial short cut of the Fur Trail; our names alone distinguish the
various pools. We had always been satisfied to compromise with the
frowning Hills. In return for the delicious necks and points and forest
areas through which our clipped trails ran, we had tacitly respected
the mystery of the upper reaches.

This year, however, a number of unusual conditions changed our spirit.
I have perhaps neglected to state that our trip up to now had been a
rather singularly damp one. Of the first fourteen days twelve had been
rainy. This was only a slightly exaggerated sample for the rest of the
time. As a consequence we found the River filled even to the limit of
its freshet banks. The broad borders of stone beach between the
stream's edge and the bushes had quite disappeared; the riffles had
become rapids, and the rapids roaring torrents; the bends boiled
angrily with a smashing eddy that sucked air into pirouetting cavities
inches in depth. Plainly, fly-fishing was out of the question. No
self-respecting trout would rise to the surface of such a moil, or
abandon for syllabubs of tinsel the magnificent solidities of
ground-bait such a freshet would bring down from the hills. Also the
River was unfordable.

We made camp at the mouth and consulted together. Billy, the half-breed
who had joined us for the labour of a permanent camp, shook his head.

"I t'ink one week, ten day," he vouchsafed. "P'rhaps she go down den.
We mus' wait." We did not want to wait; the idleness of a permanent
camp is the most deadly in the world.

"Billy," said I, "have you ever been above the Big Falls?"

The half-breed's eyes flashed.

"Non," he replied simply. "Bâ, I lak' mak' heem firs' rate."

"All right, Billy; we'll do it."

The next day it rained, and the River went up two inches. The morning
following was fair enough, but so cold you could see your breath. We
began to experiment.

Now, this expedition had become a fishing vacation, so we had all the
comforts of home with us. When said comforts of home were laden into
the canoe, there remained forward and aft just about one square foot of
space for Billy and me, and not over two inches of freeboard for the
River. We could not stand up and pole; tracking with a tow-line was out
of the question, because there existed no banks on which to walk; the
current was too swift for paddling. So we knelt and poled. We knew it
before, but we had to be convinced by trial, that two inches of
freeboard will dip under the most gingerly effort. It did so. We
groaned, stepped out into ice-water up to our waists, and so began the
day's journey with fleeting reference to Dante's nethermost hell.

Next the shore the water was most of the time a little above our knees,
but the swirl of a rushing current brought an apron of foam to our
hips. Billy took the bow and pulled; I took the stern and pushed. In
places our combined efforts could but just counterbalance the strength
of the current. Then Billy had to hang on until I could get my shoulder
against the stern for a mighty heave, the few inches gain of which he
would guard as jealously as possible, until I could get into position
for another shove. At other places we were in nearly to our armpits,
but close under the banks where we could help ourselves by seizing
bushes.

Sometimes I lost my footing entirely and trailed out behind like a
streamer; sometimes Billy would be swept away, the canoe's bow would
swing down-stream, and I would have to dig my heels and hang on until
he had floundered upright. Fortunately for our provisions, this never
happened to both at the same time. The difficulties were still further
complicated by the fact that our feet speedily became so numb from the
cold that we could not feel the bottom, and so were much inclined to
aimless stumblings. By-and-by we got out and kicked trees to start the
circulation. In the meantime the sun had retired behind thick, leaden
clouds.

At the First Bend we were forced to carry some fifty feet. There the
River rushed down in a smooth apron straight against the cliff, where
its force actually raised the mass of water a good three feet higher
than the level of the surrounding pool. I tied on a bait-hook, and two
cartridges for sinkers, and in fifteen minutes had caught three trout,
one of which weighed three pounds, and the others two pounds and a
pound and a half respectively. At this point Dick and Deuce, who had
been paralleling through the woods, joined us. We broiled the trout,
and boiled tea, and shivered as near the fire as we could. That
afternoon, by dint of labour and labour, and yet more labour, we
made Burned Rock, and there we camped for the night, utterly
beaten out by about as hard a day's travel as a man would want to
undertake.

