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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

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen and PG
        Distributed Proofreaders


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Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen and PG
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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 making
it. The boy had his head down, his lips shut tight together, his legs
well straddled apart. As I watched he stumbled badly over the merest
twig.

"Dick," said I, "are you tired?"

"Yes," he confessed frankly.

"Can you make it another half-hour?"

"I guess so; I'll try."

At the end of the half-hour we dropped our packs. Dick had manifested
no impatience--not once had he even asked how nearly time was up--but
now he breathed a deep sigh of relief.

"I thought you were never going to stop," said he simply.

From Dick those words meant a good deal. For woods-walking differs as
widely from ordinary walking as trap-shooting from field-shooting. A
good pedestrian may tire very quickly in the forest. No two successive
steps are of the same length; no two successive steps fall on the same
quality of footing; no two successive steps are on the same level.
Those three are the major elements of fatigue. Add further the facts
that your way is continually obstructed both by real difficulties--such
as trees, trunks, and rocks--and lesser annoyances, such as branches,
bushes, and even spider-webs. These things all combine against
endurance. The inexperienced does not know how to meet them with a
minimum of effort. The tenderfoot is in a constant state of muscular
and mental rigidity against a fall or a stumble or a cut across the
face from some one of the infinitely numerous woods scourges. This
rigidity speedily exhausts the vital force.

So much for the philosophy of it. Its practical side might be
infinitely extended. Woodsmen are tough and enduring and in good
condition; but no more so than the average college athlete. Time and
again I have seen men of the latter class walked to a standstill. I
mean exactly that. They knew, and were justly proud, of their physical
condition, and they hated to acknowledge, even to themselves, that the
rest of us were more enduring. As a consequence they played on their
nerve, beyond their physical powers. When the collapse came it was
complete. I remember very well a crew of men turning out from a lumber
camp on the Sturgeon River to bring in on a litter a young fellow who
had given out while attempting to follow Bethel Bristol through a hard
day. Bristol said he dropped finally as though he had been struck on
the head. The woodsman had thereupon built him a little fire, made him
as comfortable as possible with both coats, and hiked for assistance. I
once went into the woods with a prominent college athlete. We walked
rather hard over a rough country until noon. Then the athlete lay on
his back for the rest of the day, while I finished alone the business
we had come on.

Now, these instances do not imply that Bristol, and certainly not
myself, were any stronger physically, or possessed more nervous force,
than the men we had tired out. Either of them on a road could have
trailed us, step for step, and as long as we pleased. But we knew the
game.

It comes at the last to be entirely a matter of experience. Any man can
walk in the woods all day at some gait. But his speed will depend on
his skill. It is exactly like making your way through heavy, dry sand.
As long as you restrain yourself to a certain leisurely plodding, you
get along without extraordinary effort, while even a slight increase of
speed drags fiercely at your feet. So it is with the woods. As long as
you walk slowly enough, so that you can pick your footing and lift
aside easily the branches that menace your face, you will expend little
nervous energy. But the slightest pressing, the slightest inclination
to go beyond what may be called your physical foresight, lands you
immediately in difficulties. You stumble, you break through the brush,
you shut your eyes to avoid sharp switchings. The reservoir of your
energy is open full cock. In about an hour you feel very, very tired.

This principle holds rigidly true of every one, from the softest
tenderfoot to the expertest forest-runner. For each there exists a
normal rate of travel, beyond which are penalties. Only, the
forest-runner, by long use, has raised the exponent of his powers.
Perhaps as a working hypothesis the following might be recommended:
_One good step is worth six stumbling steps; go only fast enough to
assure that good one._

You will learn, besides, a number of things practically which memory
cannot summon to order for instance here. "Brush slanted across your
path is easier lifted over your head and dropped behind you than pushed
aside," will do as an example.

A good woods-walker progresses without apparent hurry. I have followed
the disappearing back of Tawabinisáy when, as my companion elegantly
expressed it, "if you stopped to spit you got lost." Tawabinisáy
wandered through the forest, his hands in his pockets, humming a little
Indian hymn. And we were breaking madly along behind him with the
crashing of many timbers.

Of your discoveries probably one of the most impressive will be that in
the bright lexicon of woodscraft the word "mile" has been entirely left
out. To count by miles is a useless and ornamental elegance of
civilization. Some of us once worked hard all one day only to camp
three miles downstream from our resting-place of the night before. And
the following day we ran nearly sixty with the current. The space of
measured country known as a mile may hold you five minutes or five
hours from your destination. The Indian counts by time, and after a
little you follow his example. "Four miles to Kettle Portage" means
nothing. "Two hours to Kettle Portage" does. Only when an Indian tells
you two hours you would do well to count it as four.

Well, our trip practically amounted to seven days to nowhere; or
perhaps seven days to everywhere would be more accurate. It was all in
the high hills until the last day and a half, and generally in the
hardwood forests. Twice we intersected and followed for short distances
Indian trails, neither of which apparently had been travelled since the
original party that had made them. They led across country for greater
or lesser distances in the direction we wished to travel, and then
turned aside. Three times we blundered on little meadows of
moose-grass. Invariably they were tramped muddy like a cattle-yard
where the great animals had stood as lately as the night before.
Caribou were not uncommon. There were a few deer, but not many, for the
most of the deer country lies to the south of this our district.
Partridge, as we had anticipated, lacked in such high country.

In the course of the five days and a half we were in the hills we
discovered six lakes of various sizes. The smallest was a mere pond;
the largest would measure some three or four miles in diameter. We came
upon that very late one afternoon. A brook of some size crossed our
way, so, as was our habit, we promptly turned upstream to discover its
source. In the high country the head-waters are never more than a few
miles distant; and at the same time the magnitude of this indicated a
lake rather than a spring as the supply. The lake might be Kawágama.

Our packs had grown to be very heavy, for they had already the weight
of nine hours piled on top. And the stream was exceedingly difficult to
follow. It flowed in one of those aggravating little ravines whose
banks are too high and steep and uneven for good footing, and whose
beds are choked with a too abundant growth. In addition, there had
fallen many trees over which one had to climb. We kept at it for
perhaps an hour. The brook continued of the same size, and the country
of the same character. Dick for the first time suggested that it might
be well to camp.

"We've got good water here," he argued, quite justly, "and we can push
on to-morrow just as well as to-night."

We balanced our packs against a prostrate tree-trunk. Billy contributed
his indirect share to the argument.

"I lak' to have the job mak' heem this countree all over," he sighed.
"I mak' heem more level."

"All right," I agreed; "you fellows sit here and rest a minute, and
I'll take a whirl a little ways ahead."

I slipped my tump-line and started on light. After carrying a heavy
pack so long, I seemed to tread on air. The thicket, before so
formidable, amounted to nothing at all. Perhaps the consciousness that
the day's work was in reality over lent a little factitious energy to
my tired legs. At any rate, the projected two hundred feet of my
investigations stretched to a good quarter-mile. At the end of that
space I debouched on a widening of the ravine. The hardwood ran off
into cedars. I pushed through the stiff rods and yielding fans of the
latter, and all at once found myself leaning out over the waters of the
lake.

It was almost an exact oval, and lay in a cup of hills. Three wooded
islands, swimming like ducks in the placid evening waters, added a
touch of diversity. A huge white rock balanced the composition to the
left, and a single white sea-gull, like a snowflake against pines,
brooded on its top.

I looked abroad to where the perfect reflection of the hills confused
the shore line. I looked down through five feet of crystal water to
where pebbles shimmered in refraction. I noted the low rocks jutting
from the wood's shelter whereon one might stand to cast a fly. Then I
turned and yelled and yelled and yelled again at the forest.

Billy came through the brush, crashing in his haste. He looked long and
comprehendingly. Without further speech, we turned back to where Dick
was guarding the packs.

That youth we found profoundly indifferent.

"Kawágama," we cried, "a quarter-mile ahead."

He turned on us a lack-lustre eye.

"You going to camp here?" he inquired dully.

"Course not! We'll go on and camp at the lake."

"All right," he replied.

We resumed our packs, a little stiffly and reluctantly, for we had
tasted of woods-travel without them. At the lake we rested.

"Going to camp here?" inquired Dick.

We looked about, but noted that the ground under the cedars was
hummocky, and that the hardwood grew on a slope. Besides, we wanted to
camp as near the shore as possible. Probably a trifle further along
there would be a point of high land and delightful little
paper-birches.

"No," we answered cheerfully, "this isn't much good. Suppose we push
along a ways and find something better."

"All right," Dick replied.

We walked perhaps a half-mile more to the westward before we discovered
what we wanted, stopping from time to time to discuss the merits of
this or that place. Billy and I were feeling pretty good. After such a
week Kawágama was a tonic. Finally we agreed.

"This'll do," said we.

"Thank God!" said Dick unexpectedly, and dropped his pack to the ground
with a thud, and sat on it.

I looked at him closely. Then I undid my own pack. "Billy," said I,
"start in on grub. Never mind the tent just now."

"A' right," grinned Billy. He had been making his own observations.

"Dick," said I, "let's go down and sit on the rock over the water. We
might fish a little."

"All right," Dick replied.

He stumbled dully after me to the shore.

"Dick," I continued, "you're a kid, and you have high principles, and
your mother wouldn't like it, but I'm going to prescribe for you, and
I'm going to insist on your following the prescription. This flask does
not contain fly-dope--that's in the other flask--it contains whisky. I
have had it in my pack since we started, and it has not been opened. I
don't believe in whisky in the woods; not because I am temperance, but
because a man can't travel on it. But here is where you break your
heaven-born principles. Drink."

Dick hesitated, then he drank. By the time grub was ready his vitality
had come to normal, and so he was able to digest his food and get some
good out of it; otherwise he could not have done so. Thus he furnished
an admirable example of the only real use for whisky in woods-travel.
Also it was the nearest Dick ever came to being completely played out.

That evening was delightful. We sat on the rock and watched the long
North Country twilight steal up like a gray cloud from the east. Two
loons called to each other, now in the shrill maniac laughter, now with
the long, mournful cry. It needed just that one touch to finish the
picture. We were looking, had we but known it, on a lake no white man
had ever visited before. Clement alone had seen Kawágama, so in our
ignorance we attained much the same mental attitude. For I may as well
let you into the secret; this was not the fabled lake after all. We
found that out later from Tawabinisáy. But it was beautiful enough, and
wild enough, and strange enough in its splendid wilderness isolation to
fill the heart of the explorer with a great content.

