"Wherever we strayed, the same tranquil leisure enfolded us; day followed
day in an order unbroken and peaceful as the unfolding of the flowers
and the silent march of the stars. Time no longer ran like the few
sands in a delicate hour-glass held by a fragile human hand, but like a
majestic river fed by fathomless seas. . . . We gave ourselves up to
the sweetness of that unmeasured life, without thought of yesterday or
to-morrow; we drank the cup to-day held to our lips, and knew that so
long as we were athirst that draught would not be denied us."--HAMILTON
W. MABIE: Under the Trees.
There is magic in words, surely, and many a treasure besides Ali Baba's
is unlocked with a verbal key. Some charm in the mere sound, some
association with the pleasant past, touches a secret spring. The bars
are down; the gate open; you are made free of all the fields of memory
and fancy--by a word.
Au large! Envoyez au large! is the cry of the Canadian voyageurs as they
thrust their paddles against the shore and push out on the broad lake
for a journey through the wilderness. Au large! is what the man in the
bow shouts to the man in the stern when the birch canoe is running down
the rapids, and the water grows too broken, and the rocks too thick,
along the river-bank. Then the frail bark must be driven out into
the very centre of the wild current, into the midst of danger to find
safety, dashing, like a frightened colt, along the smooth, sloping lane
bordered by white fences of foam.
Au large! When I hear that word, I hear also the crisp waves breaking on
pebbly beaches, and the big wind rushing through innumerable trees, and
the roar of headlong rivers leaping down the rocks, I see long reaches
of water sparkling in the sun, or sleeping still between evergreen walls
beneath a cloudy sky; and the gleam of white tents on the shore; and
the glow of firelight dancing through the woods. I smell the delicate
vanishing perfume of forest flowers; and the incense of rolls of
birch-bark, crinkling and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing
odour of balsam-boughs piled deep for woodland beds--the veritable and
only genuine perfume of the land of Nod. The thin shining veil of the
Northern lights waves and fades and brightens over the night sky; at
the sound of the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain rises.
Scene, the Forest of Arden; enter a party of hunters.
It was in the Lake St. John country, two hundred miles north of Quebec,
that I first heard my rustic incantation; and it seemed to fit the
region as if it had been made for it. This is not a little pocket
wilderness like the Adirondacks, but something vast and primitive. You
do not cross it, from one railroad to another, by a line of hotels. You
go into it by one river as far as you like, or dare; and then you turn
and come back again by another river, making haste to get out before
your provisions are exhausted. The lake itself is the cradle of the
mighty Saguenay: an inland sea, thirty miles across and nearly round,
lying in the broad limestone basin north of the Laurentian Mountains.
The southern and eastern shores have been settled for twenty or thirty
years; and the rich farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat and oats
and potatoes to a community of industrious habitants, who live in little
modern villages, named after the saints and gathered as closely as
possible around big gray stone churches, and thank the good Lord that
he has given them a climate at least four or five degrees milder than
Quebec. A railroad, built through a region of granite hills, which will
never be tamed to the plough, links this outlying settlement to the
civilised world; and at the end of the railroad the Hotel Roberval,
standing on a hill above the lake, offers to the pampered tourist
electric lights, and spring-beds, and a wide veranda from which he can
look out across the water into the face of the wilderness.
Northward and westward the interminable forest rolls away to the shores
of Hudson's Bay and the frozen wastes of Labrador. It is an immense
solitude. A score of rivers empty into the lake; little ones like the
Pikouabi and La Pipe, and middle-sized ones like the Ouiatehouan and La
Belle Riviere, and big ones like the Mistassini and the Peribonca; and
each of these streams is the clue to a labyrinth of woods and waters.
The canoe-man who follows it far enough will find himself among lakes
that are not named on any map; he will camp on virgin ground, and make
the acquaintance of unsophisticated fish; perhaps even, like the
maiden in the fairy-tale, he will meet with the little bear, and the
middle-sized bear, and the great big bear.
Damon and I set out on such an expedition shortly after the nodding
lilies in the Connecticut meadows had rung the noon-tide bell of summer,
and when the raspberry bushes along the line of the Quebec and Lake St.
John Railway had spread their afternoon collation for birds and men. At
Roberval we found our four guides waiting for us, and the steamboat took
us all across the lake to the Island House, at the northeast corner.