The following day was even worse, for as the natural bed of the River
narrowed, we found less and less footing and swifter and swifter water.
The journey to Burned Rock had been a matter of dogged hard work; this
was an affair of alertness, of taking advantage of every little eddy,
of breathless suspense during long seconds while the question of
supremacy between our strength and the stream's was being debated. And
the thermometer must have registered well towards freezing. Three times
we were forced to cross the River in order to get even precarious
footing. Those were the really doubtful moments. We had to get in
carefully, to sit craftily, and to paddle gingerly and firmly, without
attempting to counteract the downward sweep of the current. All our
energies and care were given to preventing those miserable curling
little waves from over-topping our precious two inches, and that
miserable little canoe from departing even by a hair's-breadth from the
exactly level keel. Where we were going did not matter. After an
interminable interval the tail of our eyes would catch the sway of
bushes near at hand.

"Now," Billy would mutter abstractedly.

With one accord we would arise from six inches of wet and step swiftly
into the River. The lightened canoe would strain back; we would brace
our legs. The traverse was accomplished.

[Illustration: WATCHED THE LONG NORTH COUNTRY TWILIGHT STEAL UP LIKE A
GRAY CLOUD FROM THE EAST.]

Being thus under the other bank, I would hold the canoe while Billy,
astraddle the other end for the purpose of depressing the water to
within reach of his hand, would bail away the consequences of our
crossing. Then we would make up the quarter of a mile we had lost.

We quit at the Organ Pool about three o'clock of the afternoon. Not
much was said that evening.

The day following we tied into it again. This time we put Dick and
Deuce on an old Indian trail that promised a short cut, with
instructions to wait at the end of it. In the joyous anticipation of
another wet day we forgot they had never before followed an Indian
trail. Let us now turn aside to the adventures of Dick and Deuce.

Be it premised here that Dick is a regular Indian of taciturnity when
it becomes a question of his own experience, so that for a long time we
knew of what follows but the single explanatory monosyllable which you
shall read in due time. But Dick has a beloved uncle. In moments of
expansion to this relative after his return he held forth as to the
happenings of that morning.

Dick and the setter managed the Indian trail for about twenty rods.
They thought they managed it for perhaps twice that distance. Then it
became borne in on them that the bushes went back, the faint
knife-clippings, and the half weather-browned brush-cuttings that alone
constitute an Indian trail had taken another direction, and that they
had now their own way to make through the forest. Dick knew the
direction well enough, so he broke ahead confidently. After a
half-hour's walk he crossed a tiny streamlet. After another half-hour's
walk he came to another. It was flowing the wrong way.

Dick did not understand this. He had never known of little streams
flowing away from rivers and towards eight-hundred-foot hills. This
might be a loop, of course. He resolved to follow it up-stream far
enough to settle the point. The following brought him in time to a
soggy little thicket with three areas of moss-covered mud and two
round, pellucid pools of water about a foot in diameter. As the little
stream had wound and twisted, Dick had by now lost entirely his sense
of direction. He fished out his compass and set it on a rock. The River
flows nearly north-east to the Big Falls, and Dick knew himself to be
somewhere east of the River. The compass appeared to be wrong. Dick was
a youth of sense, so he did not quarrel with the compass; he merely
became doubtful as to which was the north end of the needle--the white
or the black. After a few moments' puzzling he was quite at sea, and
could no more remember how he had been taught as to this than you can
clinch the spelling of a doubtful word after you have tried on paper a
dozen variations. But being a youth of sense he did not desert the
streamlet.

After a short half-mile of stumbling the apparent wrong direction in
the brook's bed, he came to the River. The River was also flowing the
wrong way, and uphill. Dick sat down and covered his eyes with his
hands, as I had told him to do in like instance, and so managed to
swing the country around where it belonged.

Now here was the River--and Dick resolved to desert it for no more
short cuts--but where was the canoe?

This point remained unsettled in Dick's mind, or rather it was
alternately settled in two ways. Sometimes the boy concluded we must be
still below him, so he would sit on a rock to wait. Then, after a few
moments, inactivity would bring him panic. The canoe must have passed
this point long since, and every second he wasted stupidly sitting on
that stone separated him farther from his friends and from food. Then
he would tear madly through the forest. Deuce enjoyed this game, but
Dick did not.

