A BEAUTIFUL FLOWER--A NEW LAKE--A MOOSE--HIS CAPTURE--A SUMPTUOUS
DINNER.
We started the next morning on an exploring voyage up the right-hand
stream, which enters this beautiful lake some half a mile west of the
one we had looked into the day before. On either hand, as we passed
along the narrow channel, was a natural meadow, covered with a
luxuriant growth of rank grass and weeds, conspicuous among which was
a beautiful flower, the like of which I have never seen anywhere else.
I am no botanist, and therefore cannot describe it in the language of
the florist, so that the learned in that beautiful science might
classify it. It resembles somewhat the wild lily in shape, growing
upon a tall, strong stem, almost like the stem of the flag. The flower
itself is double, and its deep crimson--the deepest almost of any
flower I have ever seen--shone conspicuously, as it waved gracefully
in the breeze above the surrounding vegetation. It has one defect,
however; it is without fragrance, I infer from the fact that its roots
spread far out every way, and reach down into the water beneath, that
it can hardly be transferred to the garden, or become civilized. It
would be a great acquisition to the collection of the florist if it
could, for I know of no flower that excels it in richness of color,
gracefulness of appearance, or in gorgeousness of beauty.
We saw abundance of deer feeding quietly upon the narrow meadows, and
upon the lily pads on our way. We had no inclination to injure them,
and we let them feed on. Some of them were hugely astonished, however,
at our presence, and dashed away, whistling and snorting, into the
forest. Two miles from the lake, we came to a rocky barrier, down
which the stream, came rushing and roaring, for fifty or sixty rods,
in a descent of perhaps sixty feet in all. Around these rapids the
boats were carried, and we found, above them, the water deep and
sluggish, flowing through a dense forest, the tall trees on the banks
stretching their leafy arms across the narrow channel, forming above
it an arch delightfully cool, through which the sunlight could
scarcely penetrate. We followed this channel a long way, when we came
to a little lake or pond, four or five miles in circumference. It was
a perfect gem, laying there all alone, so calm, so lovely in its
solitude, with no sign of civilization around it, no sound of
civilization startling its echoes from their sleep of ages, no human
voice having perhaps ever been heard upon its shore since the red man
departed from the hunting-ground of his fathers. The shores all around
it were bold and rocky, save on the western side, where a broad sandy
beach, of a quarter of a mile in extent, lay between the water and the
shadow of the deep forest beyond. A solitary island of half a dozen
acres, covered with majestic pines and tall, straight spruce trees,
rises near the centre of the lake, adding a new charm to its quiet
beauty. The waters of this little lake are clearer and more
transparent than those of any other we had seen; we could see the
white shells on its sandy bottom, fifteen feet below the surface. This
peculiarity induced us to believe that we were above the stratum of
iron ore which seems to underlay most of this wild region, coloring,
while it does not render impure, the waters of most of these lakes and
rivers. I have frequently, in my wanderings in these northern wilds,
stumbled upon outcropping orebeds, which, were they nearer market, or
more accessible to the energy and enterprise of the American people,
would be capable of building up gigantic fortunes, but they are all
valueless here, and probably will continue so for generations to come.
We saw the fresh tracks of a moose on the sandy beach, tracks that had
been made that morning, and we concluded to spend the day here, in the
hope of securing one of these gigantic deer. We rowed to the island,
intending to encamp there. We entered a little bay, of half an acre,
the points forming it coming within a few yards of each other, and the
branches of the trees intertwining their long arms lovingly above. As
we landed, our dogs began nosing and dashing about, as if suddenly
roused into excitement by the hot scent of some animal that had been
disturbed by our coming. They broke into a simultaneous cry, and
plunged like mad into the thicket. We pushed our boat back towards the
open water, when we heard the plunge of some animal into the lake, on
the other side of the island. Martin, who was in the leading boat with
me, by a few vigorous pulls at the oar, rounded the point between us
and the spot where we had heard the plunge, and there, not ten rods
from the shore, making for the mainland, was the game which, of all
others, we most desired to see.
"A moose! by Moses!" exclaimed Martin, in huge excitement. "Hurrah!
hurrah! A moose! he's ours! he can't escape!" and away he dashed in
pursuit. The other boats now hove in sight, and a loud hurrah! went up
from each, when they saw the nature of the game that had been started.