There we embarked our tents and blankets, our pots and pans, and bags
of flour and potatoes and bacon and other delicacies, our rods and guns,
and last, but not least, our axes (without which man in the woods is a
helpless creature), in two birch-bark canoes, and went flying down the
Grande Decharge.
It is a wonderful place, this outlet of Lake St. John. All the floods
of twenty rivers are gathered here, and break forth through a net of
islands in a double stream, divided by the broad Ile d'Alma, into the
Grande Decharge and the Petite Decharge. The southern outlet is small,
and flows somewhat more quietly at first. But the northern outlet is a
huge confluence and tumult of waters. You see the set of the tide far
out in the lake, sliding, driving, crowding, hurrying in with smooth
currents and swirling eddies, toward the corner of escape. By the rocky
cove where the Island House peers out through the fir-trees, the current
already has a perceptible slope. It begins to boil over hidden stones
in the middle, and gurgles at projecting points of rock. A mile farther
down there is an islet where the stream quickens, chafes, and breaks
into a rapid. Behind the islet it drops down in three or four foaming
steps. On the outside it makes one long, straight rush into a line of
white-crested standing waves.
As we approached, the steersman in the first canoe stood up to look over
the course. The sea was high. Was it too high? The canoes were heavily
loaded. Could they leap the waves? There was a quick talk among the
guides as we slipped along, undecided which way to turn. Then the
question seemed to settle itself, as most of these woodland questions
do, as if some silent force of Nature had the casting-vote. "Sautez,
sautez!" cried Ferdinand, "envoyez au large!" In a moment we were
sliding down the smooth back of the rapid, directly toward the first big
wave. The rocky shore went by us like a dream; we could feel the motion
of the earth whirling around with us. The crest of the billow in front
curled above the bow of the canoe. "Arret', arret', doucement!" A swift
stroke of the paddle checked the canoe, quivering and prancing like
a horse suddenly reined in. The wave ahead, as if surprised, sank and
flattened for a second. The canoe leaped through the edge of it, swerved
to one side, and ran gayly down along the fringe of the line of billows,
into quieter water.
Every one feels the exhilaration of such a descent. I know a lady who
almost cried with fright when she went down her first rapid, but before
the voyage was ended she was saying:--
"Count that day lost whose low, descending sun
Sees no fall leaped, no foaming rapid run."
It takes a touch of danger to bring out the joy of life.
Our guides began to shout, and joke each other, and praise their canoes.
"You grazed that villain rock at the corner," said Jean; "didn't you
know where it was?"
"Yes, after I touched it," cried Ferdinand; "but you took in a bucket of
water, and I suppose your m'sieu' is sitting on a piece of the river. Is
it not?"
This seemed to us all a very merry jest, and we laughed with the same
inextinguishable laughter which a practical joke, according to Homer,
always used to raise in Olympus. It is one of the charms of life in the
woods that it brings back the high spirits of boyhood and renews
the youth of the world. Plain fun, like plain food, tastes good
out-of-doors. Nectar is the sweet sap of a maple-tree. Ambrosia is only
another name for well-turned flapjacks. And all the immortals, sitting
around the table of golden cedar-slabs, make merry when the clumsy
Hephaistos, playing the part of Hebe, stumbles over a root and upsets
the plate of cakes into the fire.
The first little rapid of the Grande Decharge was only the beginning.
Half a mile below we could see the river disappear between two points
of rock. There was a roar of conflict, and a golden mist hanging in the
air, like the smoke of battle. All along the place where the river sank
from sight, dazzling heads of foam were flashing up and falling back, as
if a horde of water-sprites were vainly trying to fight their way up to
the lake. It was the top of the grande chute, a wild succession of falls
and pools where no boat could live for a moment. We ran down toward it
as far as the water served, and then turned off among the rocks on the
left hand, to take the portage.
These portages are among the troublesome delights of a journey in the
wilderness. To the guides they mean hard work, for everything, including
the boats, must be carried on their backs. The march of the canoes on
dry land is a curious sight. Andrew Marvell described it two hundred
years ago when he was poetizing beside the little river Wharfe in
Yorkshire:--
"And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist,
And like antipodes in shoes
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but none so slow,
These rational amphibii go!"
But the sportsman carries nothing, except perhaps his gun, or his
rod, or his photographic camera; and so for him the portage is only
a pleasant opportunity to stretch his legs, cramped by sitting in the
canoe, and to renew his acquaintance with the pretty things that are in
the woods.