In time Dick found his farther progress along the banks cut off by a
hill. The hill ended abruptly at the water's edge in a sheer rock cliff
thirty feet high. This was in reality the end of the Indian trail short
cut--the point where Dick was to meet us--but he did not know it. He
happened for the moment to be obsessed by one of his canoe up-stream
panics, so he turned inland to a spot where the hill appeared
climbable, and started in to surmount the obstruction.

This was comparatively easy at first. Then the shoulder of the cliff
intervened. Dick mounted still a little higher up the hill, then
higher, then still higher. Far down to his left, through the trees,
broiled the River. The slope of the hill to it had become steeper than
a roof, and at the edge of the eaves came a cliff drop of thirty feet.
Dick picked his way gingerly over curving moss-beds, assisting his
balance by a number of little cedar trees. Then something happened.

Dick says the side of the hill slid out from under him. The fact of the
matter is, probably, the skin-moss over loose rounded stones gave way.
Dick sat down and began slowly to bump down the slant of the roof. He
never really lost his equilibrium, nor until the last ten feet did he
abandon the hope of checking his descent. Sometimes he did actually
succeed in stopping himself for a moment; but on his attempting to
follow up the advantage, the moss always slipped or the sapling let go
a tenuous hold and he continued on down. At last the River flashed out
below him. He saw the sheer drop. He saw the boiling eddies of the
Halfway Pool, capable of sucking down a saw-log. Then, with a final
rush of loose round stones, he shot the chutes feet first into space.

In the meantime Billy and I repeated our experience of the two previous
days, with a few variations caused by the necessity of passing two
exceptionally ugly rapids whose banks left little footing. We did this
precariously, with a rope. The cold water was beginning to tell on our
vitality, so that twice we went ashore and made hot tea. Just below the
Halfway Pool we began to do a little figuring ahead, which is a bad
thing. The Halfway Pool meant much inevitable labour, with its two
swift rapids and its swirling, eddies, as sedulously to be avoided as
so many steel bear-traps. Then there were a dozen others, and the three
miles of riffles, and all the rest of it. At our present rate it would
take us a week to make the Falls. Below the Halfway Pool we looked for
Dick. He was not to be seen. This made us cross. At the Halfway Pool we
intended to unload for portage, and also to ferry over Dick and the
setter in the lightened canoe. The tardiness of Dick delayed the game.

However, we drew ashore to the little clearing of the Halfway Camp,
made the year before, and wearily discharged our cargo. Suddenly,
upstream, and apparently up in the air, we heard distinctly the excited
yap of a dog. Billy and I looked at each other. Then we looked
upstream.

Close under the perpendicular wall of rock, and fifty feet from the end
of it, waist deep in water that swirled angrily about him, stood Dick.

I knew well enough what he was standing on--a little ledge of shale not
over five or six feet in length and two feet wide--for in lower water I
had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But
I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was
impossible to wade to the spot, impossible to swim to it. And why in
the name of all the woods gods would a man want to wade or swim to it
if he could? The affair, to our cold-benumbed intellects, was simply
incomprehensible.

Billy and I spoke no word. We silently, perhaps a little fearfully,
launched the empty canoe. Then we went into a space of water whose
treading proved us no angels. From the slack water under the cliff we
took another look. It was indeed Dick. He carried a rod-case in one
hand. His fish-creel lay against his hip. His broad hat sat accurately
level on his head. His face was imperturbable. Above, Deuce agonized,
afraid to leap into the stream, but convinced that his duty required
him to do so.

We steadied the canoe while Dick climbed in. You would have thought he
was embarking at the regularly appointed rendezvous. In silence we shot
the rapids, and collected Deuce from the end of the trail, whither he
followed us. In silence we worked our way across to where our duffel
lay scattered. In silence we disembarked.

"In Heaven's name, Dick," I demanded at last, "how did you get
_there_?"

"Fell," said he, succinctly. And that was all.




XIII.

THE HILLS.


We explained carefully to Dick that he had lit on the only spot in the
Halfway Pool where the water was at once deep enough to break his fall
and not too deep to stand in. We also pointed out that he had escaped
being telescoped or drowned by the merest hair's-breadth. From this we
drew moral conclusions. It did us good, but undoubtedly Dick knew it
already.

