Chapter II: Introduction (2)

The third man pitches the tent, cuts a dozen or more pins with his knife to fasten it down with, and then collects an armful or two of fir twigs, arbor-vitæ, spruce, or hemlock, whichever is at hand, and makes the bed, beginning at either end, and laying the twigs wrong side up, in regular rows, covering the stub ends of the last row; first, however, filling the hollows, if there are any, with coarser material.

Commonly, by the time the bed is made, or within fifteen or twenty minutes, the water boils, the pork is fried, and supper is ready. We eat this sitting on the ground, or a stump, around a large piece of birch bark for a table, each holding a dipper in one hand and a piece of ship-bread or fried pork in the other, frequently making a pass with his hand, or thrusting his head into the smoke, to avoid the mosquitoes.

Next, pipes are lit by those who smoke, and veils are donned by those who have them, and we hastily examine and dry our plants, anoint our faces and hands, and go to bed.

Though you have nothing to do but see the country, there’s rarely any time to spare, hardly enough to examine a plant, before the night or drowsiness is upon you.

Such was the ordinary experience, but this evening we had camped earlier on account of the rain, and had more time. We found that our camp was on an old indistinct supply-road, running along the river. What is called a road there shows no ruts or trace of wheels, for they are not used; nor, indeed, of runners, since they are used only in the winter when the snow is several feet deep. It is only an indistinct vista through the wood, which it takes an experienced eye to detect.

We had no sooner pitched our tent than the thunder-shower burst on us, and we hastily crept under it, drawing our bags after us, curious to see how much of a shelter our thin cotton roof was going to be in this excursion. Though the violence of the rain forced a fine shower through the cloth before it was fairly wetted and shrunk, with which we were well bedewed, we managed to keep pretty dry, only a box of matches having been left out and spoiled, and before we were aware of it the shower was over, and only the dripping trees imprisoned us.

Wishing to see what fishes were in the river there, we cast our lines over the wet bushes on the shore, but they were repeatedly swept down the swift stream in vain. So, leaving the Indian, we took the canoe, just before dark, and dropped down the river a few rods to fish at the mouth of a sluggish brook. We pushed up this a rod or two, but were soon driven off by the mosquitoes. While there we heard the Indian fire his gun twice in rapid succession. His object was to clean out and dry it after the rain, and he then loaded it with ball, being now on ground where he expected to meet with large game. This sudden loud crashing noise in the still aisles of the forest affected me like an insult to nature, or ill manners at any rate, as if you were to fire a gun in a hall or temple. It was not heard far, however, except along the river, the sound being rapidly hushed up or absorbed by the damp trees and mossy ground.

The Indian made a little smothered fire of damp leaves close to the back of the camp, that the smoke might drive through and keep out the mosquitoes, but just before we fell asleep this suddenly blazed up and came near setting fire to the tent.

IV

SUNDAY, JULY 26

The note of the white-throated sparrow was the first heard in the morning, and with this all the woods rang. Though commonly unseen, their simple _ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te_, so sharp and piercing, was as distinct to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the darkest of the forest would be to the eye. We were commonly aroused by their lively strain very early. What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind!

I told the Indian that we would go to church to Chesuncook this morning, some fifteen miles. It was settled weather at last. A few swallows flitted over the water, we heard Maryland yellow-throats along the shore, the notes of the chickadee, and, I believe, redstarts. Moose-flies of large size pursued us in midstream.

The Indian thought that we should lie by on Sunday. Said he, “We come here lookum things, look all round, but come Sunday look up all that, and then Monday look again.”

He spoke of an Indian of his acquaintance who had been with some ministers to Katahdin and had told him how they conducted. This he described in a low and solemn voice. “They make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every meal. Come Sunday, they stop ’em, no go at all that day--keep still--preach all day--first one, then another, just like church. Oh, ver’ good men. One day going along a river, they came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while. They go right ashore--stop there, go no farther that day--they have meeting there, preach and pray just like Sunday. Then they go back and carry the body with them. Oh, they ver’ good men.”

I judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see Katahdin.