Having thus, as we thought, attained the primary object of our
explorations, we determined on trying now for the second--that is, the
investigation of the upper reaches of the River. Trout we had not
accomplished at this lake, but the existence of fish of some sort was
attested by the presence of the two loons and the gull, so we laid our
non-success to fisherman's luck. After two false starts we managed to
strike into a good country near enough our direction. The travel was
much the same as before. The second day, however, we came to a
surveyor's base-line cut through the woods. Then we followed that as a
matter of convenience. The base-line, cut the fall before, was the only
evidence of man we saw in the high country. It meant nothing in itself,
but was intended as a starting-point for the township surveys, whenever
the country should become civilized enough to warrant them. That
condition of affairs might not occur for years to come. Therefore the
line was cut out clear for a width of twenty feet.

We continued along it as along a trail until we discovered our last
lake--a body of water possessing many radiating arms. This was the
nearest we came to the real Kawágama. If we had skirted the lake,
mounted the ridge, followed a creek-bed, mounted another ridge, and
descended a slope, we should have made our discovery. Later we did just
that, under the guidance of Tawabinisáy himself. Floating in the birch
canoe we carried with us we looked back at the very spot on which we
stood this morning.

But we turned sharp to the left, and so missed our chance. However, we
were in a happy frame of mind, for we imagined we had really made the
desired discovery.

Nothing of moment happened until we reached the valley of the River.
Then we found we were treed. We had been travelling all the time among
hills and valleys, to be sure, but on a high elevation. Even the bottom
lands, in which lay the lakes, were several hundred feet above
Superior. Now we emerged from the forest to find ourselves on bold
mountains at least seven or eight hundred feet above the main valley.
And in the main valley we could make out the River.

It was rather dizzy work. Three or four times we ventured over the
rounded crest of the hill, only to return after forty or fifty feet
because the slope had become too abrupt. This grew to be monotonous and
aggravating. It looked as though we might have to parallel the River's
course, like scouts watching an army, on the top of the hill. Finally a
little ravine gave us hope. We scrambled down it; ended in a very steep
slant, and finished at a sheer tangle of cedar-roots. The latter we
attempted. Billy went on ahead. I let the packs down to him by means of
a tump-line. He balanced them on roof; until I had climbed below him.
And so on. It was exactly like letting a bucket down a well. If one of
the packs had slipped off the cedar-roots, it would have dropped like a
plummet to the valley, and landed on Heaven knows what. The same might
be said of ourselves. We did this because we were angry all through.

Then we came to the end of the cedar-roots. Right and left offered
nothing; below was a sheer, bare drop. Absolutely nothing remained but
to climb back, heavy packs and all, to the top of the mountain. False
hopes had wasted a good half day and innumerable foot-pounds. Billy and
I saw red. We bowed our heads and snaked those packs to the top of the
mountain at a gait that ordinarily would have tired us out in fifty
feet. Dick did not attempt to keep up. When we reached the top we sat
down to wait for him. After a while he appeared, climbing leisurely. He
gazed on us from behind the mask of his Indian imperturbability. Then
he grinned. That did us good, for we all three laughed aloud, and
buckled down to business in a better frame of mind.

That day we discovered a most beautiful waterfall. A stream about
twenty feet in width, and with a good volume of water, dropped some
three hundred feet or more into the River. It was across the valley
from us, so we had a good view of its beauties. Our estimates of its
height were carefully made on the basis of some standing pine that grew
near its foot.

And then we entered a steep little ravine, and descended it with
misgivings to a cañon, and walked easily down the cañon to a slope that
took us by barely sensible gradations to a wooded plain. At six o'clock
we stood on the banks of the River, and the hills were behind us.

Of our down-stream travel there is little really to be said. We
established a number of facts--that the River dashes most scenically
from rapid to rapid, so that the stagnant pool theory is henceforth
untenable; that the hills get higher and wilder the farther you
penetrate to the interior, and their cliffs and rock-precipices bolder
and more naked; that there are trout in the upper reaches, but not so
large as in the lower pools; and, above all, that travel is not a joy
for ever.

For we could not ford the River above the Falls--it is too deep and
swift. As a consequence, we had often to climb, often to break through
the narrowest thicket strips, and once to feel our way cautiously along
a sunken ledge under a sheer rock cliff. That was Billy's idea. We came
to the sheer rock cliff after a pretty hard scramble, and we were most
loth to do the necessary climbing. Billy suggested that we might be
able to wade. As the pool below the cliff was black water and of
indeterminate depth, we scouted the idea. Billy, however, poked around
with a stick, and, as I have said, discovered a little ledge about a
foot and a half wide and about two feet and a half below the surface.
This was spectacular, but we did it. A slip meant a swim and the loss
of the pack. We did not happen to slip. Shortly after, we came to the
Big Falls, and so after further painful experiment descended joyfully
into known country.

The freshet had gone down, the weather had warmed, the sun shone, we
caught trout for lunch below the Big Falls; everything was lovely. By
three o'clock, after thrice wading the stream, we regained our
canoe--now at least forty feet from the water. We paddled across. Deuce
followed easily, where a week before he had been sucked down and nearly
drowned. We opened the cache and changed our very travel-stained
garments. We cooked ourselves a luxurious meal. We built a
friendship-fire. And at last we stretched our tired bodies full length
on balsam a foot thick, and gazed drowsily at the canvas-blurred moon
before sinking to a dreamless sleep.




XV.

ON WOODS INDIANS.


Far in the North dwell a people practically unknown to any but the
fur-trader and the explorer. Our information as to Mokis, Sioux,
Cheyennes Nez Percés, and indirectly many others, through the pages of
Cooper, Parkman, and allied writers, is varied enough, so that our
ideas of Indians are pretty well established. If we are romantic, we
hark back to the past and invent fairy-tales with ourselves anent the
Noble Red Man who has Passed Away. If we are severely practical, we
take notice of filth, vice, plug-hats, tin cans, and laziness. In fact,
we might divide all Indian concepts into two classes, following these
mental and imaginative bents. Then we should have quite simply and
satisfactorily the Cooper Indian and the Comic Paper Indian. It must be
confessed that the latter is often approximated by reality--and
everybody knows it. That the former is by no means a myth--at least in
many qualities--the average reader might be pardoned for doubting.

Some time ago I desired to increase my knowledge of the Woods Indians
by whatever others had accomplished. Accordingly I wrote to the
Ethnological Department at Washington asking what had been done in
regard to the Ojibways and Wood Crees north of Lake Superior. The
answer was "nothing."

And "nothing" is more nearly a comprehensive answer than at first you
might believe. Visitors at Mackinac, Traverse, Sault Ste. Marie, and
other northern resorts are besought at certain times of the year by
silent calico-dressed squaws to purchase basket and bark work. If the
tourist happens to follow these women for more wholesale examination of
their wares, he will be led to a double-ended Mackinaw-built
sailing-craft with red-dyed sails, half pulled out on the beach. In the
stern sit two or three bucks wearing shirts, jean trousers, and broad
black hats. Some of the oldest men may sport a patched pair of
moccasins or so, but most are conventional enough in clumsy shoes.
After a longer or shorter stay they hoist their red sails and drift
away toward some mysterious destination on the north shore. If the
buyer is curious enough and persistent enough, he may elicit the fact
that they are Ojibways.

Now, if this same tourist happens to possess a mildly venturesome
disposition, a sailing-craft, and a chart of the region, he will sooner
or later blunder across the dwelling-place of his silent vendors. At
the foot of some rarely-frequented bay he will come on a diminutive
village of small whitewashed log houses. It will differ from other
villages in that the houses are arranged with no reference whatever to
one another, but in the haphazard fashion of an encampment. Its
inhabitants are his summer friends. If he is of an insinuating address,
he may get a glimpse of their daily life. Then he will go away firmly
convinced that he knows quite a lot about the North Woods Indian.

And so he does. But this North Woods Indian is the Reservation Indian.
And in the North a Reservation Indian is as different from a Woods
Indian as a negro is from a Chinese.

Suppose, on the other hand, your tourist is unfortunate enough to get
left at some North Woods railway station where he has descended from
the transcontinental to stretch his legs, and suppose him to have
happened on a fur-town like Missináibie at the precise time when the
trappers are in from the wilds. Near the borders of the village he will
come upon a little encampment of conical tepees. At his approach the
women and children will disappear into inner darkness. A dozen
wolf-like dogs will rush out barking. Grave-faced men will respond
silently to his salutation.

These men, he will be interested to observe, wear still the deer or
moose skin moccasin--the lightest and easiest foot-gear for the woods;
bind their long hair with a narrow fillet, and their waists with a red
or striped worsted sash; keep warm under the blanket thickness of a
Hudson Bay capote; and deck their clothes with a variety of barbaric
ornament. He will see about camp weapons whose acquaintance he has made
only in museums, peltries of whose identification he is by no means
sure, and as matters of daily use--snow-shoes, bark canoes, bows and
arrows--what to him have been articles of ornament or curiosity.
To-morrow these people will be gone for another year, carrying with
them the results of the week's barter. Neither he nor his kind will see
them again, unless they too journey far into the Silent Places. But he
has caught a glimpse of the stolid mask of the Woods Indian, concerning
whom officially "nothing" is known.

In many respects the Woods Indian is the legitimate descendant of the
Cooper Indian. His life is led entirely in the forests; his subsistence
is assured by hunting, fishing, and trapping; his dwelling is the
wigwam, and his habitation the wide reaches of the wilderness lying
between Lake Superior and the Hudson Bay; his relation to humanity
confined to intercourse with his own people and acquaintance with the
men who barter for his peltries. So his dependence is not on the world
the white man has brought, but on himself and his natural environment.
Civilization has merely ornamented his ancient manner. It has given him
the convenience of cloth, of firearms, of steel traps, of iron kettles,
of matches; it has accustomed him to the luxuries of white
sugar--though he had always his own maple product--tea, flour, and
white man's tobacco. That is about all. He knows nothing of whisky. The
towns are never visited by him, and the Hudson's Bay Company will sell
him no liquor. His concern with you is not great, for he has little to
gain from you.

This people, then, depending on natural resources for subsistence, has
retained to a great extent the qualities of the early aborigines.