Now we gave our attention to the wetness of garments, for we were
chilled blue. A big fire and a clothes-rack of forked sticks and a
sapling, an open-air change, a lunch of hot tea and trout and cold
galette and beans, a pipe--and then the inevitable summing up.

We had in two and a half days made the easier half of the distance to
the Falls. At this rate we would consume a week or more in reaching the
starting-point of our explorations. It was a question whether we could
stand a week of ice-water and the heavy labour combined. Ordinarily we
might be able to abandon the canoe and push on afoot, as we were
accustomed to do when trout-fishing, but that involved fording the
river three times--a feat manifestly impossible in present freshet
conditions.

"I t'ink we quit heem," said Billy.

But then I was seized with an inspiration. Judging by the configuration
of the hills, the River bent sharply above the Falls. Why would it not
be possible to cut loose entirely at this point, to strike across
through the forest, and so to come out on the upper reaches? Remained
only the probability of our being able, encumbered by a pack, to scale
the mountains.

"Billy," said I, "have you ever been over in those hills?".

"No," said he.

"Do you know anything about the country? Are there any trails?"

"Dat countree is belong Tawabinisáy. He know heem. I don' know heem. I
t'ink he is have many hills, some lak'."

"Do you think we can climb those hills with packs?"

Billy cast a doubtful glance on Dick. Then his eye lit up.

"Tawabinisáy is tell me 'bout dat Lak' Kawágama. P'rhaps we fine heem."

In so saying Billy decided the attempt. What angler on the River has
not discussed--again idly, again academically--that mysterious Lake
alive with the burnished copper trout, lying hidden and wonderful in
the high hills, clear as crystal, bottomed with gravel like a fountain,
shaped like a great crescent whose curves were haunted of forest trees
grim and awesome with the solemnity of the primeval? That its exact
location was known to Tawabinisáy alone, that the trail to it was
purposely blinded and muddled with the crossing of many little ponds,
that the route was laborious--all those things, along with the minor
details so dear to winter fire-chats, were matters of notoriety.
Probably more expeditions to Kawágama have been planned--in
February--than would fill a volume with an account of anticipated
adventures. Only, none of them ever came off. We were accustomed to
gaze at the forbidden cliff ramparts of the hills, to think of the
Idiot's Delight, and the Halfway Pool, and the Organ Pool, and the
Burned Rock Pool, and the Rolling Stone Pool, and all the rest of them
even up to the Big Falls; and so we would quietly allow our February
plannings to lapse. One man Tawabinisáy had honoured. But this man,
named Clement, a banker from Peoria, had proved unworthy. Tawabinisáy
told how he caught trout, many, many trout, and piled them on the
shores of Kawágama to defile the air. Subsequently this same
"sportsman" buried another big catch on the beach of Superior. These
and other exploits finally earned him his exclusion from the delectable
land. I give his name because I have personally talked with his guides,
and heard their circumstantial accounts of his performances. Unless
three or four woodsmen are fearful liars, I do Mr. Clement no
injustice.

Since then Tawabinisáy had hidden himself behind his impenetrable grin.

So you can easily see that the discovery of Kawágama would be a feat
worthy even high hills.

That afternoon we rested and made our cache. A cache in the forest
country is simply a heavily constructed rustic platform on which
provisions and clothing are laid and wrapped completely about in sheets
of canoe bark tied firmly with strips of cedar bark, or withes made
from a bush whose appearance I know well, but whose name I cannot say.
In this receptacle we left all our canned goods, our extra clothing,
and our Dutch oven. We retained for transportation some pork, flour,
rice, baking-powder, oatmeal, sugar, and tea, cooking utensils,
blankets, the tent, fishing-tackle, and the little pistol. As we were
about to go into the high country where presumably both game and fish
might lack, we were forced to take a full supply for four--counting
Deuce as one--to last ten days. The packs counted up about one hundred
and fifteen pounds of grub, twenty pounds of blankets, ten of tent, say
eight or ten of hardware including the axe, about twenty of duffel.
This was further increased by the idiosyncrasy of Billy. He, like most
woodsmen, was wedded to a single utterly foolish article of personal
belonging, which he worshipped as a fetish, and without which he was
unhappy. In his case it was a huge winter overcoat that must have
weighed fifteen pounds. The total amounted to about one hundred and
ninety pounds. We gave Dick twenty, I took seventy-six, and Billy
shouldered the rest.