However, the Indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we would go along he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he no takum pay for what he do Sunday then ther’s no harm, but if he takum pay then wrong. I told him that he was stricter than white men. Nevertheless, I noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the Sundays at last.

He appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud voice, in Indian, kneeling before the camp, morning and evening--sometimes scrambling up in haste when he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity. In the course of the day he remarked, “Poor man rememberum God more than rich.”

We soon passed the island where I had camped four years before. The deadwater, a mile or two below it, the Indian said was “a great place for moose.” We saw the grass bent where a moose came out the night before, and the Indian said that he could smell one as far as he could see him, but he added that if he should see five or six to-day close by canoe he no shoot ’em. Accordingly, as he was the only one of the party who had a gun, or had come a-hunting, the moose were safe.

Just below this a cat owl flew heavily over the stream, and he, asking if I knew what it was, imitated very well the common _hoo, hoo, hoo, hoorer, hoo_, of our woods.

We carried a part of the baggage about Pine Stream Falls, while the Indian went down in the canoe. A Bangor merchant had told us that two men in his employ were drowned some time ago while passing these falls in a bateau, and a third clung to a rock all night and was taken off in the morning. There were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on this carry and the neighboring shores. I measured the largest canoe birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the carry. It was fourteen and one half feet in circumference at two feet from the ground, but at five feet divided into three parts. The Indian cut a small woody knob as big as a filbert from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good medicine.

After we had embarked and gone half a mile, my companion remembered that he had left his knife, and we paddled back to get it, against the strong and swift current. This taught us the difference between going up and down the stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter of a mile, we should have gone down a mile and half at least. So we landed, and while he and the Indian were gone back for it, I watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white waterfowl near the shore, forty or fifty rods below. It alternately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being carried round by an eddy.

Immediately below these falls was the Chesuncook Deadwater, caused by the flowing back of the lake. As we paddled slowly over this, the Indian told us a story of his hunting thereabouts, and something more interesting about himself. It appeared that he had represented his tribe at Augusta, and once at Washington. He had a great idea of education, and would occasionally break out into such expressions as this, “Kademy--good thing--I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there. You been college?”

We steered across the northwest end of the lake. It is an agreeable change to cross a lake after you have been shut up in the woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. It is one of the surprises which Nature has in store for the traveler in the forest. To look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water was liberating and civilizing even. The lakes also reveal the mountains, and give ample scope and range to our thought. Already there were half a dozen log huts about this end of the lake, though so far from a road. In these woods the earliest settlements are clustering about the lakes, partly, I think, for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest clearings. Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.

About noon we turned northward up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast corner found the Caucomgomoc River, and after going about a mile from the lake reached the Umbazookskus. Our course was up the Umbazookskus, but as the Indian knew of a good camping-place, that is, a cool place where there were few mosquitoes, about half a mile farther up the Caucomgomoc, we went thither. So quickly we changed the civilizing sky of Chesuncook for the dark wood of the Caucomgomoc. On reaching the Indian’s camping-ground on the south side, where the bank was about a dozen feet high, I read on the trunk of a fir tree blazed by an axe an inscription in charcoal which had been left by him. It was surmounted by a drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the sign used by his family always. The drawing, though rude, could not be mistaken for anything but a bear, and he doubted my ability to copy it. The inscription ran thus. I interline the English of his Indian as he gave it to me.

(The figure of a bear in a boat.)
July 26
1853

_niasoseb_
We alone Joseph
_Polis elioi_
Polis start
_sia olta_
for Oldtown
_onke ni_
right away
_quambi_

July 15
1855
_niasoseb_

He added now below:--

1857
July 26
Jo. Polis

This was one of his homes. I saw where he had sometimes stretched his moose-hides on the sunny north side of the river where there was a narrow meadow.

After we had selected a place for our camp, and kindled our fire, almost exactly on the site of the Indian’s last camp here, he, looking up, observed, “That tree danger.”