To begin with, it is distinctly nomadic. The great rolls of birch bark
to cover the pointed tepees are easily transported in the bottoms of
canoes, and the poles are quickly cut and put in place. As a
consequence, the Ojibway family is always on the move. It searches out
new trapping-grounds, new fisheries, it pays visits, it seems even to
enjoy travel for the sake of exploration. In winter a tepee of double
wall is built, whose hollow is stuffed with moss to keep out the cold;
but even that approximation of permanence cannot stand against the
slightest convenience. When an Indian kills, often he does not
transport his game to camp, but moves his camp to the vicinity of the
carcass. There are of these woods dwellers no villages, no permanent
clearings. The vicinity of a Hudson's Bay post is sometimes occupied
for a month or so during the summer, but that is all.

An obvious corollary of this is that tribal life does not consistently
obtain. Throughout the summer months, when game and fur are at their
poorest, the bands assemble, probably at the times of barter with the
traders. Then for the short period of the idling season they drift
together up and down the North Country streams, or camp for big
pow-wows and conjuring near some pleasant conflux of rivers. But when
the first frosts nip the leaves, the families separate to their
allotted trapping districts, there to spend the winter in pursuit of
the real business of life.

The tribe is thus split into many groups, ranging in numbers from
the solitary trapper, eager to win enough fur to buy him a wife, to a
compact little group of three or four families closely related in
blood. The most striking consequence is that, unlike other Indian
bodies politic, there are no regularly constituted and acknowledged
chiefs. Certain individuals gain a remarkable reputation and an equally
remarkable respect for wisdom, or hunting skill, or power of woodcraft,
or travel. These men are the so-called "old men" often mentioned in
Indian manifestoes, though age has nothing to do with the deference
accorded them. Tawabinisáy is not more than thirty-five years old;
Peter, our Hudson Bay Indian, is hardly more than a boy. Yet both are
obeyed implicitly by whomever they happen to be with; both lead the way
by river or trail; and both, where question arises, are sought in
advice by men old enough to be their fathers. Perhaps this is as good a
democracy as another.

The life so briefly hinted at in the foregoing lines inevitably
develops and fosters an expertness of woodcraft almost beyond belief.
The Ojibway knows his environment. The forest is to him so familiar in
each and every one of its numerous and subtle aspects that the
slightest departure from the normal strikes his attention at once. A
patch of brown shadow where green shadow should fall, a shimmering of
leaves where should be merely a gentle waving, a cross-light where the
usual forest growth should adumbrate, a flash of wings at a time of day
when feathered creatures ordinarily rest quiet--these, and hundreds of
others which you and I should never even guess at, force themselves as
glaringly on an Indian's notice as a brass band in a city street. A
white man _looks_ for game; an Indian sees it because it differs
from the forest.

That is, of course, a matter of long experience and lifetime habit.
Were it a question merely of this, the white man might also in time
attain the same skill. But the Indian is a better animal. His senses
are appreciably sharper than our own.

In journeying down the Kapúskasíng River, our Indians--who had come
from the woods to guide us--always saw game long before we did. They
would never point it out to us. The bow of the canoe would swing
silently in its direction, there to rest motionless until we indicated
we had seen something.

"Where is it, Peter?" I would whisper.

But Peter always remained contemptuously silent.

One evening we paddled directly into the eye of the setting sun
across a shallow little lake filled with hardly sunken boulders. There
was no current, and no breath of wind to stir the water into betraying
riffles. But invariably those Indians twisted the canoe into a new
course ten feet before we reached one of the obstructions, whose
existence our dazzled vision could not attest until they were actually
below us. They _saw_ those rocks, through the shimmer of the
surface glare.

Another time I discovered a small black animal lying flat on a point of
shale. Its head was concealed behind a boulder, and it was so far away
that I was inclined to congratulate myself on having differentiated it
from the shadow.

"What is it, Peter?" I asked.

Peter hardly glanced at it.

"Ninny-moósh" (dog), he replied.

Now we were a hundred miles south of the Hudson's Bay post, and two
weeks north of any other settlement. Saving a horse, a dog would be
about the last thing to occur to one in guessing at the identity of any
strange animal. This looked like a little black blotch, without form.
Yet Peter knew it. It was a dog, lost from some Indian hunting-party,
and mightily glad to see us.

The sense of smell, too, is developed to an extent positively uncanny
to us who have needed it so little. Your Woods Indian is always
sniffing, always testing the impressions of other senses by his
olfactories. Instances numerous and varied might be cited, but probably
one will do as well as a dozen. It once became desirable to kill a
caribou in country where the animals are not at all abundant.
Tawabinisáy volunteered to take Jim within shot of one. Jim describes
their hunt as the most wonderful bit of stalking he had ever seen. The
Indian followed the animal's tracks as easily as you or I could have
followed them over snow. He did this rapidly and certainly. Every once
in a while he would get down on all fours to sniff inquiringly at the
crushed herbage. Always on rising to his feet he would give the result
of his investigations. "Ah-téek [caribou] one hour."

And later, "Ah-téek half hour."

Or again, "Ah-téek quarter hour."

And finally, "Ah-téek over nex' hill."

And it was so.

In like manner, but most remarkable to us because the test of direct
comparison with our own sense was permitted us, was their acuteness of
hearing. Often while "jumping" a roaring rapids in two canoes, my
companion and I have heard our men talking to each other in quite an
ordinary tone of voice. That is to say, I could hear my Indian, and Jim
could hear his; but personally we were forced to shout loudly to carry
across the noise of the stream. The distant approach of animals they
announce accurately.

"Wawashkeshí" (deer), says Peter.

And sure enough, after an interval, we too could distinguish the
footfalls on the dry leaves.

As both cause and consequence of these physical endowments--which place
them nearly on a parity with the game itself--they are most expert
hunters. Every sportsman knows the importance--and also the
difficulty--of discovering game before it discovers him. The Indian has
here an immense advantage. And after game is discovered, he is
furthermore most expert in approaching it with all the refined art of
the still hunter.

Mr. Caspar Whitney describes in exasperation his experience with the
Indians of the Far North-West. He complains that when they blunder on
game they drop everything and enter into almost hopeless chase, two
legs against four. Occasionally the quarry becomes enough bewildered so
that the wild shooting will bring it down. He quite justly argues that
the merest pretence at caution in approach would result in much greater
success.

The Woods Indian is no such fool. He is a mighty poor shot--and he
knows it. Personally I believe he shuts both eyes before pulling
trigger. He is armed with a long flint or percussion lock musket, whose
gas-pipe barrel is bound to the wood that runs its entire length by
means of brass bands, and whose effective range must be about ten
yards. This archaic implement is known as a "trade gun" and has the
single merit of never getting out of order. Furthermore ammunition is
precious. In consequence, the wilderness hunter is not going to be
merely pretty sure; he intends to be absolutely certain. If he cannot
approach near enough to blow a hole in his prey, he does not fire.

I have seen Peter drop into marsh-grass so thin that apparently we
could discern the surface of the ground through it, and disappear so
completely that our most earnest attention could not distinguish even a
rustling of the herbage. After an interval his gun would go off from
some distant point, exactly where some ducks had been feeding serenely
oblivious to fate. Neither of us white men would have considered for a
moment the possibility of getting any of them. Once I felt rather proud
of myself for killing six ruffed grouse out of some trees with the
pistol, until Peter drifted in carrying three he had bagged with a
stick.

Another interesting phase of this almost perfect correspondence to
environment is the readiness with which an Indian will meet an
emergency. We are accustomed to rely first of all on the skilled labour
of some one we can hire; second, if we undertake the job ourselves, on
the tools made for us by skilled labour; and third, on the shops to
supply us with the materials we may need. Not once in a lifetime are we
thrown entirely on our own resources. Then we improvise bunglingly a
makeshift.

The Woods Indian possesses his knife and his light axe. Nails, planes,
glue, chisels, vices, cord, rope, and all the rest of it he has to do
without. But he never improvises makeshifts. No matter what the
exigency or how complicated the demand, his experience answers with
accuracy.

Utensils and tools he knows exactly where to find. His job is neat and
workmanlike, whether it is a bark receptacle--water-tight or not--a
pair of snow-shoes, the repairing of a badly-smashed canoe, the
construction of a shelter, or the fashioning of a paddle. About noon
one day Tawabinisáy broke his axe-helve square off. This to us would
have been a serious affair. Probably we should, left to ourselves, have
stuck in some sort of a rough straight sapling handle which would have
answered well enough until we could have bought another. By the time we
had cooked dinner that Indian had fashioned another helve. We compared
it with the store article. It was as well shaped, as smooth, as nicely
balanced. In fact, as we laid the new and the old side by side, we
could not have selected, from any evidence of the workmanship, which
had been made by machine and which by hand. Tawabinisáy then burned out
the wood from the axe, retempered the steel, set the new helve, and
wedged it neatly with ironwood wedges. The whole affair, including the
cutting of the timber, consumed perhaps half an hour.

To travel with a Woods Indian is a constant source of delight on this
account. So many little things that the white man does without, because
he will not bother with their transportation, the Indian makes for
himself. And so quickly and easily! I have seen a thoroughly
waterproof, commodious, and comfortable bark shelter made in about the
time it would take one to pitch a tent. I have seen a raft built of
cedar logs and cedar bark ropes in an hour. I have seen a badly-stove
canoe made as good as new in fifteen minutes. The Indian rarely needs
to hunt for the materials he requires. He knows exactly where they
grow, and he turns as directly to them as a clerk would turn to his
shelves. No problem of the living of physical life is too obscure to
have escaped his varied experience. You may travel with Indians for
years, and learn something new and delightful as to how to take care of
yourself every summer.

The qualities I have mentioned come primarily from the fact that the
Woods Indian is a hunter. I have now to instance two whose development
can be traced to the other fact--that he is a nomad. I refer to his
skill with the bark canoe and his ability to carry.

I was once introduced to a man at a little way station of the Canadian
Pacific Railway in the following words:--

"Shake hands with Munson; he's as good a canoeman as an Indian."

A little later one of the bystanders remarked to me:--

"That fellow you was just talking with is as good a canoeman as an
Injun."

Still later, at an entirely different place, a member of the bar
informed me, in the course of discussion:--

"The only man I know of who can do it is named Munson. He is as good a
canoeman as an Indian."