There was no difficulty in overtaking the animal, desperate as were
his efforts to escape. We shot past him, and turned him back in a
direction towards the island again, and I picked up my rifle to settle
the matter.
"Don't shoot him," said Martin; "don't shoot him yet; he can't get
away, and if you kill him, he'll sink; and if he don't, we can't get
him into the boat. Let us drive him back to the island." The other
boats were, by this time, up with us, every man in a wild state of
excitement, eager to be first in at the death. We had headed the
animal towards the island, with our three boats so arranged, as that
he could swim in no other direction, without running one of them down.
The dogs had started a deer that had taken to the water, on the other
side of the island.
"Look here!" said I; "gentlemen, this game is mine. I claim him by
right of discovery, and my right must not be interfered with."
"Very well," the Doctor answered, "we'll only take a hand in his
capture if he's likely to escape. So, go ahead."
As we came within a few yards of the shore, and we could see that the
animal's hoofs touched the bottom, I aimed carefully at his head, and
fired. He made one desperate lunge forward, and turned over on his
side, dying with scarcely a straggle, the ball having passed directly
through his brain.
This was the first and only live moose I have ever seen. He was not a
large one, being, probably, a three-year-old, but well-grown. We
should have called him a monster, had we not, before that time, seen
in various museums the stuffed skins of those a quarter or a third
larger. He would have weighed, as shot, probably between five and six
hundred pounds. He had made this solitary island his home, as we
ascertained by his spoor and other signs that we found upon subsequent
explorations. We saw his bed but a few rods from where we landed, and
from which our dogs had aroused him, though they, in their excitement,
had overrun his scent, and dashed off after a deer.
We had now accomplished one of the objects of our journey in this
direction, and as the law we had imposed upon ourselves had reached
its limits, prohibiting our shooting another moose that day, even
should an opportunity occur, we concluded to return to our shanty, on
the lake below. We, therefore, dressed our moose, and taking with us
the skin and hind quarters, started down stream to a late dinner on
Little Tupper's Lake. Indeed, there was a sort of necessity for our
doing so. We had left our provisions there, calculating to return in
the afternoon, not having taken with us even pepper or salt, wherewith
to season the food which, upon constraint, we might cook during our
absence. A few crackers, in the pockets of each, was all, in the
provision line, that we had provided ourselves with, and though, when
we saw the moose-tracks in the sand, we had concluded to rough it, for
a single night, for the chance of securing such rare game, yet having
secured it, that part of our mission was accomplished, and we turned
towards home.
On our return to the lake, Spalding and myself rowed across to the
mouth of a cold brook, to procure a supply of fresh trout, upon which,
with our moose and bear-meat, to dine. This we soon accomplished, and
on our arrival home, we found huge pieces of moose and bear roasting
before a blazing fire. The meat was supported upon long sticks, one
end of which was sharpened, and the meat spitted upon it, and the
other thrust into the ground, in a slanting direction, so as to bring
the roasting pieces into a proper position before the fire. The meat
was removed occasionally, and turned, until the roasting process was
completed, and then served up on clean birch bark, just peeled from
the trees, in the place of platters. We had tin plates, knives, and
forks, with us, also a tea-kettle, tin cups, and tea of the choicest
quality, sugar, pepper, salt, and pork. The man who cannot make a meal
where the viands present are moose-meat, bear, jerked venison, fresh
trout, and pork, and for drink the best of tea and the purest and
coldest spring water, had better keep out of the Rackett woods.
The people, whoever they were, who prepared the camp in which we were
domiciled, had an eye to convenience and comfort. The shanty was built
of logs, on three sides, the crevices between which were filled with
moss, and the sloping roof neatly covered with bark, in layers, like
an old-fashioned roof, covered with split shingles. The front was
open, and directly before it was a rough fire-place, with jams, made
of small boulders, laid up with clay, regularly-fashioned, as if
intended for a kitchen. This fire-place was three or four feet high,
and served an excellent purpose, with reference to our cookery, and
the lighting of our shanty at night. It served, also, to conduct the
smoke upward, and prevented it from being blown into our faces, as we
sat in front, at once, of our sleeping-place and our camp-fire. The
only things that reminded us of civilization, aside from what we
carried with us, were the innumerable crickets that, through all the
night, kept up their chirruping in the crevices of this rude
fireplace. There was something old-fashioned and sociable in their
song. These, with the shrill notes of the little peepers along the
shore, were old sounds to us, familiar voices, and they fell
pleasantly on the ear. We had finished our meal, and taken to our
pipes in the evening, as the sun went down among the old forests, away
off in the west. The greyness of twilight came stealing over the
water, and grew into darkness in the beautiful valley where that lake
lay sleeping. The stars stole out silently, and set their watch in the
sky, and calmness and repose rested upon everything around us.