It was a dead part, more than a foot in diameter, of a large canoe birch, which branched at the ground. This branch, rising thirty feet or more, slanted directly over the spot which we had chosen for our bed. I told him to try it with his axe, but he could not shake it perceptibly, and, therefore, seemed inclined to disregard it, and my companion expressed his willingness to run the risk. But it seemed to me that we should be fools to lie under it, for though the lower part was firm, the top, for aught we knew, might be just ready to fall, and we should at any rate be very uneasy if the wind arose in the night. It is a common accident for men camping in the woods to be killed by a falling tree. So the camp was moved to the other side of the fire.

The Indian said that the Umbazookskus, being a dead stream with broad meadows, was a good place for moose, and he frequently came a-hunting here, being out alone three weeks or more from Oldtown. He sometimes, also, went a-hunting to the Seboois Lakes, taking the stage, with his gun and ammunition, axe and blankets, hard-bread and pork, perhaps for a hundred miles of the way, and jumped off at the wildest place on the road, where he was at once at home, and every rod was a tavern-site for him. Then, after a short journey through the woods, he would build a spruce-bark canoe in one day, putting but few ribs into it, that it might be light, and, after doing his hunting with it on the lakes, would return with his furs the same way he had come. Thus you have an Indian availing himself of the advantages of civilization, without losing any of his woodcraft, but proving himself the more successful hunter for it.

This man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. Our tent was of a kind new to him, but when he had once seen it pitched it was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time, though I am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered several times.

Now I thought I would observe how he spent his Sunday. While I and my companion were looking about at the trees and river he went to sleep. Indeed, he improved every opportunity to get a nap, whatever the day.

Rambling about the woods at this camp, I noticed that they consisted chiefly of firs, spruce, red maple, birch, and, along the river, the hoary alder. I could trace the outlines of large birches that had fallen long ago, collapsed and rotted and turned to soil, by faint yellowish-green lines of featherlike moss, eighteen inches wide and twenty or thirty feet long, crossed by other similar lines.

Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry. The waterfalls which I heard were not without their dams and mills to my imagination; and several times I found that I had been regarding the steady rushing sound of the wind from over the woods beyond the rivers as that of a train of cars. Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.

I asked the Indian to make us a sugar-bowl of birch bark, which he did, using the great knife which dangled in a sheath from his belt; but the bark broke at the corners when he bent it up, and he said it was not good--that there was a great difference in this respect between the bark of one canoe birch and that of another.

My companion, wishing to distinguish between the black and white spruce, asked Polis to show him a twig of the latter, which he did at once, together with the black; indeed, he could distinguish them about as far as he could see them. As the two twigs appeared very much alike, my companion asked the Indian to point out the difference; whereupon the latter, taking the twigs, instantly remarked, as he passed his hand over them successively in a stroking manner, that the white was rough, that is, the needles stood up nearly perpendicular, but the black smooth, that is, as if bent down. This was an obvious difference, both to sight and touch.

I asked him to get some black spruce root and make some thread. Whereupon, without looking up at the trees overhead, he began to grub in the ground, instantly distinguishing the black spruce roots, and cutting off a slender one, three or four feet long, and as big as a pipestem, he split the end with his knife, and taking a half between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, rapidly separated its whole length into two equal semi-cylindrical halves. Then, giving me another root, he said, “You try.”

But in my hands it immediately ran off one side, and I got only a very short piece. Though it looked easy, I found that there was a great art in splitting these roots. The split is skillfully humored by bending short with this hand or that, and so kept in the middle. He then took off the bark from each half, pressing a short piece of cedar bark against the convex side with both hands, while he drew the root upward with his teeth. An Indian’s teeth are strong, and I noticed that he used his often where we should have used a hand. They amounted to a third hand. He thus obtained in a moment a very neat, tough, and flexible string, which he could tie into a knot, or make into a fishline even. He said that you would be obliged to give half a dollar for spruce root enough for a canoe, thus prepared.

He had discovered the day before that his canoe leaked a little, and said that it was owing to stepping into it violently. I asked him where he would get pitch to mend it with, for they commonly use hard pitch, obtained of the whites at Oldtown. He said that he could make something very similar, and equally good, of material which we had with us; and he wished me to guess what. But I could not, and he would not tell me, though he showed me a ball of it when made, as big as a pea and like black pitch, saying, at last, that there were some things which a man did not tell even his wife.