At the time this unanimity of praise puzzled me a little. I thought I
had seen some pretty good canoe work, and even cherished a mild conceit
that occasionally I could keep right side up myself. I knew Munson to
be a great woods-traveller, with many striking qualities, and why this
of canoemanship should be so insistently chosen above the others was
beyond my comprehension. Subsequently a companion and I journeyed to
Hudson Bay with two birch canoes and two Indians. Since that trip I
have had a vast respect for Munson.

Undoubtedly among the half-breed and white guides of Lower Canada,
Maine, and the Adirondacks are many skilful men. But they know their
waters; they follow a beaten track. The Woods Indian--well, let me tell
you something of what he does.

We went down the Kapúskasíng River to the Mattágami, and then down that
to the Moose. These rivers are at first but a hundred feet or so wide,
but rapidly swell with the influx of numberless smaller streams. Two
days' journey brings you to a watercourse nearly half a mile in
breadth; two weeks finds you on a surface approximately a mile and a
half across. All this water descends from the Height of Land to the sea
level. It does so through a rock country. The result is a series of
roaring, dashing boulder rapids and waterfalls that would make your
hair stand on end merely to contemplate from the banks.

The regular route to Moose Factory is by the Missinaíbie. Our way was
new and strange. No trails; no knowledge of the country. When we came
to a stretch of white water, the Indians would rise to their feet for a
single instant's searching examination of the stretch of tumbled water
before them. In that moment they picked the passage they were to follow
as well as a white man could have done so in half an hour's study. Then
without hesitation they shot their little craft at the green water.

From that time we merely tried to sit still, each in his canoe. Each
Indian did it all with his single paddle. He seemed to possess absolute
control over his craft.

Even in the rush of water which seemed to hurry us on at almost
railroad speed, he could stop for an instant, work directly sideways,
shoot forward at a slant, swing either his bow or his stern. An error
in judgment or in the instantaneous acting upon it meant a hit; and a
hit in these savage North Country Rivers meant destruction. How my man
kept in his mind the passage he had planned during his momentary
inspection was always to me a miracle. How he got so unruly a beast as
the birch canoe to follow it in that tearing volume of water was always
another. Big boulders he dodged, eddies he took advantage of, slants of
current he utilized. A fractional second of hesitation could not be
permitted him. But always the clutching of white hands from the rip at
the eddy finally conveyed to my spray-drenched faculties that the rapid
was safely astern. And this, mind you, in strange waters.

Occasionally we would carry our outfit through the woods, while the
Indians would shoot some especially bad water in the light canoe. As a
spectacle nothing could be finer. The flash of the yellow bark, the
movement of the broken waters, the gleam of the paddle, the tense
alertness of the men's figures, their carven, passive faces, with the
contrast of the flashing eyes and the distended nostrils, then the leap
into space over some half-cataract, the smash of spray, the exultant
yells of the canoemen! For your Indian enjoys the game thoroughly. And
it requires very bad water indeed to make him take to the brush.

This is, of course, the spectacular. But also in the ordinary gray
business of canoe travel the Woods Indian shows his superiority. He is
tireless, and composed as to wrist and shoulder of a number of
whale-bone springs. From early dawn to dewy eve, and then a few
gratuitous hours into the night, he will dig energetic holes in the
water with his long, narrow blade. And every stroke counts. The water
boils out in a splotch of white air-bubbles, the little suction holes
pirouette like dancing-girls, the fabric of the craft itself trembles
under the power of the stroke. Jim and I used, in the lake stretches,
to amuse ourselves--and probably the Indians--by paddling in furious
rivalry one against the other. Then Peter would make up his mind he
would like to speak to Jacob. His canoe would shoot up alongside as
though the Old Man of the Lake had laid his hand across its stern.
Would I could catch that trick of easy, tireless speed! I know it lies
somewhat in keeping both elbows always straight and stiff, in a lurch
forward of the shoulders at the end of the stroke. But that, and more!
Perhaps one needs a copper skin and beady black eyes with surface
lights.

Nor need you hope to pole a canoe upstream as do these people.
Tawabinisáy uses two short poles, one in either hand, kneels amidships,
and snakes that little old canoe of his upstream so fast that you would
swear the rapids an easy matter--until you tried them yourself. We were
once trailed up a river by an old Woods Indian and his interesting
family. The outfit consisted of canoe Number One--_item_, one old
Injin, one boy of eight years, one dog; canoe Number Two--_item_,
one old Injin squaw, one girl of eighteen or twenty, one dog; canoe
Number Three--_item_, two little girls of ten and twelve, one
dog. We tried desperately for three days to get away from this party.
It did not seem to work hard at all. We did. Even the two little girls
appeared to dip the contemplative paddle from time to time. Water
boiled back of our own blades. We started early and quit late, and
about as we congratulated ourselves over our evening fire that we had
distanced our followers at last, those three canoes would steal
silently and calmly about the lower bend to draw ashore below us. In
ten minutes the old Indian was delivering an oration to us, squatted in
resignation.

The Red Gods alone know what he talked about. He had no English, and
our Ojibway was of the strictly utilitarian. But for an hour he would
hold forth. We called him Talk-in-the-Face, the Great Indian Chief.
Then he would drop a mild hint for sáymon, which means tobacco, and
depart. By ten o'clock the next morning he and his people would
overtake us in spite of our earlier start. Usually we were in the act
of dragging our canoe through an especially vicious rapid by means of a
tow-line. Their three canoes, even to the children's, would ascend
easily by means of poles. Tow-lines appeared to be unsportsmanlike--like
angle-worms. Then the entire nine--including the dogs--would roost on
rocks and watch critically our methods.

The incident had one value, however: it showed us just why these people
possess the marvellous canoe skill I have attempted to sketch. The
little boy in the leading canoe was not over eight or nine years of
age, but he had his little paddle and his little canoe-pole, and, what
is more, he already used them intelligently and well. As for the little
girls--well, they did easily feats I never hope to emulate, and that
without removing the cowl-like coverings from their heads and
shoulders.

The same early habitude probably accounts for their ability to carry
weights long distances. The Woods Indian is not a mighty man
physically. Most of them are straight and well built, but of only
medium height, and not wonderfully muscled. Peter was most beautiful,
but in the fashion of the flying Mercury, with long smooth panther
muscles. He looked like Uncas, especially when his keen hawk-face was
fixed in distant attention. But I think I could have wrestled Peter
down. Yet time and again I have seen that Indian carry two hundred
pounds for some miles through a rough country absolutely without
trails. And once I was witness of a feat of Tawabinisáy, when that wily
savage portaged a pack of fifty pounds and a two-man canoe through a
hill country for four hours and ten minutes without a rest. Tawabinisáy
is even smaller than Peter.

So much for the qualities developed by the woods life. Let us now
examine what may be described as the inherent characteristics of the
people.




XVI.

ON WOODS INDIANS (_continued_).


It must be understood, of course, that I offer you only the best of my
subject. A people counts for what it does well. Also I instance men of
standing in the loose Indian body politic. A traveller can easily
discover the reverse of the medal. These have their shirks, their
do-nothings, their men of small account, just as do other races. I have
no thought of glorifying the noble red man, nor of claiming for him a
freedom from human imperfection--even where his natural quality and
training count the most--greater than enlightenment has been able to
reach.

In my experience the honesty of the Woods Indian is of a very high
order. The sense of _mine_ and _thine_ is strongly forced by
the exigencies of the North Woods life. A man is always on the move; he
is always exploring the unknown countries. Manifestly it is impossible
for him to transport the entire sum of his worldly effects. The
implements of winter are a burden in summer. Also the return journey
from distant shores must be provided for by food-stations, to be relied
on. The solution of these needs is the cache.

And the cache is not a literal term at all. It _conceals_ nothing.
Rather does it hold aloft in long-legged prominence, for the inspection
of all who pass, what the owner has seen fit to leave behind. A heavy
platform high enough from the ground to frustrate the investigations of
animals is all that is required. Visual concealment is unnecessary,
because in the North Country a cache is sacred. On it may depend the
life of a man. He who leaves provisions must find them on his return,
for he may reach them starving, and the length of his out-journey may
depend on his certainty of relief at this point on his in-journey. So
men passing touch not his hoard, for some day they may be in the same
fix, and a precedent is a bad thing.

[Illustration: NOR NEED YOU HOPE TO POLE A CANOE UPSTREAM AS DO THESE
PEOPLE.]

Thus in parts of the wildest countries of northern Canada I have
unexpectedly come upon a birch canoe in capsized suspension between two
trees; or a whole bunch of snow-shoes depending fruit-like beneath the
fans of a spruce; or a tangle of steel traps thrust into the crevice of
a tree-root; or a supply of pork and flour, swathed like an Egyptian
mummy, occupying stately a high bier. These things we have passed by
reverently, as symbols of a people's trust in its kind.

The same sort of honesty holds in regard to smaller things. I have
never hesitated to leave in my camp firearms, fishing-rods, utensils
valuable from a woods point of view, even a watch or money. Not only
have I never lost anything in that manner, but once an Indian lad
followed me some miles after the morning's start to restore to me a
half-dozen trout flies I had accidentally left behind.

It might be readily inferred that this quality carries over into the
subtleties, as indeed is the case. Mr. MacDonald of Brunswick House
once discussed with me the system of credits carried on by the Hudson's
Bay Company with the trappers. Each family is advanced goods to the
value of two hundred dollars, with the understanding that the debt is
to be paid from the season's catch.

"I should think you would lose a good deal," I ventured. "Nothing could
be easier than for an Indian to take his two hundred dollars' worth and
disappear in the woods. You'd never be able to find him."

Mr. MacDonald's reply struck me, for the man had twenty years' trading
experience.

"I have never," said he, "in a long woods life known but one Indian
liar."

This my own limited woods-wandering has proved to be true to a
sometimes almost ridiculous extent. The most trivial statement of fact
can be relied on, provided it is given outside of trade or enmity or
absolute indifference. The Indian loves to fool the tenderfoot. But a
sober, measured statement you can conclude is accurate. And if an
Indian promises a thing, he will accomplish it. He expects you to do
the same. Watch your lightest words carefully and you would retain the
respect of your red associates.

On our way to the Hudson Bay we rashly asked Peter, towards the last,
when we should reach Moose Factory. He deliberated.

"T'ursday," said he.