We sauntered along the trail, Damon and I, as if school were out and
would never keep again. How fresh and tonic the forest seemed as we
plunged into its bath of shade. There were our old friends the cedars,
with their roots twisted across the path; and the white birches, so trim
in youth and so shaggy in age; and the sociable spruces and balsams,
crowding close together, and interlacing their arms overhead. There were
the little springs, trickling through the moss; and the slippery logs
laid across the marshy places; and the fallen trees, cut in two and
pushed aside,--for this was a much-travelled portage.
Around the open spaces, the tall meadow-rue stood dressed in robes of
fairy white and green. The blue banners of the fleur-de-lis were planted
beside the springs. In shady corners, deeper in the wood, the fragrant
pyrola lifted its scape of clustering bells, like a lily of the valley
wandered to the forest. When we came to the end of the portage, a
perfume like that of cyclamens in Tyrolean meadows welcomed us, and
searching among the loose grasses by the water-side we found the
exquisite purple spikes of the lesser fringed orchis, loveliest and most
ethereal of all the woodland flowers save one. And what one is that? Ah,
my friend, it is your own particular favourite, the flower, by whatever
name you call it, that you plucked long ago when you were walking in the
forest with your sweetheart,--
"Im wunderschonen Monat Mai
Als alle Knospen sprangen."
We launched our canoes again on the great pool at the foot of the first
fall,--a broad sweep of water a mile long and half a mile wide, full of
eddies and strong currents, and covered with drifting foam. There was
the old campground on the point, where I had tented so often with my
lady Greygown, fishing for ouananiche, the famous land-locked salmon of
Lake St. John. And there were the big fish, showing their back fins as
they circled lazily around in the eddies, as if they were waiting to
play with us. But the goal of our day's journey was miles away, and we
swept along with the stream, now through a rush of quick water, boiling
and foaming, now through a still place like a lake, now through
"Fairy crowds
Of islands, that together lie,
As quietly as spots of sky
Among the evening clouds."
The beauty of the shores was infinitely varied, and unspoiled by
any sign of the presence of man. We met no company except a few
king-fishers, and a pair of gulls who had come up from the sea to spend
the summer, and a large flock of wild ducks, which the guides call
"Betseys," as if they were all of the gentler sex. In such a big family
of girls we supposed that a few would not be missed, and Damon bagged
two of the tenderest for our supper.
In the still water at the mouth of the Riviere Mistook, just above the
Rapide aux Cedres, we went ashore on a level wooded bank to make our
first camp and cook our dinner. Let me try to sketch our men as they are
busied about the fire.
They are all French Canadians of unmixed blood, descendants of the men
who came to New France with Samuel de Champlain, that incomparable old
woodsman and life-long lover of the wilderness. Ferdinand Larouche
is our chef--there must be a head in every party for the sake of
harmony--and his assistant is his brother Francois. Ferdinand is a
stocky little fellow, a "sawed off" man, not more than five feet two
inches tall, but every inch of him is pure vim. He can carry a big canoe
or a hundred-weight of camp stuff over a mile portage without stopping
to take breath. He is a capital canoe-man, with prudence enough to
balance his courage, and a fair cook, with plenty of that quality which
is wanting in the ordinary cook of commerce--good humour. Always joking,
whistling, singing, he brings the atmosphere of a perpetual holiday
along with him. His weather-worn coat covers a heart full of music. He
has two talents which make him a marked man among his comrades. He plays
the fiddle to the delight of all the balls and weddings through the
country-side; and he speaks English to the admiration and envy of
the other guides. But like all men of genius he is modest about his
accomplishments. "H'I not spik good h'English--h'only for camp--fishin',
cookin', dhe voyage--h'all dhose t'ings." The aspirates puzzle him. He
can get though a slash of fallen timber more easily than a sentence full
of "this" and "that." Sometimes he expresses his meaning queerly. He
was telling me once about his farm, "not far off here, in dhe Riviere au
Cochon, river of dhe pig, you call 'im. H'I am a widow, got five sons,
t'ree of dhem are girls." But he usually ends by falling back into
French, which, he assures you, you speak to perfection, "much better
than the Canadians; the French of Paris in short--M'sieu' has been in
Paris?" Such courtesy is born in the blood, and is irresistible. You
cannot help returning the compliment and assuring him that his English
is remarkable, good enough for all practical purposes, better than any
of the other guides can speak. And so it is.