Being curious to see what kind of fishes there were in this dark, deep, sluggish river, I cast in my line just before night, and caught several small sucker-like fishes, which the Indian at once rejected, saying that they were good for nothing. Also, he would not touch a pout, which I caught, and said that neither Indians nor whites thereabouts ever ate them. But he said that some small silvery fishes, which I called white chivin, were the best fish in the Penobscot waters, and if I would toss them up the bank to him, he would cook them for me. After cleaning them, not very carefully, leaving the heads on, he laid them on the coals and so broiled them.

Returning from a short walk, he brought a vine in his hand, saying that it made the best tea of anything in the woods. It was the creeping snowberry, which was quite common there, its berries just grown. So we determined to have some tea made of this. It had a slight checkerberry flavor, and we both agreed that it was really better than the black tea which we had brought. We thought it quite a discovery, and that it might well be dried and sold in the shops. I for one, however, am not an old tea-drinker and cannot speak with authority to others. The Indian said that they also used for tea a certain herb which grew in low ground, which he did not find there, and Labrador tea; also hemlock leaves, the last especially in winter when the other plants were covered with snow; and various other things. We could have had a new kind of tea every night.

Just before night we saw a _musquash_, the only one we saw in this voyage, swimming downward on the opposite side of the stream. The Indian, wishing to get one to eat, hushed us, saying, “Stop, me call ’em”; and, sitting flat on the bank, he began to make a curious squeaking, wiry sound with his lips, exerting himself considerably. I was greatly surprised--thought that I had at last got into the wilderness, and that he was a wild man indeed, to be talking to a musquash! I did not know which of the two was the strangest to me. He seemed suddenly to have quite forsaken humanity, and gone over to the musquash side. The musquash, however, as near as I could see, did not turn aside, and the Indian said that he saw our fire; but it was evident that he was in the habit of calling the musquash to him, as he said. An acquaintance of mine who was hunting moose in these woods a month after this, tells me that his Indian in this way repeatedly called the musquash within reach of his paddle in the moonlight, and struck at them.

The Indian said a particularly long prayer this Sunday evening, as if to atone for working in the morning.

V

MONDAY, JULY 27

Having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the Indian always carefully attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each having taken a look, as usual, to see that nothing was left, we set out again, descending the Caucomgomoc, and turning northeasterly up the Umbazookskus. This name, the Indian said, meant _Much Meadow River_. We found it now very wide on account of the rains. The space between the woods, chiefly bare meadow, was from fifty to two hundred rods in breadth.

In the water on the meadows grew sedges, wool-grass, the common blue flag abundantly, its flower just showing itself above the high water, as if it were a blue water-lily, and higher in the meadows a great many clumps of a peculiar narrow-leaved willow. Here also grew the red osier, its large fruit now whitish.

It was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when I was shouting in order to awake it, the Indian reminded me that I should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and which we all wanted to see.

Having paddled several miles up the Umbazookskus, it suddenly contracted to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the larches and other trees approaching the bank and leaving no open meadow. We landed to get a black spruce pole for pushing against the stream. The one selected was quite slender, cut about ten feet long, merely whittled to a point, and the bark shaved off.

While we were thus employed, two Indians in a canoe hove in sight round the bushes, coming down stream. Our Indian knew one of them, an old man, and fell into conversation with him. He belonged at the foot of Moosehead. The other was of another tribe. They were returning from hunting. I asked the younger if they had seen any moose, to which he said “No”; but I, seeing the moose-hides sticking out from a great bundle made with their blankets in the middle of the canoe, added, “Only their hides.”

As he was a foreigner, he may have wished to deceive me, for it is against the law for white men and foreigners to kill moose in Maine at this season. But perhaps he need not have been alarmed, for the moose-wardens are not very particular. I heard of one who, being asked by a white man going into the woods what he would say if he killed a moose, answered, “If you bring me a quarter of it I guess you won’t be troubled.” His duty being, as he said, only to prevent the “indiscriminate” slaughter of them for their hides. I suppose that he would consider it an _indiscriminate_ slaughter when a quarter was not reserved for himself.