Things went wrong; Thursday supplied a head wind. We had absolutely no
interest in reaching Moose Factory next day; the next week would have
done as well. But Peter, deaf to expostulation, entreaty, and command,
kept us travelling from six in the morning until after twelve at night.
We couldn't get him to stop. Finally he drew the canoes ashore.

"Moose-amik quarter hour," said he.

He had kept his word.

The Ojibway possesses a great pride which the unthinking can ruffle
quite unconsciously in many ways. Consequently the Woods Indian is
variously described as a good guide or a bad one. The difference lies
in whether you suggest or command.

"Peter, you've got to make Chicawgun to-night. Get a move on you!" will
bring you sullen service, and probably breed kicks on the grub supply,
which is the immediate precursor of mutiny.

"Peter, it's a long way to Chicawgun. Do you think we make him
to-night?" on the other hand, will earn you at least a serious
consideration of the question. And if Peter says you can, you will.

For the proper man the Ojibway takes a great pride in his woodcraft,
the neatness of his camps, the savoury quality of his cookery, the
expedition of his travel, the size of his packs, the patience of his
endurance. On the other hand, he can be as sullen, inefficient, stupid,
and vindictive as any man of any race on earth. I suppose the faculty
of getting along with men is largely inherent. Certainly it is blended
of many subtleties. To be friendly, to retain respect, to praise, to
preserve authority, to direct and yet to leave detail, to exact what is
due, and yet to deserve it--these be the qualities of a leader, and
cannot be taught.

In general the Woods Indian is sober. He cannot get whisky regularly,
to be sure, but I have often seen the better class of Ojibways refuse a
drink, saying that they did not care for it. He starves well, and keeps
going on nothing long after hope is vanished. He is patient--yea, very
patient--under toil, and so accomplishes great journeys, overcomes
great difficulties, and does great deeds by means of this handmaiden of
genius. According to his own standards is he clean. To be sure his
baths are not numerous, nor his laundry-days many, but he never cooks
until he has washed his hands and arms to the very shoulders. Other
details would but corroborate the impression of this instance--that his
ideas differ from ours, as is his right, but that he lives up to his
ideas. Also is he hospitable, expecting nothing in return. After your
canoe is afloat and your paddle in the river, two or three of his
youngsters will splash in after you to toss silver fish to your
necessities. And so always he will wait until this last moment of
departure, in order that you will not feel called on to give him
something in return. Which is true tact and kindliness, and worthy of
high praise.

Perhaps I have not strongly enough insisted that the Indian nations
differ as widely from one another as do unallied races. We found this
to be true even in the comparatively brief journey from Chapleau to
Moose. After pushing through a trackless wilderness without having laid
eyes on a human being, excepting the single instance of three French
_voyageurs_ going Heaven knows where, we were anticipating
pleasurably our encounter with the traders at the Factory, and
naturally supposed that Peter and Jacob would be equally pleased at the
chance of visiting with their own kind. Not at all. When we reached
Moose our Ojibways wrapped themselves in a mantle of dignity, and
stalked scornful amidst obsequious clans. For the Ojibway is great
among Indians, verily much greater than the Moose River Crees. Had it
been a question of Rupert's River Crees with their fierce blood-laws,
their conjuring-lodges, and their pagan customs, the affair might have
been different.

For, mark you, the Moose River Cree is little among hunters, and he
conducts the chase miscellaneously over his district without thought to
the preservation of the beaver, and he works in the hay marshes during
the summer, and is short, squab, and dirty, and generally
_ka-win-ni-shi-shin_. The old sacred tribal laws, which are better
than a religion because they are practically adapted to northern life,
have among them been allowed to lapse. Travellers they are none, nor do
their trappers get far from the Company's pork-barrels. So they inbreed
ignobly for lack of outside favour, and are dying from the face of the
land through dire diseases, just as their reputations have already died
from men's respect.

The great unwritten law of the forest is that, save as provision during
legitimate travel, one may not hunt in his neighbour's district. Each
trapper has assigned him, or gets by inheritance or purchase, certain
territorial power. In his land he alone may trap. He knows the
beaver-dams, how many animals each harbours, how large a catch each
will stand without diminution of the supply. So the fur is made to
last. In the southern district this division is tacitly agreed upon. It
is not etiquette to poach. What would happen to a poacher no one knows,
simply because the necessity for finding out has not arisen.
Tawabinisáy controls from Batchawanúng to Agawa. There old Waboos takes
charge. And so on. But in the Far North the control is more often
disputed, and there the blood-law still holds. An illegal trapper baits
his snares with his life. If discovered, he is summarily shot. So is
the game preserved.

The Woods Indian never kills waste-fully. The mere presence of game
does not breed in him a lust to slaughter something. Moderation you
learn of him first of all. Later, provided you are with him long enough
and your mind is open to mystic influence, you will feel the strong
impress of his idea--that the animals of the forest are not lower than
man, but only different. Man is an animal living the life of the
forest; the beasts are also a body politic speaking a different
language and with different view-points. Amik, the beaver, has certain
ideas as to the conduct of life, certain habits of body, and certain
bias of thought. His scheme of things is totally at variance with that
held by Me-en-gan, the wolf, but even to us whites the two are on a
parity. Man has still another system. One is no better than another.
They are merely different. And just as Me-en-gan preys on Amik, so does
Man kill for his own uses.

Thence are curious customs. A Rupert River Cree will not kill a bear
unless he, the hunter, is in gala attire, and then not until he has
made a short speech in which he assures his victim that the affair is
not one of personal enmity, but of expedience, and that anyway he, the
bear, will be better off in the Hereafter. And then the skull is
cleaned and set on a pole near running water, there to remain during
twelve moons. Also at the tail-root of a newly-deceased beaver is tied
a thong braided of red wool and deerskin. And many other curious
habitudes which would be of slight interest here. Likewise do they
conjure up by means of racket and fasting the familiar spirits of
distant friends or enemies, and on these spirits fasten a blessing or a
curse.

From this it may be deduced that missionary work has not been as
thorough as might be hoped. That is true. The Woods Indian loves to
sing, and possesses quaint melodies, or rather intonations, of his own.
But especially does he delight in the long-drawn wail of some of our
old-fashioned hymns. The church oftenest reaches him through them. I
know nothing stranger than the sight of a little half-lit church filled
with Indians swaying unctuously to and fro in the rhythm of a cadence
old Watts would have recognized with difficulty. The religious feeling
of the performance is not remarkable, but perhaps it does as a
starting-point.

Exactly how valuable the average missionary work is I have been puzzled
to decide. Perhaps the church needs more intelligence in the men it
sends out. The evangelist is usually filled with narrow, preconceived
notions as to the proper physical life. He squeezes his savage into log
houses, boiled shirts, and boots. When he has succeeded in getting his
tuberculosis crop well started, he offers as compensation a doctrinal
religion admirably adapted to us, who have within reach of
century-trained perceptions a thousand of the subtler associations a
savage can know nothing about. If there is enough glitter and tin
steeple and high-sounding office and gilt good-behaviour card to it,
the red man's pagan heart is tickled in its vanity, and he dies in the
odour of sanctity--and of a filth his out-of-door life has never taught
him how to avoid. The Indian is like a raccoon: in his proper
surroundings he is clean morally and physically because he knows how to
be so; but in a cage he is filthy because he does not know how to be
otherwise.

I must not be understood as condemning missionary work; only the stupid
missionary work one most often sees in the North. Surely Christianity
should be adaptable enough in its little things to fit any people with
its great. It seems hard for some men to believe that it is not
essential for a real Christian to wear a plug-hat. One God, love,
kindness, charity, honesty, right living, may thrive as well in the
wigwam as in a foursquare house--provided you let them wear moccasins
and a _capote_ wherewith to keep themselves warm and vital.

Tawabinisáy must have had his religious training at the hands of a good
man. He had lost none of his aboriginal virtue and skill, as may be
gathered from what I have before said of him, and had gained in
addition certain of the gentle qualities. I have never been able to
gauge exactly the extent of his religious _understanding_, for
Tawabinisáy is a silent individual, and possesses very little English;
but I do know that his religious _feeling_ was deep and reverent.
He never swore in English; he did not drink; he never travelled or
hunted or fished on Sunday when he could possibly help it. These
virtues he wore modestly and unassumingly as an accustomed garment. Yet
he was the most gloriously natural man I have ever met.

The main reliance of his formalism when he was off in the woods seemed
to be a little tattered volume, which he perused diligently all Sunday,
and wrapped carefully in a strip of oiled paper during the rest of the
week. One day I had a chance to look at this book while its owner was
away after spring water. Every alternate page was in the phonetic
Indian symbols, of which more hereafter. The rest was in French, and
evidently a translation. Although the volume was of Roman Catholic
origin, creed was conspicuously subordinated to the needs of the class
it aimed to reach. A confession of faith, quite simple, in one God, a
Saviour, a Mother of Heaven; a number of Biblical extracts rich in
imagery and applicability to the experience of a woods-dweller; a dozen
simple prayers of the kind the natural man would oftenest find occasion
to express--a prayer for sickness, for bounty, for fair weather, for
ease of travel, for the smiling face of Providence; and then some
hymns. To me the selection seemed most judicious. It answered the needs
of Tawabinisáy's habitual experiences, and so the red man was a good
and consistent convert. Irresistibly I was led to contemplate the idea
of any one trying to get Tawabinisáy to live in a house, to cut
cordwood with an axe, to roost on a hard bench under a tin steeple, to
wear stiff shoes, and to quit forest roaming.

The written language mentioned above you will see often in the
Northland. Whenever an Indian band camps, it blazes a tree and leaves,
as record for those who may follow, a message written in the phonetic
character. I do not understand exactly the philosophy of it, but I
gather that each sound has a symbol of its own, like shorthand, and
that therefore even totally different languages--such as Ojibway, the
Wood Cree, or the Hudson Bay Eskimos--may all be written in the same
character. It was invented nearly a hundred years ago by a priest. So
simple is it, and so needed a method of intercommunication, that its
use is now practically universal. Even the youngsters understand it,
for they are early instructed in its mysteries during the long winter
evenings. On the preceding page is a message I copied from a spruce
tree two hundred miles from anywhere on the Mattágami River.