Francois is a little taller, a little thinner, and considerably quieter
than Ferdinand. He laughs loyally at his brother's jokes, and sings the
response to his songs, and wields a good second paddle in the canoe.
Jean--commonly called Johnny--Morel is a tall, strong man of fifty, with
a bushy red beard that would do credit to a pirate. But when you look at
him more closely, you see that he has a clear, kind blue eye and a most
honest, friendly face under his slouch hat. He has travelled these woods
and waters for thirty years, so that he knows the way through them by a
thousand familiar signs, as well as you know the streets of the city. He
is our pathfinder.
The bow paddle in his canoe is held by his son Joseph, a lad not quite
fifteen, but already as tall, and almost as strong as a man. "He is yet
of the youth," said Johnny, "and he knows not the affairs of the camp.
This trip is for him the first--it is his school--but I hope he will
content you. He is good, M'sieu', and of the strongest for his age. I
have educated already two sons in the bow of my canoe. The oldest
has gone to Pennsylvanie; he peels the bark there for the tanning of
leather. The second had the misfortune of breaking his leg, so that he
can no longer kneel to paddle. He has descended to the making of shoes.
Joseph is my third pupil. And I have still a younger one at home waiting
to come into my school."
A touch of family life like that is always refreshing, and doubly so in
the wilderness. For what is fatherhood at its best, everywhere, but the
training of good men to take the teacher's place when his work is done?
Some day, when Johnny's rheumatism has made his joints a little stiffer
and his eyes have lost something of their keenness, he will be wielding
the second paddle in the boat, and going out only on the short and
easy trips. It will be young Joseph that steers the canoe through the
dangerous places, and carries the heaviest load over the portages, and
leads the way on the long journeys.
It has taken me longer to describe our men than it took them to prepare
our frugal meal: a pot of tea, the woodsman's favourite drink, (I never
knew a good guide that would not go without whisky rather than without
tea,) a few slices of toast and juicy rashers of bacon, a kettle of
boiled potatoes, and a relish of crackers and cheese. We were in a
hurry to be off for an afternoon's fishing, three or four miles down the
river, at the Ile Maligne.
The island is well named, for it is the most perilous place on the
river, and has a record of disaster and death. The scattered waters of
the Discharge are drawn together here into one deep, narrow, powerful
stream, flowing between gloomy shores of granite. In mid-channel the
wicked island shows its scarred and bristling head, like a giant ready
to dispute the passage. The river rushes straight at the rocky brow,
splits into two currents, and raves away on both sides of the island in
a double chain of furious falls and rapids.
In these wild waters we fished with immense delight and fair success,
scrambling down among the huge rocks along the shore, and joining the
excitement of an Alpine climb with the placid pleasures of angling.
At nightfall we were at home again in our camp, with half a score of
onananiche, weighing from one to four pounds each.
Our next day's journey was long and variegated. A portage of a mile or
two across the Ile d'Alma, with a cart to haul our canoes and stuff,
brought us to the Little Discharge, down which we floated for a little
way, and then hauled through the village of St. Joseph to the foot of
the Carcajou, or Wildcat Falls. A mile of quick water was soon passed,
and we came to the junction of the Little Discharge with the Grand
Discharge at the point where the picturesque club-house stands in a
grove of birches beside the big Vache Caille Falls. It is lively work
crossing the pool here, when the water is high and the canoes are heavy;
but we went through the labouring seas safely, and landed some distance
below, at the head of the Rapide Gervais, to eat our lunch. The water
was too rough to run down with loaded boats, so Damon and I had to walk
about three miles along the river-bank, while the men went down with the
canoes.
On our way beside the rapids, Damon geologised, finding the marks of
ancient glaciers, and bits of iron-ore, and pockets of sand full of
infinitesimal garnets, and specks of gold washed from the primitive
granite; and I fished, picking up a pair of ouananiche in foam-covered
nooks among the rocks. The swift water was almost passed when we
embarked again and ran down the last slope into a long deadwater.
The shores, at first bold and rough, covered with dense thickets of
second-growth timber, now became smoother and more fertile. Scattered
farms, with square, unpainted houses, and long, thatched barns, began
to creep over the hills toward the river. There was a hamlet, called St.