We continued along through the most extensive larch wood which I had seen--tall and slender trees with fantastic branches. You do not find straggling trees of this species here and there throughout the wood, but rather a little forest of them. The same is the case with the white and red pines and some other trees, greatly to the convenience of the lumberer. They are of a social habit, growing in “veins,” “clumps,” “groups,” or “communities,” as the explorers call them, distinguishing them far away, from the top of a hill or a tree, the white pines towering above the surrounding forest, or else they form extensive forests by themselves. I should have liked to come across a large community of pines which had never been invaded by the lumbering army.

We saw some fresh moose-tracks along the shore. The stream was only from one and one half to three rods wide, quite winding, with occasional small islands, meadows, and some very swift and shallow places. When we came to an island the Indian never hesitated which side to take, as if the current told him which was the shortest and deepest. It was lucky for us that the water was so high. We had to walk but once on this stream, carrying a part of the load, at a swift and shallow reach, while he got up with the canoe, not being obliged to take out, though he said it was very strong water. Once or twice we passed the red wreck of a bateau which had been stove some spring.

While making this portage I saw many splendid specimens of the great purple fringed orchis, three feet high. It is remarkable that such delicate flowers should here adorn these wilderness paths.

The Umbazookskus is called ten miles long. Having poled up the narrowest part some three or four miles, the next opening in the sky was over Umbazookskus Lake, which we suddenly entered about eleven o’clock in the forenoon. It stretches north-westerly four or five miles. We crossed the southeast end to the carry into Mud Pond.

Hodge, who went through this way to the St. Lawrence in the service of the State, calls the portage here a mile and three quarters long. The Indian said this was the wettest carry in the State, and as the season was a very wet one we anticipated an unpleasant walk. As usual he made one large bundle of the pork-keg, cooking-utensils, and other loose traps, by tying them up in his blanket. We should be obliged to go over the carry twice, and our method was to carry one half part way, and then go back for the rest.

Our path ran close by the door of a log hut in a clearing at this end of the carry, which the Indian, who alone entered it, found to be occupied by a Canadian and his family, and that the man had been blind for a year. This was the first house above Chesuncook, and was built here, no doubt, because it was the route of the lumberers in the winter and spring.

After a slight ascent from the lake through the springy soil of the Canadian’s clearing, we entered on a level and very wet and rocky path through the dense evergreen forest, a loosely paved gutter merely, where we went leaping from rock to rock and from side to side in the vain attempt to keep out of the water and mud. It was on this carry that the white hunter whom I met in the stage, as he told me, had shot two bears a few months before. They stood directly in the path and did not turn out for him. He said that at this season bears were found on the mountains and hillsides in search of berries and were apt to be saucy.

Here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land in the State. This very spot was described as “covered with the greatest abundance of pine,” but now this appeared to me, comparatively, an uncommon tree there--and yet you did not see where any more could have stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc.

The Indian with his canoe soon disappeared before us, but ere long he came back and told us to take a path which turned off westward, it being better walking, and, at my suggestion, he agreed to leave a bough in the regular carry at that place that we might not pass it by mistake. Thereafter, he said, we were to keep the main path, and he added, “You see ’em my tracks.”

But I had not much faith that we could distinguish his tracks, since others had passed over the carry within a few days. We turned off at the right place, but were soon confused by numerous logging-paths coming into the one we were on. However, we kept what we considered the main path, though it was a winding one, and in this, at long intervals, we distinguished a faint trace of a footstep. This, though comparatively unworn, was at first a better, or, at least, a dryer road than the regular carry which we had left. It led through an arbor-vitæ wilderness of the grimmest character. The great fallen and rotting trees had been cut through and rolled aside, and their huge trunks abutted on the path on each side, while others still lay across it two or three feet high.

It was impossible for us to discern the Indian’s trail in the elastic moss, which, like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as well as the earth. Nevertheless, I did occasionally detect the track of a man, and I gave myself some credit for it. I carried my whole load at once, a heavy knapsack, and a large rubber bag containing our bread and a blanket, swung on a paddle, in all about sixty pounds; but my companion preferred to make two journeys by short stages while I waited for him. We could not be sure that we were not depositing our loads each time farther off from the true path.