The carrying we did with the universal tump-line. This is usually
described as a strap passed about a pack and across the forehead of the
bearer. The description is incorrect. It passes across the top of the
head. The weight should rest on the small of the back just above the
hips--not on the broad of the back as most beginners place it. Then the
chin should be dropped, the body slanted sharply forward, and you may
be able to stagger forty rods at your first attempt.

Use soon accustoms you to carrying, however. The first time I ever did
any packing I had a hard time stumbling a few hundred feet over a hill
portage with just fifty pounds on my back. By the end of that same trip
I could carry a hundred pounds and a lot of miscellaneous traps, like
canoe-poles and guns, without serious inconvenience and over a long
portage. This quickly-gained power comes partly from a strengthening of
the muscles of the neck, but more from a mastery of balance. A pack can
twist you as suddenly and expertly on your back as the best of
wrestlers. It has a head lock on you, and you have to go or break your
neck. After a time you adjust your movements, just as after a time you
can travel on snow-shoes through heavy down timber without taking
conscious thought as to the placing of your feet.

But at first packing is as near infernal punishment as merely mundane
conditions can compass. Sixteen brand-new muscles ache, at first dully,
then sharply, then intolerably, until it seems you cannot bear it
another second. You are unable to keep your feet. A stagger means an
effort at recovery, and an effort at recovery means that you trip when
you place your feet, and that means, if you are lucky enough not to be
thrown, an extra tweak for every one of the sixteen new muscles. At
first you rest every time you feel tired. Then you begin to feel very
tired every fifty feet. Then you have to do the best you can, and prove
the pluck that is in you.

Mr. Tom Friant, an old woodsman of wide experience, has often told me
with relish of his first try at carrying. He had about sixty pounds,
and his companion double that amount. Mr. Friant stood it a few
centuries and then sat down. He couldn't have moved another step if a
gun had been at his ear.

"What's the matter?" asked his companion.

"Del," said Friant, "I'm all in. I can't navigate. Here's where I
quit."

"Can't you carry her any farther?"

"Not an inch."

"Well, pile her on. I'll carry her for you."

Friant looked at him a moment in silent amazement.

"Do you mean to say that you are going to carry your pack and mine
too?"

"That's what I mean to say. I'll do it if I have to."

Friant drew a long breath.

"Well," said he at last, "if a little sawed-off cuss like you can
wiggle under a hundred and eighty, I guess I can make it under sixty."

"That's right," said Del imperturbably. "_If you think you can, you
can_."

"And I did," ends Friant, with a chuckle.

Therein lies the whole secret. The work is irksome, sometimes even
painful, but if you think you can do it, you can, for though great is
the protest of the human frame against what it considers abuse, greater
is the power of a man's grit.

We carried the canoe above the larger eddies, where we embarked
ourselves and our packs for traverse, leaving Deuce under strict
command to await a second trip. Deuce disregarded the strict command.
From disobedience came great peril, for when he attempted to swim
across after us he was carried downstream, involved in a whirlpool,
sucked under, and nearly drowned. We could do nothing but watch. When,
finally, the River spued out a frightened and bedraggled dog, we drew a
breath of very genuine relief, for Deuce was dear to us through much
association.

The canoe we turned bottom up and left in the bushes, and so we set off
through the forest.

At the end of fifteen minutes we began to mount a gentle ascent. The
gentle ascent speedily became a sharp slope, the sharp slope an abrupt
hill, and the latter finally an almost sheer face of rock and thin
soil. We laid hold doggedly of little cedars; we dug our fingers into
little crevices, and felt for the same with our toes; we perspired in
streams and breathed in gasps; we held the strained muscles of our
necks rigid, for the twisting of a pack meant here a dangerous fall; we
flattened ourselves against the face of the mountain with always the
heavy, ceaseless pull of the tump-line attempting to tear us backward
from our holds. And so at last, when the muscles of our thighs refused
to strengthen our legs for the ascent of another foot, we would turn
our backs to the slant and sink gratefully into the only real luxury in
the world.