"I remember," said Smith, "the first year that I was in college, of
hearing two learned professors disputing about what sort of animal it
was that made the piping noise we hear in the marshy places, and
stagnant pools, in the spring time, usually known as peepers. One
insisted that it was a newt, or small lizard; and I remember that he
went to his library, and brought a volume which proved his theory to
be correct. The other denied the authority of the author, and insisted
that the peeper was a frog. The discussion excited my curiosity, and I
made up my mind to satisfy myself on the subject, if possible, by
occular demonstration. There was a small marshy place, half a mile, or
so, from the college grounds, from which I had heard, in my walks, the
music of the peepers coming up every evening, in a loud and joyous
chorus. I watched by it a number of evenings, and though there were a
plenty of peepers, piping merrily enough, yet I could not get sight of
one to save me. I began to think it was a myth, the viewless spirit of
the bog, that made all the noises about which the learned professors
had been disputing. At last, however, I got sight of a peeper, caught
him in the act, and saw that it was, in fact, a little frog, nothing
more, nothing less. He was not more than three feet from me, and
though, when I moved, he hid himself in the muddy water, yet I managed
to capture and take him home alive. He was a little animal, certainly,
not larger than a half-dollar piece, and it was marvellous how a thing
so small could make such a loud and piercing noise. I took him to my
room, and placed him in a water-tight box, in which I fashioned an
artificial bog, in the hope that he would confirm my testimony by his
piping. The second evening, as I sat in my room, poring over the
recitations of the morrow, he lifted up his voice, loud, shrill, and
clear, as when singing in his native marsh. I hurried, in triumph, to
the learned disputants about his identity, and in their presence, he
furnished unanswerable evidence that the peeper was a frog, and not a
newt. I was complimented by both the learned pundits, as though I had
added a great item to the aggregate of human knowledge."
"You _did_ do a great thing, my friend," said Spalding, "you solved a
mystery about which men, wise in the learning of the books, had
perhaps been disputing for centuries. What are the peepers? asked the
naturalist, who listened to their piping notes from the marshy places
in the spring time. It was a matter of small practical importance,
what they were. Still it was a question which MIND wanted to have
solved. Its solution would do no great amount of good to the world.
But then it was a mystery which it was the business of mind to lay
bare; and what more has science done in tracing the history and
progress of this earth of ours, as written upon the rocks, among which
geology has been so long delving? 'What are the peepers?' asked the
naturalist. 'They are newts, little lizards,' answers a learned
pandit. 'They are spirits of the bog, myths, that hold their carnival
in the early grass of the marshy pools,' says the theorist and poet,
who _believes_ in the idealities of a poetic fancy. 'They are frogs,'
says a third, who is ready to chop any amount of logic in favor of his
system of frogology, and hereupon columns of argument, and pages of
learned discussion, have been held over the identity of the jolly
peepers of the spring-time.
"But you discarded logic, threw away argument, and came down to the
sure demonstrations of sober fact. You watched by the marshy pool, and
caught the 'peeper' in the act, took him '_in flagrante, delicto_,' as
the lawyers say, and thus ended the theoretical discussion about the
'peepers.' You placed another fixed fact upon the page of
natural history.
"And how often has the wisdom of the schools, the philosophy of the
profoundest theorists, been overthrown by the simple demonstrations of
practical facts? For a thousand years the world was in pursuit of the
giant power that lay hidden in heated vapor, the steam that came
floating up from boiling water. That power eluded the grasp and
baffled the research of human genius, which was looking so earnestly
after it, until ingenuity gave it up, and philosophy pronounced it a
delusion. Not far from the beginning of the present century, practical
experiment began to develop the mysterious power of steam. Rudely and
imperfectly harnessed, at first, it still made the great wheel
revolve, and men talked about making it a great motor for mechanical
purposes. Philosophy volunteered its demonstrations of the absolute
impossibility of such a thing. Still human ingenuity felt its way
carefully onward, until the great fact was developed, that steam was
in truth capable of moving machinery, was endowed almost with
vitality, and could be made to throw the shuttle and spin. Ingenious
men hinted that it might be made to propel water-craft in the place of
wind and sails, and thus be harnessed into the service of commerce, as
it had already been into that of manufactures. Here again philosophy
interposed its axioms, and declared the scheme among the wild vagaries
of a distempered fancy. But years rolled on, and the tall ship that
swung out upon the broad ocean, and moved forward when the air was
still and calmness was on the face of the deep, forward in the eye of
the wind--forward in the teeth of the storm, that stopped not for
billow or blast, gave the lie to philosophy, and scattered the theory
of the wise like chaff.