[Illustration]

Besides this are numberless formal symbols in constant use. Forerunners
on a trail stick a twig in the ground whose point indicates exactly the
position of the sun. Those who follow are able to estimate, by noting
how far beyond the spot the twig points to the sun has travelled, how
long a period of time has elapsed. A stick pointed in any given
direction tells the route, of course. Another planted upright across
the first shows by its position how long a journey is contemplated. A
little sack suspended at the end of the pointer conveys information as
to the state of the larder, lean or fat according as the little sack
contains more or less gravel or sand. A shred of rabbit-skin means
starvation. And so on in variety useless in any but an ethnological
work.

[Illustration 1: A short journey.]

[Illustration 2: A medium journey.]

[Illustration 3: A long journey.]

The Ojibways' tongue is soft, and full of decided lisping and sustained
hissing sounds. It is spoken with somewhat of a sing-song drawl. We
always had a fancy that somehow it was of forest growth, and that its
syllables were intended in the scheme of things to blend with the woods
noises, just as the feathers of the mother partridge blend with the
woods colours. In general it is polysyllabic. That applies especially
to concepts borrowed of the white men. On the other hand, the Ojibways
describe in monosyllables many ideas we could express only in phrase.
They have a single word for the notion,
Place-where-an-animal-slept-last-night. Our "lair," "form," etc., do
not mean exactly that. Its genius, moreover, inclines to a flexible
verb-form, by which adjectives and substantives are often absorbed into
the verb itself, so that one beautiful singing word will convey a whole
paragraph of information. My little knowledge of it is so entirely
empirical that it can possess small value.

In concluding these desultory remarks, I want to tell you of a very
curious survival among the Ojibways and Ottawas of the Georgian Bay. It
seems that some hundreds of years ago these ordinarily peaceful folk
descended on the Iroquois in what is now New York, and massacred a
village or so. Then, like small boys who have thrown only too
accurately at the delivery wagon, they scuttled back home again.

Since that time they have lived in deadly fear of retribution. The
Iroquois have long since disappeared from the face of the earth, but
even to-day the Georgian Bay Indians are subject to periodical spasms
of terror. Some wild-eyed and imaginative youth sees at sunset a canoe
far down the horizon. Immediately the villages are abandoned in haste,
and the entire community moves up to the head-waters of streams, there
to lurk until convinced that all danger is past. It does no good to
tell these benighted savages that they are safe from vengeance, at
least in this world. The dreaded name of Iroquois is potent, even
across the centuries.




XVII.

THE CATCHING OF A CERTAIN FISH.


We settled down peacefully on the River, and the weather, after so much
enmity, was kind to us. Likewise did the flies disappear from the woods
utterly.

Each morning we arose as the Red Gods willed; generally early, when the
sun was just gilding the peaks to the westward; but not too early,
before the white veil had left the River. Billy, with woodsman's
contempt for economy, hewed great logs and burned them nobly in the
cooking of trout, oatmeal, pancakes, and the like. We had constructed
ourselves tables and benches between green trees, and there we ate. And
great was the eating beyond the official capacity of the human stomach.
There offered little things to do, delicious little things just on the
hither side of idleness. A rod wrapping needed more waxed silk; a
favourite fly required attention to prevent dissolution; the pistol was
to be cleaned; a flag-pole seemed desirable; a trifle more of balsam
could do no harm; clothes might stand drying, blankets airing. We
accomplished these things leisurely, pausing for the telling of
stories, for the puffing of pipes, for the sheer joy of contemplations.
Deerskin slipper moccasins and flapping trousers attested our
deshabille. And then somehow it was noon, and Billy again at the Dutch
oven and the broiler.

Trout we ate, and always more trout. Big fellows broiled with strips of
bacon craftily sewn in and out of the pink flesh; medium fellows cut
into steaks; little fellows fried crisp in corn-meal; big, medium, and
little fellows mingled in component of the famous North Country
_bouillon_, whose other ingredients are partridges, and tomatoes,
and potatoes, and onions, and salt pork, and flour in combination
delicious beyond belief. Nor ever did we tire of them, three times a
day, printed statement to the contrary notwithstanding. And besides
were many crafty dishes over whose construction the major portion of
morning idleness was spent.

Now at two o'clock we groaned temporary little groans; and crawled
shrinking into our river clothes, which we dared not hang too near the
fire for fear of the disintegrating scorch, and drew on soggy hobnailed
shoes with holes cut in the bottom and plunged with howls of disgust
into the upper riffles. Then the cautious leg-straddled passage of the
swift current, during which we forgot for ever--which eternity alone
circles the bliss of an afternoon on the River--the chill of the water,
and so came to the trail.

Now, at the Idiot's Delight Dick and I parted company. By three o'clock
I came again to the River, far up, halfway to the Big Falls. Deuce
watched me gravely. With the first click of the reel he retired to the
brush away from the back cast, there to remain until the pool was
fished and we could continue our journey.

In the swift leaping water, at the smooth back of the eddy, in the
white foam, under the dark cliff shadow, here, there, everywhere the
bright flies drop softly like strange snowflakes. The game is as
interesting as pistol-shooting. To hit the mark, that is enough. And
then a swirl of water and a broad lazy tail wake you to the fact that
other matters are yours. Verily the fish of the North Country are
mighty beyond all others.

Over the River rests the sheen of light; over the hills rests the sheen
of romance. The land is enchanted. Birds dip and sway, advance and
retreat; leaves toss their hands in greeting, or bend and whisper one
to the other; splashes of sun fall heavy as metal through the yielding
screens of branches; little breezes wander hesitatingly here and there
to sink like spent kites on the nearest bar of sun-warmed shingle; the
stream shouts and gurgles, murmurs, hushes, lies still and secret as
though to warn you to discretion, breaks away with a shriek of hilarity
when your discretion has been assured. There is in you a great leisure,
as though the day would never end. There is in you a great keenness.
One part of you is vibrantly alive. Your wrist muscles contract almost
automatically at the swirl of a rise, and the hum of life along the
gossamer of your line gains its communication with every nerve in your
body. The question of gear and method you attack clear-minded. What
fly? Montreal, Parmachenee Belle, Royal Coachman, Silver Doctor,
Professor, Brown Hackle, Cow-dung--these grand lures for the North
Country trout receive each its due test and attention. And on the tail
snell what fisherman has not the Gamble--the unusual, obscure,
multinamed fly which may, in the occultism of his taste, attract the
Big Fellows? Besides, there remains always the handling. Does your
trout to-day fancy the skittering of his food, or the withdrawal in
three jerks, or the inch-deep sinking of the fly? Does he want it
across current or up current; will he rise with a snap, or is he going
to come slowly, or is he going to play? These be problems interesting,
insistent to be solved, with the ready test within the reach of your
skill.

But that alertness is only one side of your mood. No matter how
difficult the selection, how strenuous the fight, there is in you a
large feeling that might almost be described as Buddhistic. Time has
nothing to do with your problems. The world has quietly run down, and
has been embalmed with all its sweetness of light and colour and sound
in a warm Lethe bath of sun. This afternoon is going to last for ever.
You note and enjoy and savour the little pleasures unhurried by the
thought that anything else, whether of pleasure or duty, is to follow.

And so for long delicious eons. The River flows on, ever on; the hills
watch, watch always; the birds sing, the sun shines grateful across
your shoulders; the big trout and the little rise in predestined order,
and make their predestined fight, and go their predestined way either
to liberty or the creel; the pools and the rapids and the riffles slip
by upstream as though they had been withdrawn rather than as though you
had advanced.

Then suddenly the day has dropped its wings. The earth moves forward
with a jar. Things are to be accomplished; things are being
accomplished. The River is hurrying down to the Lake; the birds have
business of their own to attend to, an it please you; the hills are
waiting for something that has not yet happened, but they are ready.
Startled, you look up. The afternoon has finished. Your last step has
taken you over the edge of the shadow cast by the setting sun across
the range of hills.

For the first time you look about you to see where you are. It has not
mattered before. Now you know that shortly it will be dark. Still
remain below you four pools. A great haste seizes you.

"If I take my rod apart and strike through the woods," you argue, "I
can make the Narrows, and I am sure there is a big trout there."

Why the Narrows should be any more likely to contain a big trout than
any of the other three pools you would not be able to explain. In half
an hour it will be dark. You hurry. In the forest it is already
twilight, but by now you know the forest well. Preoccupied, feverish
with your great idea, you hasten on. The birds, silent all in the
brooding of night, rise ghostly to right and left. Shadows steal away
like hostile spies among the treetrunks. The silver of last daylight
gleams ahead of you through the brush. You know it for the Narrows,
whither the instinct of your eagerness has led you as accurately as a
compass through the forest.

Fervently, as though this were of world's affairs the most important,
you congratulate yourself on being in time. Your rod seems to join
itself. In a moment the cast drops like a breath on the molten silver.
Nothing. Another try a trifle lower down. Nothing. A little wandering
breeze spoils your fourth attempt, carrying the leader far to the left.
Curses, deep and fervent. The daylight is fading, draining away. A
fifth cast falls forty feet out. Slowly you drag the flies across the
current, reluctant to recover until the latest possible moment. And so,
when your rod is foolishly upright, your line slack, and your flies
motionless, there rolls slowly up and over the trout of trouts. You see
a broad side, the whirl of a fantail that looks to you to be at least
six inches across; and the current slides on, silver-like, smooth,
indifferent to the wild leap of your heart.

[Illustration: THEN IN THE TWILIGHT THEY BATHE.]

Like a crazy man you shorten your line. Six seconds later your flies
fall skilfully just upstream from where last you saw that wonderful
tail.

But six seconds may be a long, long period of time. You have feared and
hoped and speculated and realized; feared that the leviathan has
pricked himself, and so will not rise again; hoped that his appearance
merely indicated curiosity which he will desire further to satisfy;
speculated on whether your skill can drop the fly exactly on that spot,
as it must be dropped; and realized that, whatever be the truth as to
all those fears and hopes and speculations, this is irrevocably your
last chance.

For an instant you allow the flies to drift downstream, to be floated
here and there by idle little eddies, to be sucked down and spat out of
tiny suction-holes. Then cautiously you draw them across the surface of
the waters. _Thump--thump--thump_--your heart slows up with
disappointment. Then mysteriously, like the stirring of the waters by
some invisible hand, the molten silver is broken in its smoothness. The
Royal Coachman quietly disappears. With all the brakes shrieking on
your desire to shut your eyes and heave a mighty heave, you depress
your butt and strike.