Charles, with a rude little church and a campanile of logs. The cure,
robed in decent black and wearing a tall silk hat of the vintage of
1860, sat on the veranda of his trim presbytery, looking down upon us,
like an image of propriety smiling at Bohemianism. Other craft appeared
on the river. A man and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a
dozen children packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed
bateau, picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads
of young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of
berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the country-side
was in evidence on the river. We felt quite as if we had been "in the
swim" of society, when at length we reached the point where the Riviere
des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot ladder of broken black
rocks. There we pitched our tents in a strip of meadow by the
water-side, where we could have the sound of the falls for a
slumber-song all night and the whole river for a bath at sunrise.
A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-cup
in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles across
country to the Riviere a l'Ours, a tributary of the crooked, unnavigable
river of Alders. The canoes and luggage were loaded on a couple of
charrettes, or two-wheeled carts. But for us and the guides there were
two quatre-roues, the typical vehicles of the century, as characteristic
of Canada as the carriole is of Norway. It is a two-seated buckboard,
drawn by one horse, and the back seat is covered with a hood like an
old-fashioned poke bonnet. The road is of clay and always rutty. It runs
level for a while, and then jumps up a steep ridge and down again, or
into a deep gully and out again. The habitant's idea of good driving
is to let his horse slide down the hill and gallop up. This imparts a
spasmodic quality to the motion, like Carlyle's style.
The native houses are strung along the road. The modern pattern has a
convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic adaptation
of the Mansard. The antique pattern, which is far more picturesque,
has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project like eyebrows,
shading the flatness of the face. Paint is a rarity. The prevailing
colour is the soft gray of weather-beaten wood. Sometimes, in the better
class of houses, a gallery is built across the front and around one
side, and a square of garden is fenced in, with dahlias and hollyhocks
and marigolds, and perhaps a struggling rosebush, and usually a small
patch of tobacco growing in one corner. Once in a long while you may see
a balm-of-Gilead tree, or a clump of sapling poplars, planted near the
door.
How much better it would have been if the farmer had left a few of the
noble forest-trees to shade his house. But then, when the farmer
came into the wilderness he was not a farmer, he was first of all a
wood-chopper. He regarded the forest as a stubborn enemy in possession
of his land. He attacked it with fire and axe and exterminated it,
instead of keeping a few captives to hold their green umbrellas over his
head when at last his grain fields should be smiling around him and he
should sit down on his doorstep to smoke a pipe of home-grown tobacco.
In the time of adversity one should prepare for prosperity. I fancy
there are a good many people unconsciously repeating the mistake of the
Canadian farmer--chopping down all the native growths of life, clearing
the ground of all the useless pretty things that seem to cumber it,
sacrificing everything to utility and success. We fell the last green
tree for the sake of raising an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop
to think what an ugly, barren place we may have to sit in while we eat
them. The ideals, the attachments--yes, even the dreams of youth are
worth saving. For the artificial tastes with which age tries to make
good their loss grow very slowly and cast but a slender shade.
Most of the Canadian farmhouses have their ovens out-of-doors. We saw
them everywhere; rounded edifices of clay, raised on a foundation of
logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof of boards. They looked
like little family chapels--and so they were; shrines where the ritual
of the good housewife was celebrated, and the gift of daily bread,
having been honestly earned, was thankfully received.
At one house we noticed a curious fragment of domestic economy. Half a
pig was suspended over the chimney, and the smoke of the summer fire was
turned to account in curing the winter's meat. I guess the children of
that family had a peculiar fondness for the parental roof-tree. We saw
them making mud-pies in the road, and imagined that they looked lovingly
up at the pendent porker, outlined against the sky,--a sign of promise,
prophetic of bacon.
About noon the road passed beyond the region of habitation into a barren
land, where blueberries were the only crop, and partridges took the
place of chickens. Through this rolling gravelly plain, sparsely wooded
and glowing with the tall magenta bloom of the fireweed, we drove toward
the mountains, until the road went to seed and we could follow it no
longer. Then we took to the water and began to pole our canoes up the
River of the Bear. It was a clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than
ten or fifteen yards wide, running swift and strong, over beds of sand
and rounded pebbles. The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the
narrow channel, between thick banks of alders, like clumsy sea-monsters.