As I sat waiting for my companion, he would seem to be gone a long time, and I had ample opportunity to make observations on the forest. I now first began to be seriously molested by the black fly, a very small but perfectly formed fly of that color, about one tenth of an inch long, which I felt, and then saw, in swarms about me, as I sat by a wider and more than usually doubtful fork in this dark forest path. Remembering that I had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a thoughtful hand in Bangor, I made haste to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual, as long as it was fresh, or for twenty minutes, not only against black flies, but all the insects that molested us. They would not alight on the part thus defended. It was composed of sweet oil and oil of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor. However, I finally concluded that the remedy was worse than the disease, it was so disagreeable and inconvenient to have your face and hands covered with such a mixture.

Three large slate-colored birds of the jay genus, the Canada jay, came flitting silently and by degrees toward me, and hopped down the limbs inquisitively to within seven or eight feet. Fish hawks from the lake uttered their sharp whistling notes low over the top of the forest near me, as if they were anxious about a nest there.

After I had sat there some time I noticed at this fork in the path a tree which had been blazed, and the letters “Chamb. L.” written on it with red chalk. This I knew to mean Chamberlain Lake. So I concluded that on the whole we were on the right course.

My companion having returned with his bag, we set forward again. The walking rapidly grew worse and the path more indistinct, and at length we found ourselves in a more open and regular swamp made less passable than ordinary by the unusual wetness of the season. We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees. The trail was almost obliterated, being no more than a musquash leaves in similar places when he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places. We concluded that if Mud Pond was as muddy as the approach to it was wet, it certainly deserved its name. It would have been amusing to behold the dogged and deliberate pace at which we entered that swamp, without interchanging a word, as if determined to go through it, though it should come up to our necks. Having penetrated a considerable distance into this and found a tussock on which we could deposit our loads, though there was no place to sit, my companion went back for the rest of his pack.

After a long while my companion came back, and the Indian with him. We had taken the wrong road, and the Indian had lost us. He had gone back to the Canadian’s camp and asked him which way we had probably gone, since he could better understand the ways of white men, and he told him correctly that we had undoubtedly taken the supply road to Chamberlain Lake. The Indian was greatly surprised that we should have taken what he called a “tow,” that is, tote, toting, or supply, road instead of a carry path,--that we had not followed his tracks,--said it was “strange,” and evidently thought little of our woodcraft.

Having held a consultation and eaten a mouthful of bread, we concluded that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now to keep on to Chamberlain Lake, omitting Mud Pond, than to go back and start anew for the last place, though the Indian had never been through this way and knew nothing about it. In the meanwhile he would go back and finish carrying over his canoe and bundle to Mud Pond, cross that, and go down its outlet and up Chamberlain Lake, and trust to meet us there before night. It was now a little after noon. He supposed that the water in which we stood had flowed back from Mud Pond, which could not be far off eastward, but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp.

Keeping on, we were ere long agreeably disappointed by reaching firmer ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but there was never any outlook over the forest. At one place I heard a very clear and piercing note from a small hawk as he dashed through the tree-tops over my head. We also saw and heard several times the red squirrel. This, according to the Indian, is the only squirrel found in those woods, except a very few striped ones. It must have a solitary time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life, seventy-five miles from a road as we had come. I wondered how he could call any particular tree there his home, and yet he would run up the stem of one out of the myriads, as if it were an old road to him. I fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us. One of those somber fir and spruce woods is not complete unless you hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his fine alarum--his spruce voice, like the working of the sap through some crack in a tree. Such an impertinent fellow would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me.

“Oh,” said I, “I am well acquainted with your family. I know your cousins in Concord very well.” But my overtures were vain, for he would withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar-top, and spring his rattle again.

We entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. The fallen trees were so numerous that for long distances the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over another fence into a second yard, and so on. In many places the canoe would have run if it had not been for the fallen timber. Again it would be more open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow. It was a mossy swamp, which it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though we saw none. It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you. Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl; it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. I did, however, see one dead porcupine. Perhaps he had succumbed to the difficulties of the way. These bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses.

Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and they who do the work are called “swampers.” I now perceived the fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here. However, I suppose they would tell you that this name took its origin from the fact that the chief work of roadmakers in those woods is to make the swamps passable. We came to a stream where the bridge, which had been made of logs tied together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over as we could. Such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we were on a path of any kind.

We then crossed another low rising ground, and I, who wore shoes, had an opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used boots, had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he might not be able to get his wet boots on again. He went over the whole ground, or water, three times, for which reason our progress was very slow. Beside that, the water softened our feet, and to some extent unfitted them for walking.

As I sat waiting for him it would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at nightfall, I proposed that I should push through with what speed I could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the Indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companion’s bag.

Having gone about a mile I heard a noise like the note of an owl, which I soon discovered to be made by the Indian, and answering him, we soon came together. He had reached the lake after crossing Mud Pond and running some rapids below it, and had come up about a mile and a half on our path. If he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, for the path branched once or twice before reaching this particular part of the lake. So he went back for my companion and his bag. Having waded through another stream, where the bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away, we continued on through alternate mud and water to the shores of Apmoojenegamook Lake, which we reached in season for a late supper, instead of dining there, as we had expected, having gone without our dinner.

It was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my companion had gone over most of it three times he had walked full a dozen miles. In the winter, when the water is frozen and the snow is four feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman. If you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part Mud Pond, and dilute it with equal parts of Umbazookskus and Apmoojenegamook; then send a family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and culverts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do the fencing.

We had come out on a point extending into Apmoojenegamook, or Chamberlain Lake, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and trees. We were rejoiced to see such dry things in that part of the world. But at first we did not attend to dryness so much as to mud and wetness. We all three walked into the lake up to our middle to wash our clothes.

This was another noble lake, twelve miles long; if you add Telos Lake, which, since the dam was built, has been connected with it by dead water, it will be twenty; and it is apparently from a mile and a half to two miles wide. We were about midway its length on the south side. We could see the only clearing in these parts, called the “Chamberlain Farm,” with two or three log buildings close together, on the opposite shore, some two and a half miles distant. The smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two men in a canoe from the farm, that being a common signal agreed on when one wishes to cross. It took them about half an hour to come over, and they had their labor for their pains this time.

After putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging the others to dry on the pole which the Indian arranged over the fire, we ate our supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore with our feet to the fire without pitching our tent, making a thin bed of grass to cover the stones.

Here first I was molested by the little midge called the no-see-em, especially over the sand at the water’s edge, for it is a kind of sand-fly. You would not observe them but for their light-colored wings. They are said to get under your clothes and produce a feverish heat, which I suppose was what I felt that night.

Our insect foes in this excursion were, first, mosquitoes, only troublesome at night, or when we sat still on shore by day; second, black flies (_simulium molestum_), which molested us more or less on the carries by day, and sometimes in narrower parts of the stream; third, moose-flies, stout brown flies much like a horsefly. They can bite smartly, according to Polis, but are easily avoided or killed. Fourth, the no-see-ems. Of all these, the mosquitoes are the only ones that troubled me seriously, but as I was provided with a wash and a veil, they have not made any deep impression.

The Indian would not use our wash to protect his face and hands, for fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any veil. He, therefore, suffered from insects throughout this journey more than either of us. He regularly tied up his face in his handkerchief, and buried it in his blanket, and he now finally lay down on the sand between us and the fire for the sake of the smoke, which he tried to make enter his blanket about his face, and for the same purpose he lit his pipe and breathed the smoke into his blanket.

In the middle of the night we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to its wildness. Some idea of bears, wolves, or panthers runs in your head naturally, and when this note is first heard very far off at midnight, as you lie with your ear to the ground,--the forest being perfectly still about you, you take it for granted that it is the voice of a wolf or some other wild beast,--you conclude that it is a pack of wolves baying the moon, or, perchance, cantering after a moose. It was the unfailing and characteristic sound of those lakes.