"The lightning, that fierce spirit of the storm, that darted down on
its mission of destruction from the black cloud floating in the sky,
became a thing of interest to the mechanical world, and the question
was asked, 'Why cannot the lightning be harnessed into the service of
man, and be made utilitarian?' Philosophy sneered at the wild
delusion, but see how that same subtle and mysterious agency has been
conquered? Note how truthfully it carries every word intrusted to its
charge, along thousands of miles of the telegraph wire, with a speed,
in comparison with which, sound is a laggard, a speed that annihilates
alike space and time. Men looked into a mirror, and seeing their own
counterpart, a _fac-simile_ of themselves reflected there, began to
ask, 'Why may not that shadow be fixed; fastened in some way, to
remain upon the polished surface that gives it back, even after the
original may be mouldering in the grave?' Here again philosophy laid
its finger upon its nose, and winked facetiously, as if it had found a
new subject for ridicule, in the stupendous folly of such an inquiry.
But from that simple question, rose up the Daguerreian art; an art
which fixes upon metallic plates, upon paper, the shadow of a man, of
palace and cottage, of mountain and field, giving thus a picture ten
thousand times truer to nature than the pencil of the cunningest
artist. These and a thousand other mighty triumphs of human ingenuity
have fought their way onward to their present position, against the
fogyism of philosophy, the inertia of the schoolmen. They have been
the sequence of cold, resistless demonstrations of experiment and
fact. The world would stand still but for the spirit of research for
the practical; for experimental, and not theoretical knowledge, that
is abroad. It is this spirit that moves the world in all its present
matchless career of progress, and distinguishes our era above all
others of the world's existence. You may be thankful, my friend, that
you have been able to add another fixed fact to the stock of human
knowledge, even though it be only that the 'peeper' is a frog, and not
a 'newt' or a 'myth.'
"But who would suppose that such a tiny little frogling could make
such a loud, shrill, and ear-piercing sound? Who would think that a
million of such puny things, could make the air of a summer evening so
full of the music of their songs? I remember how, in my boyhood, I
listened to their voices, which came up loudest, shrillest, merriest,
when twilight was spreading its grey mantle over the earth; while the
song of the birds was hushing into silence, and the coming darkness
was lulling the things of the day into repose; Oh! how merrily they
sang along the little brooklet that took its rise in a spring in the
meadow, and wended its way among the young grass, just springing into
verdure, to the beautiful lake beyond. Their song is in my ear now,
and that meadow, that beautiful lake, the tall hills on the summits of
which the departing sunlight lingered, the tall maples that clustered
in their conelike beauty around that gushing fountain, the clustered
plum trees, the giant oak, spared by the woodman's axe when the old
forest was swept away, the fields, the 'Gulf' in the hill-side, and
the beautiful creek, that came cascading down the shelving rocks, and
leaping over precipices in which the speckled trout sported: all these
are before me now--a vision of loveliness, all the more dear because
stamped upon the memory when life was young. Oh! Time! Time! the
wrecks that lie scattered in thy pathway! That little brooklet, and
the peepers, the fountain, the maples, and the meadow, are all gone.
The brave old oak was riven by the lightning. The fields have crept up
to the very summit of the hills, and even the stream that came down
from the mountain has vanished away, save when the rains, or the
melting snows send it in a freshet over the rocks where, when I was a
boy, it was cascading always. That beautiful meadow, too, is gone, and
the streets of a modern village, with blocks of houses, and stores,
and shops, occupy the place where I swung my first scythe. The old
log-house vanished years and years ago. A steamboat ploughs its way
through that beautiful lake, and the things of my boyhood are but
visions of memory, called up from the long, long past. Not one
landmark of the olden time remains. Oh! Time! Time!"