Then in the twilight the battle. No leisure is here, only quivering,
intense, agonized anxiety. The affair transcends the moment. Purposes
and necessities of untold ages have concentrated, so that somehow back
of your consciousness rest hosts of disembodied hopes, tendencies,
evolutionary progressions, all breathless lest you prove unequal to the
struggle for which they have been so long preparing.

Responsibility--vast, vague, formless--is yours. Only the fact that you
are wholly occupied with the exigence of the moment prevents your
understanding of what it is, but it hovers dark and depressing behind
your possible failure. You must win. This is no fish; it is opportunity
itself, and once gone it will never return. The mysticism of lower dusk
in the forest, of upper afterglow on the hills, of the chill of evening
waters and winds, of the glint of strange phantoms under the darkness
of cliffs, of the whisperings and shoutings of Things you are too busy
to identify out in the gray of North Country awe--all these menace you
with indeterminate dread. Knee-deep, waist-deep, swift water, slack
water, downstream, upstream, with red eyes straining into the dimness,
with every muscle taut and every nerve quivering, you follow the
ripping of your line. You have consecrated yourself to the uttermost.
The minutes stalk by you gigantic. You are a stable pin-point in
whirling phantasms. And you are very little, very small, very
inadequate among these Titans of circumstance.

Thrice he breaks water, a white and ghostly apparition from the deep.
Your heart stops with your reel, and only resumes its office when again
the line sings safely. The darkness falls, and with it, like the
mysterious strength of Sir Gareth's opponent, falls the power of your
adversary. His rushes shorten. The blown world of your uncertainty
shrinks to the normal. From the haze of your consciousness, as through
a fog, loom the old familiar forest, and the hills, and the River.
Slowly you creep from that strange enchanted land. The sullen trout
yields. In all gentleness you float him within reach of your net.
Quietly, breathlessly you walk ashore, and over the beach, and yet an
unnecessary hundred feet from the water lest he retain still a flop.
Then you lay him upon the stones and lift up your heart in rejoicing.

How you get to camp you never clearly know. Exultation lifts your feet.
Wings, wings, O ye Red Gods, wings to carry the body whither the spirit
hath already soared, and stooped, and circled back in impatience to see
why still the body lingers! Ordinarily you can cross the riffles above
the Halfway Pool only with caution and prayer and a stout staff
craftily employed. This night you can--and do--splash across hand-free,
as recklessly as you would wade a little brook. There is no stumble in
you, for you have done a great deed, and the Red Gods are smiling.

Through the trees glows a light, and in the centre of that light are
leaping flames, and in the circle of that light stand, rough-hewn in
orange, the tent and the table and the waiting figures of your
companions. You stop short, and swallow hard, and saunter into camp as
one indifferent.

Carelessly you toss aside your creel--into the darkest corner, as
though it were unimportant--nonchalantly you lean your rod against the
slant of your tent, wearily you seat yourself and begin to draw off
your drenched garments. Billy bends toward the fire. Dick gets you your
dry clothes. Nobody says anything, for everybody is hungry. No one asks
you any questions, for on the River you get in almost any time of
night.

Finally, as you are hanging your wet things near the fire, you inquire
casually over your shoulder,--

"Dick, have any luck?"

Dick tells you. You listen with apparent interest. He has caught a
three-pounder. He describes the spot and the method and the struggle.
He is very much pleased. You pity him.

The three of you eat supper, lots of supper. Billy arises first,
filling his pipe. He hangs water over the fire for the dish-washing.
You and Dick sit hunched on a log, blissfully happy in the moments of
digestion, ruminative, watching the blaze. The tobacco smoke eddies and
sucks upward to join the wood smoke. Billy moves here and there in the
fulfilment of his simple tasks, casting his shadow wavering and
gigantic against the fire-lit trees. By-and-by he has finished. He
gathers up the straps of Dick's creel, and turns to the shadow for your
own. He is going to clean the fish. It is the moment you have watched
for. You shroud yourself in profound indifference.

"_Sacré!_" shrieks Billy.

You do not even turn your head.

"Jumping giraffes! why, it's a whale!" cries Dick.

You roll a _blasé_ eye in their direction, as though such puerile
enthusiasm wearies you.

"Yes, it's quite a little fish," you concede.

They swarm down upon you, demanding particulars. These you accord
laconically, a word at a time, in answer to direct question, between
puffs of smoke.

"At the Narrows. Royal Coachman. Just before I came in. Pretty fair
fight. Just at the edge of the eddy." And so on. But your soul glories.

The tape-line is brought out. Twenty-nine inches it records. Holy
smoke, what a fish! Your air implies that you will probably catch three
more just like him on the morrow. Dick and Billy make tracings of him
on the birch bark. You retain your lofty calm: but inside you are
little quivers of rapture. And when you awake, late in the night, you
are conscious, first of all, that you are happy, happy, happy, all
through; and only when the drowse drains away do you remember why.




XVIII.

MAN WHO WALKS BY MOONLIGHT.


We had been joined on the River by friends. "Doug," who never fished
more than forty rods from camp, and was always inventing water-gauges,
patent indicators, and other things, and who wore in his soft slouch
hat so many brilliant trout flies that he irresistibly reminded you of
flower-decked Ophelia; "Dinnis," who was large and good-natured, and
bubbling and popular; Johnny, whose wide eyes looked for the first time
on the woods-life, and whose awe-struck soul concealed itself behind
assumptions; "Jim," six feet tall and three feet broad, with whom the
season before I had penetrated to Hudson Bay; and finally, "Doc," tall,
granite, experienced, the best fisherman that ever hit the river. With
these were Indians. Buckshot, a little Indian with a good knowledge of
English; Johnnie Challán, a half-breed Indian, ugly, furtive, an
efficient man about camp; and Tawabinisáy himself. This was an honour
due to the presence of Doc. Tawabinisáy approved of Doc. That was all
there was to say about it.

After a few days, inevitably the question of Kawágama came up. Billy,
Johnnie Challán, and Buckshot squatted in a semi-circle, and drew
diagrams in the soft dirt with a stick. Tawabinisáy sat on a log and
overlooked the proceedings. Finally he spoke.

"Tawabinisáy" (they always gave him his full title; we called him
Tawáb) "tell me lake you find he no Kawágama," translated Buckshot. "He
called Black Beaver Lake."

"Ask him if he'll take us to Kawágama," I requested.

Tawabinisáy looked very doubtful.

"Come on, Tawáb," urged Doc, nodding at him vigorously. "Don't be a
clam. We won't take anybody else up there."

The Indian probably did not comprehend the words, but he liked Doc.

"A'-right," he pronounced laboriously.

Buckshot explained to us his plans.

"Tawabinisáy tell me," said he, "he don' been to Kawágama seven year.
To-morrow he go blaze trail. Nex' day we go."

"How would it be if one or two of us went with him to-morrow to see how
he does it?" asked Jim.

Buckshot looked at us strangely.

"_I_ don't want to follow him," he replied, with a significant
simplicity. "He run like a deer."

"Buckshot," said I, pursuing the inevitable linguistics, "what does
Kawágama mean?"

Buckshot thought for quite two minutes. Then he drew a semicircle.

"W'at you call dat?" he asked.

"Crescent, like moon? half-circle? horseshoe? bow?" we proposed.

Buckshot shook his head at each suggestion. He made a wriggling mark,
then a wide sweep, then a loop.

"All dose," said he, "w'at you call him?"

"Curve!" we cried.

"Áh hah," assented Buckshot, satisfied.

"Buckshot," we went on, "what does Tawabinisáy mean?"

"Man-who-travels-by-moonlight," he replied promptly.

The following morning Tawabinisáy departed, carrying a lunch and a
hand-axe. At four o'clock he was back, sitting on a log and smoking a
pipe. In the meantime we had made up our party.

Tawabinisáy himself had decided that the two half-breeds must stay at
home. He wished to share his secret only with his own tribesmen. The
fiat grieved Billy, for behold he had already put in much time on this
very search, and naturally desired to be in at the finish. Dick, too,
wanted to go, but him we decided too young and light for a fast march.
Dinnis had to leave the River in a day or so; Johnnie was a little
doubtful as to the tramp, although he concealed his doubt--at least to
his own satisfaction--under a variety of excuses. Jim and Doc would go,
of course. There remained Doug.

We found that individual erecting a rack of many projecting arms--like
a Greek warrior's trophy--at the precise spot where the first rays of
the morning sun would strike it. On the projecting arms he purposed
hanging his wet clothes.

"Doug," said we, "do you want to go to Kawágama to-morrow?"

Doug turned on us a sardonic eye. He made no direct answer, but told
the following story:--

"Once upon a time Judge Carter was riding through a rural district in
Virginia. He stopped at a negro's cabin to get his direction.

"'Uncle,' said he, 'can you direct me to Colonel Thompson's?'

"'Yes, sah,' replied the negro; 'yo' goes down this yah road 'bout two
mile till yo' comes to an ol' ailm tree, and then yo' tu'us sha'p to
th' right down a lane fo' 'bout a qua'ter of a mile. Thah you sees a
big white house. Yo' wants to go through th' ya'd, to a paf that takes
you a spell to a gate. Yo' follows that road to th' lef till yo' comes
to three roads goin' up a hill; and, jedge, _it don' mattah which one
of them thah roads yo' take, yo' gets lost surer 'n hell anyway!_'"

Then Doug turned placidly back to the construction of his trophy.

We interpreted this as an answer, and made up an outfit for five.

The following morning at six o'clock we were under way. Johnnie Challán
ferried us across the river in two instalments. We waved our hands and
plunged through the brush screen.

Thenceforth it was walk half an hour, rest five minutes, with almost
the regularity of clockwork. We timed the Indians secretly, and found
they varied by hardly a minute from absolute fidelity to this schedule.
We had at first, of course, to gain the higher level of the hills, but
Tawabinisáy had the day before picked out a route that mounted as
easily as the country would allow, and through a hardwood forest free
of underbrush. Briefly indicated, our way led first through the big
trees and up the hills, then behind a great cliff knob into a creek
valley, through a quarter-mile of bottom-land thicket, then by an open
strip to the first little lake. This we ferried by means of the bark
canoe carried on the shoulders of Tawabinisáy.