Some friends of mine, who two years ago went up the Caucomgomoc River, were serenaded by wolves while moose-hunting by moonlight. It was a sudden burst, as if a hundred demons had broke loose,--a startling sound enough, which, if any, would make your hair stand on end,--and all was still again. It lasted but a moment, and you’d have thought there were twenty of them, when probably there were only two or three. They heard it twice only, and they said that it gave expression to the wilderness which it lacked before. I heard of some men, who, while skinning a moose lately in those woods, were driven off from the carcass by a pack of wolves, which ate it up.

This of the loon--I do not mean its laugh, but its looning--is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear--_hoo-hoo-ooooo_, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all. Formerly, when lying awake at midnight in those woods, I had listened to hear some words or syllables of their language, but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry of the loon. I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.

I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.

VI

TUESDAY, JULY 28

When we awoke we found a heavy dew on our blankets. I lay awake very early and listened to the clear, shrill _ah, te te, te te, te_ of the white-throated sparrow, repeated at short intervals, without the least variation, for half an hour, as if it could not enough express its happiness.

We did some more washing in the lake this morning, and, with our clothes hung about on the dead trees and rocks, the shore looked like washing-day at home. The Indian, taking the hint, borrowed the soap, and, walking into the lake, washed his only cotton shirt on his person, then put on his pants and let it dry on him.

I observed that he wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, and strong linen or duck pants, which also had been white, blue woolen stockings, cowhide boots, and a Kossuth hat.[3] He carried no change of clothing, but, putting on a stout, thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready to be gone all summer. This looked very independent--a few simple and effective tools, and no rubber clothing. He was always the first ready to start in the morning. Instead of carrying a large bundle of his own extra clothing, etc., he brought back the greatcoats of moose tied up in his blanket. I found that his outfit was the result of a long experience, and in the main hardly to be improved on, unless by washing and an extra shirt. Wanting a button here, he walked off to a place where some Indians had recently encamped, and searched for one, but I believe in vain.

Having softened our stiffened boots and shoes with the pork fat, the usual disposition of what was left at breakfast, we crossed the lake, steering in a diagonal direction northeastly about four miles to the outlet. The Indian name, Apmoojenegamook, means lake that is crossed, because the usual course lies across and not along it. We did not intend to go far down the Allegash, but merely to get a view of the lakes which are its source, and then return this way to the East Branch of the Penobscot.

After reaching the middle of the lake, we found the waves pretty high, and the Indian warned my companion, who was nodding, that he must not allow himself to fall asleep in the canoe lest he should upset us; adding, that when Indians want to sleep in a canoe, they lie down straight on the bottom. But in this crowded one that was impossible. However, he said that he would nudge him if he saw him nodding.

A belt of dead trees stood all around the lake, some far out in the water, with others prostrate behind them, and they made the shore, for the most part, almost inaccessible. This is the effect of the dam at the outlet. Thus the natural sandy or rocky shore, with its green fringe, was concealed and destroyed. We coasted westward along the north side, searching for the outlet, about quarter of a mile distant from this savage-looking shore, on which the waves were breaking violently, knowing that it might easily be concealed amid this rubbish, or by the overlapping of the shore. It is remarkable how little these important gates to a lake are blazoned. There is no triumphal arch over the modest inlet or outlet, but at some undistinguished point it trickles in or out through the uninterrupted forest, almost as through a sponge.

We reached the outlet in about an hour, and carried over the dam there, which is quite a solid structure, and about one quarter of a mile farther there was a second dam. The result of this particular damming about Chamberlain Lake is that the headwaters of the St. John are made to flow by Bangor. They have thus dammed all the larger lakes, raising their broad surfaces many feet, thus turning the forces of Nature against herself, that they might float their spoils out of the country. They rapidly run out of these immense forests all the finer and more accessible pine timber, and then leave the bears to watch the decaying dams, not clearing nor cultivating the land, nor making roads, nor building houses, but leaving it a wilderness, as they found it. In many parts only these dams remain, like deserted beaver dams. Think how much land they have flowed without asking Nature’s leave.

The wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes. She feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees. Many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and all is still again. It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them--to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens. He speaks of a “berth” of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might.