For be it known that real luxury cannot be bought; it must be worked
for. I refer to luxury as the exquisite savour of a pleasant sensation.
The keenest sense-impressions are undoubtedly those of contrast. In
looking back over a variety of experience, I have no hesitation at all
in selecting as the moment in which I have experienced the liveliest
physical pleasure one hot afternoon in July. The thermometer might have
stood anywhere. We would have placed childlike trust in any of its
statements, even three figures great. Our way had led through unbroken
forest oppressed by low brush and an underfooting of brakes. There had
been hills. Our clothes were wringing wet, to the last stitch; even the
leather of the tump-line was saturated. The hot air we gulped down did
not seem to satisfy our craving for oxygen any more than lukewarm water
ever seems to cut a real thirst. The woods were literally like an oven
in their hot dryness. Finally we skirted a little hill, and at the base
of that hill a great tree had fallen, and through the aperture thus
made in the forest a tiny current of cool air flowed like a stream. It
was not a great current, nor a wide; if we moved three feet in any
direction, we were out of it. But we sat us down directly across its
flow. And never have dinners or wines or men or women, or talks of
books or scenery or adventure or sport, or the softest, daintiest
refinements of man's invention given me the half of luxury I drank in
from that little breeze. So the commonest things--a dash of cool water
on the wrists, a gulp of hot tea, a warm, dry blanket, a whiff of
tobacco, a ray of sunshine--are more really the luxuries than all the
comforts and sybaritisms we buy. Undoubtedly the latter would also rise
to the higher category if we were to work for their essence instead of
merely signing club cheques or paying party calls for them.

Which means that when we three would rest our packs against the side of
that hill, and drop our head-straps below our chins, we were not at all
to be pitied, even though the forest growth denied us the encouragement
of knowing how much farther we had to go.

Before us the trees dropped away rapidly, so that twenty feet out in a
straight line we were looking directly into their tops. There, quite on
an equality with their own airy estate, we could watch the fly-catchers
and warblers conducting their small affairs of the chase. It lent us
the illusion of imponderability; we felt that we too might be able to
rest securely on graceful gossamer twigs. And sometimes, through a
chance opening, we could see down over billows of waving leaves to a
single little spot of blue, like a turquoise sunk in folds of green
velvet, which meant that the River was dropping below us. This, in the
mercy of the Red Gods, was meant as encouragement.

The time came, however, when the ramparts we scaled rose sheer and bare
in impregnability. Nothing could be done on the straight line, so we
turned sharp to the north. The way was difficult, for it lay over great
fragments of rock stricken from the cliff by winter, and further
rendered treacherous by the moss and wet by a thousand trickles of
water. At the end of one hour we found what might be called a ravine,
if you happened not to be particular, or a steep cleft in the precipice
if you were. Here we deserted the open air for piled-up brushy tangles,
many sharp-cornered rock fragments, and a choked streamlet. Finally the
whole outfit abruptly ceased. We climbed ten feet of crevices and stood
on the ridge.

The forest trees shut us in our own little area, so that we were for
the moment unable to look abroad over the country.

The descent, abrupt where we had mounted, stretched away gently toward
the north and west. And on that slope, protected as it was from the
severer storms that sweep up the open valleys in winter, stood the most
magnificent primeval forest it has ever been my fortune to behold. The
huge maple, beech, and birch trees lifted column-like straight up to a
lucent green canopy, always twinkling and shifting in the wind and the
sunlight. Below grew a thin screen of underbrush, through which we had
no difficulty at all in pushing, but which threw about us face-high a
tender green partition. The effect was that of a pew in an
old-fashioned church, so that, though we shared the upper stillnesses,
a certain delightful privacy of our own seemed assured us. This privacy
we knew to be assured also to many creatures besides ourselves. On the
other side of the screen of broad leaves we sensed the presence of
life. It did not intrude on us, nor were we permitted to intrude on it.
But it was there. We heard it rustling, pattering, scrambling,
whispering, scurrying with a rush of wings. More subtly we felt it, as
one knows of a presence in a darkened room. By the exercise of
imagination and experience we identified it in its manifestations--the
squirrel, the partridge, the weasel, the spruce hens, once or twice the
deer. We knew it saw us perfectly, although we could not see it, and
that gave us an impression of companionship; so the forest was not
lonely.