In the course of the morning we thus passed four lakes. Throughout the
entire distance to Kawágama were the fresh axe-blazes the Indian had
made the day before. These were neither so frequent nor as plainly cut
as a white man's trail, but each represented a pause long enough for
the clip of an axe. In addition the trail had been made passable for a
canoe. That meant the cutting out of overhanging branches wherever they
might catch the bow of the craft. In the thicket a little road had been
cleared, and the brush had been piled on either side. To an
unaccustomed eye it seemed the work of two days at least. Yet
Tawabinisáy had picked out his route, cleared and marked it thus,
skirted the shores of the lakes we were able to traverse in the canoe,
and had returned to the River in less time than we consumed in merely
reaching the Lake itself! Truly, as Buckshot said, he must have "run
like a deer."

Tawabinisáy has a delightful grin which he displays when pleased or
good-humoured or puzzled or interested or comprehending, just as a dog
sneezes and wrinkles up his nose in like case. He is essentially
kind-hearted. If he likes you and approves of you, he tries to teach
you, to help you, to show you things. But he never offers to do any
part of your work, and on the march he never looks back to see if you
are keeping up. You can shout at him until you are black in the face,
but never will he pause until rest-time. Then he squats on his heels,
lights his pipe, and grins.

Buckshot adored him. This opportunity of travelling with him was an
epoch. He drank in eagerly the brief remarks of his "old man," and
detailed them to us with solemnity, prefaced always by his "Tawabinisáy
tell me." Buckshot is of the better class of Indian himself, but
occasionally he is puzzled by the woods-noises. Tawabinisáy never. As
we cooked lunch, we heard the sound of steady footsteps in the
forest--_pat_; then a pause; then _pat_; just like a deer
browsing. To make sure I inquired of Buckshot.

"What is it?"

Buckshot listened a moment.

"Deer," said he decisively; then, not because he doubted his own
judgment, but from habitual deference, he turned to where Tawabinisáy
was frying things.

"Qwaw?" he inquired.

Tawabinisáy never even looked up.

"Adjí-domo" (squirrel), said he.

We looked at each other incredulously. It sounded like a deer. It did
not sound in the least like a squirrel. An experienced Indian had
pronounced it a deer. Nevertheless it was a squirrel.

We approached Kawágama by way of a gradual slope clothed with a
beautiful beech and maple forest whose trees were the tallest of those
species I have ever seen. Ten minutes brought us to the shore. There
was no abrupt bursting in on Kawágama through screens of leaves; we
entered leisurely to her presence by way of an ante-chamber whose
spaciousness permitted no vulgar surprises. After a time we launched
our canoe from a natural dock afforded by a cedar root, and so stood
ready to cross to our permanent camp. But first we drew our knives and
erased from a giant birch the half-grown-over name of the banker
Clement.

There seems to me little use in telling you that Kawágama is about four
miles long by a mile wide, is shaped like a crescent, and lies in a
valley surrounded by high hills; nor that its water is so transparent
that the bottom is visible until it fades into the sheer blackness of
depth; nor that it is alive with trout; nor that its silence is the
silence of a vast solitude, so that always, even at daybreak or at high
midday, it seems to be late afternoon. That would convey little to you.
I will inform you quite simply that Kawágama is a very beautiful
specimen of the wilderness lake; that it is as the Lord made it; and
that we had a good time.

Did you ever fish with the fly from a birch-bark canoe on absolutely
still water? You do not seem to move. But far below you, gliding,
silent, ghostlike, the bottom slips beneath. Like a weather-vane in an
imperceptible current of air, your bow turns to right or left in
apparent obedience to the mere will of your companion. And the flies
drop softly like down. Then the silence becomes sacred. You
whisper--although there is no reason for your whispering; you move
cautiously, lest your reel scrape the gunwale. An inadvertent click of
the paddle is a profanation. The only creatures in all God's world
possessing the right to utter aloud a single syllable are the loon,
far away, and the winter wren, near at hand. Even the trout fight
grimly, without noise, their white bodies flashing far down in the
dimness.

Hour after hour we stole here and there like conspirators. Where showed
the circles of a fish's rise, thither crept we to drop a fly on their
centre as in the bull's-eye of a target. The trout seemed to linger
near their latest capture, so often we would catch one exactly where we
had seen him break water some little time before. In this was the charm
of the still hunt. Shoal water, deep water, it seemed all the same to
our fortunes. The lake was full of fish, and beautiful fish they were,
with deep, glowing bronze bellies, and all of from a pound to a pound
and a half in weight. The lake had not been fished. Probably somewhere
in those black depths over one of the bubbling spring-holes that must
feed so cold and clear a body of water, are big fellows lying, and
probably the crafty minnow or spoon might lure them out. But we were
satisfied with our game.

At other times we paddled here and there in exploration of coves,
inlets, and a tiny little brook that flowed westward from a reed marsh
to join another river running parallel to our own.

The Indians had erected a huge lean-to of birch bark, from the ribs of
which hung clothes and the little bags of food. The cooking-fire was
made in front of it between two giant birch trees. At evening the light
and heat reflected strongly beneath the shelter, leaving the forest in
impenetrable darkness. To the very edge of mystery crowded the strange
woods noises, the eerie influences of the night, like wolves afraid of
the blaze. We felt them hovering, vague, huge, dreadful, just outside
the circle of safety our fire had traced about us. The cheerful flames
were dancing familiars who cherished for us the home feeling in the
middle of a wilderness.

Two days we lingered, then took the back track. A little after noon we
arrived at the camp, empty save for Johnnie Challán. Towards dark the
fishermen straggled in. Time had been paid them in familiar coinage.
They had demanded only accustomed toll of the days, but we had returned
laden with strange and glittering memories.




XIX.

APOLOGIA.


The time at last arrived for departure.

Deep laden were the canoes; heavy laden were we. The Indians shot away
down the current. We followed for the last time the dim blazed trail,
forded for the last time the shallows of the river. At the Burned Rock
Pool we caught our lunch fish from the ranks of leviathans. Then the
trodden way of the Fur Trail, worn into a groove so deep and a surface
so smooth that vegetation has left it as bare as ever, though the Post
has been abandoned these many years. At last the scrub spruce, and the
sandy soil, and the blue, restless waters of the Great Lake. With the
appearance of the fish-tug early the following day the summer ended.

How often have I ruminated in the long marches the problem of the
Forest! Subtle she is, and mysterious, and gifted with a charm that
lures. Vast she is, and dreadful, so that man bows before her fiercer
moods, a little thing. Gentle she is, and kindly, so that she denies
nothing, whether of the material or spiritual, to those of her chosen
who will seek. August she is, and yet of a homely, sprightly
gentleness. Variable she is in her many moods. Night, day, sun, cloud,
rain, snow, wind, lend to her their best of warmth and cold, of comfort
and awe, of peace and of many shoutings, and she accepts them, but yet
remains greater and more enduring than they. In her is all the
sweetness of little things. Murmurs of water and of breeze, faint
odours, wandering streams of tepid air, stray bird-songs in fragment as
when a door is opened and closed, the softness of moss, the coolness of
shade, the glimpse of occult affairs in the woods life, accompany her
as Titania her court. How to express these things; how to fix on paper
in a record, as one would describe the Capitol at Washington, what the
Forest is--that is what I have asked myself often, and that is what I
have never yet found out.

This is the wisdom reflection has taught. One cannot imprison the ocean
in a vial of sea-water; one cannot imprison the Forest inside the
covers of a book.

There remains the second best. I have thought that perhaps if I were to
attempt a series of detached impressions, without relation, without
sequence; if I were to suggest a little here the beauty of a moon-beam,
there the humour of a rainstorm, at the last you might, by dint of
imagination and sympathy, get some slight feeling of what the great
woods are. It is the method of the painter. Perhaps it may suffice.

For this reason let no old camper look upon this volume as a treatise
on woodcraft. Woodcraft there is in it, just as there is woodcraft in
the Forest itself, but much of the simplest and most obvious does not
appear. The painter would not depict every twig, as would the
naturalist.

Equally it cannot be considered a book of travel nor of description.
The story is not consecutive; the adventures not exciting; the
landscape not denned. Perhaps it may be permitted to call it a book of
suggestion. Often on the street we have had opened to us by the merest
sketches of incident limitless vistas of memory. A momentary pose of
the head of a passer-by, a chance word, the breath of a faint
perfume--these bring back to us the entirety of forgotten scenes. Some
of these essays may perform a like office for you. I cannot hope to
give you the Forest. But perhaps a word or a sentence, an incident, an
impression, may quicken your imagination, so that through no conscious
direction of my own the wonder of the Forest may fill you, as the mere
sight of a conch-shell will sometimes till you with the wonder of the
sea.




SUGGESTIONS FOR OUTFIT.


In reply to inquiries as to necessary outfit for camping and
woods-travelling, the author furnishes the following lists:--

1. _Provisions per man, one week._

7 lbs. flour; 5 lbs. pork; 1-5 lb. tea; 2 lbs. beans; 1 1-2 lbs. sugar;
1 1-2 lbs. rice; 1 1-2 lbs. prunes and raisins; 1-1-2 lb. lard; 1 lb.
oatmeal; baking-powder; matches; soap; pepper; salt; 1-3 lb.
tobacco--(weight, a little over 20 lbs.). This will last much longer if
you get game and fish.

2. _Pack one, or absolute necessities for hard trip._

_Wear_ hat; suit woollen underwear; shirt; trousers; socks; silk
handkerchief; cotton handkerchief; moccasins.

_Carry_ sweater (3 lbs.); extra drawers (1 1-2 lbs.); 2 extra
pairs socks; gloves (buckskin); towel; 2 extra pairs moccasins;
surgeon's plaster; laxative; pistol and cartridges; fishing-tackle;
blanket (7 1-2 lbs.); rubber blanket (1 lb.); tent (8 lbs.); small axe
(2 1-2 lbs.); knife; mosquito-dope; compass; match-box; tooth-brush;
comb; small whetstone--(weight, about 25 lbs.); 2 tin or aluminium
pails; 1 frying-pan; 1 cup; 1 knife, fork, and spoon--(weight, 4 lbs.
if of aluminium).

Whole pack under 50 lbs. In case of two or more people, each pack would
be lighter, as tent, tinware, etc., would do for both.

3. _Pack two--for luxuries and easy trips--extra to pack one._

More fishing-tackle; camera; 1 more pair socks; 1 more suit
underclothes; extra sweater; wading-shoes of canvas; large axe;
mosquito net; mending materials; kettle; candles; more cooking-utensils;
extra shirt; whisky.


THE END.












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