Next to this double sense of isolation and company was the feeling of
transparent shadow. The forest was thick and cool. Only rarely did the
sun find an orifice in the roof through which to pour a splash of
liquid gold. All the rest was in shadow. But the shadow was that of the
bottom of the sea--cool, green, and, above all, transparent. We saw
into the depth of it, but dimly, as we would see into the green
recesses of a tropic ocean. It possessed the same liquid quality.
Finally the illusion overcame us completely. We bathed in the shadows
as though they were palpable, and from that came great refreshment.

Under foot the soil was springy with the mould of numberless autumns.
The axe had never hurried slow old servant decay. Once in a while we
came across a prostrate trunk lying in the trough of destruction its
fall had occasioned. But the rest of the time we trod a carpet to the
making of which centuries of dead forest warriors had wrapped
themselves in mould and soft moss and gentle dissolution. Sometimes a
faint rounded shell of former fair proportion swelled above the level,
to crumble to punkwood at the lightest touch of our feet. Or, again,
the simulacrum of a tree trunk would bravely oppose our path, only to
melt away into nothing, like the opposing phantoms of Aeneas, when we
placed a knee against it for the surmounting.

If the pine woods be characterized by cathedral solemnity, and the
cedars and tamaracks by certain horrifical gloom, and the popples by a
silvery sunshine, and the berry-clearings by grateful heat and the
homely manner of familiar birds, then the great hardwood must be known
as the dwelling-place of transparent shadows, of cool green lucency,
and the repository of immemorial cheerful forest tradition which the
traveller can hear of, but which he is never permitted actually to
know.

[Illustration: IN THIS LOVABLE MYSTERY WE JOURNEYED ALL THE REST OF
THAT MORNING.]

In this lovable mystery we journeyed all the rest of that morning. The
packs were heavy with the first day's weight, and we were tired from
our climb; but the deep physical joy of going on and ever on into
unknown valleys, down a long, gentle slope that must lead somewhere,
through things animate and things of an almost animate life, opening
silently before us to give us passage, and closing as silently behind
us after we had passed--these made us forget our aches and fatigues for
the moment.

At noon we boiled tea near a little spring of clear, cold water. As yet
we had no opportunity of seeing farther than the closing in of many
trees. We were, as far as external appearances went, no more advanced
than our first resting-place after surmounting the ridge. This effect
is constant in the great forests. You are in a treadmill--though a
pleasant one withal. Your camp of to-day differs only in non-essentials
from that of yesterday, and your camp of to-morrow will probably be
almost exactly like to-day's. Only when you reach your objective point
do you come to a full realization that you have not been the Sisyphus
of the Red Gods.

Deuce returning from exploration brought indubitable evidence of
porcupines. We picked the barbed little weapons from his face and nose
and tongue with much difficulty for ourselves and much pain for Deuce.
We offered consolation by voicing for his dumbness his undoubted
intention to avoid all future porcupines. Then we took up the afternoon
tramp.

Now at last through the trees appeared the gleam of water. Tawabinisáy
had said that Kawágama was the only lake in its district. We therefore
became quite excited at this sapphire promise. Our packs were thrown
aside, and like school-boys we raced down the declivity to the shore.




XIV.

ON WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS.


We found ourselves peering through the thicket at a little reed and
grass grown body of water a few acres in extent. A short detour to the
right led us to an outlet--a brook of width and dash that convinced us
the little pond was only a stopping-place in the stream, and not a
headwater as we had at first imagined. Then a nearer approach led us
past pointed tree-stumps exquisitely chiselled with the marks of teeth;
so we knew we looked, not on a natural pond, but on the work of
beavers.

I examined the dam more closely. It was a marvel of engineering skill
in the accuracy with which the big trees had been felled exactly along
the most effective lines, the efficiency of the filling in, and the
just estimate of the waste water to be allowed. We named the place
obviously Beaver Pond, resumed our packs, and pushed on.

Now I must be permitted to celebrate by a little the pluck of Dick. He
was quite unused to the tump-line, comparatively inexperienced in
woods-walking, and weighed but one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Yet
not once in the course of that trip did he bewail his fate. Towards the
close of this first afternoon I dropped behind to see how he was makin

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