All the grace with which they move under the strokes of the paddle, in
large waters, was gone. They looked uncouth and predatory, like a pair
of seals that I once saw swimming far up the river Ristigouche in chase
of fish. From the bow of each canoe the landing-net stuck out as a
symbol of destruction--after the fashion of the Dutch admiral who nailed
a broom to his masthead. But it would have been impossible to sweep the
trout out of that little river by any fair method of angling, for there
were millions of them; not large, but lively, and brilliant, and fat;
they leaped in every bend of the stream. We trailed our flies, and made
quick casts here and there, as we went along. It was fishing on the
wing. And when we pitched our tents in a hurry at nightfall on the low
shore of Lac Sale, among the bushes where firewood was scarce and there
were no sapins for the beds, we were comforted for the poorness of the
camp-ground by the excellence of the trout supper.
It was a bitter cold night for August. There was a skin of ice on the
water-pail at daybreak. We were glad to be up and away for an early
start. The river grew wilder and more difficult. There were rapids, and
ruined dams built by the lumbermen years ago. At these places the trout
were larger, and so plentiful that it was easy to hook two at a cast. It
came on to rain furiously while we were eating our lunch. But we did not
seem to mind it any more than the fish did. Here and there the river
was completely blocked by fallen trees. The guides called it bouchee,
"corked," and leaped out gayly into the water with their axes to
"uncork" it. We passed through some pretty lakes, unknown to the
map-makers, and arrived, before sundown, at the Lake of the Bear, where
we were to spend a couple of days. The lake was full of floating logs,
and the water, raised by the heavy rains and the operations of
the lumbermen, was several feet above its usual level. Nature's
landing-places were all blotted out, and we had to explore halfway
around the shore before we could get out comfortably. We raised the
tents on a small shoulder of a hill, a few rods above the water; and
a glorious camp-fire of birch logs soon made us forget our misery as
though it had not been.
The name of the Lake of the Beautiful Trout made us desire to visit
it. The portage was said to be only fifty acres long (the arpent is the
popular measure of distance here), but it passed over a ridge of newly
burned land, and was so entangled with ruined woods and desolate of
birds and flowers that it seemed to us at least five miles. The lake
was charming--a sheet of singularly clear water, of a pale green tinge,
surrounded by wooded hills. In the translucent depths trout and pike
live together, but whether in peace or not I cannot tell. Both of
them grow to an enormous size, but the pike are larger and have more
capacious jaws. One of them broke my tackle and went off with a silver
spoon in his mouth, as if he had been born to it. Of course the guides
vowed that they saw him as he passed under the canoe, and declared that
he must weigh thirty or forty pounds. The spectacles of regret always
magnify.
The trout were coy. We took only five of them, perfect specimens of
the true Salvelinus fontinalis, with square tails, and carmine spots
on their dark, mottled sides; the largest weighed three pounds and
three-quarters, and the others were almost as heavy.
On our way back to the camp we found the portage beset by innumerable
and bloodthirsty foes. There are four grades of insect malignity in
the woods. The mildest is represented by the winged idiot that John
Burroughs' little boy called a "blunderhead." He dances stupidly before
your face, as if lost in admiration, and finishes his pointless tale by
getting in your eye, or down your throat. The next grade is represented
by the midges. "Bite 'em no see 'em," is the Indian name for these
invisible atoms of animated pepper which settle upon you in the twilight
and make your skin burn like fire. But their hour is brief, and when
they depart they leave not a bump behind. One step lower in the scale
we find the mosquito, or rather he finds us, and makes his poisoned mark
upon our skin. But after all, he has his good qualities. The mosquito is
a gentlemanly pirate. He carries his weapon openly, and gives notice of
an attack. He respects the decencies of life, and does not strike below
the belt, or creep down the back of your neck. But the black fly is
at the bottom of the moral scale. He is an unmitigated ruffian, the
plug-ugly of the woods. He looks like a tiny, immature house-fly, with
white legs as if he must be innocent. But, in fact, he crawls like a
serpent and bites like a dog. No portion of the human frame is sacred
from his greed. He takes his pound of flesh anywhere, and does not
scruple to take the blood with it. As a rule you can defend yourself,
to some degree, against him, by wearing a head-net, tying your sleeves
around your wrists and your trousers around your ankles, and anointing
yourself with grease, flavoured with pennyroyal, for which cleanly and
honest scent he has a coarse aversion. But sometimes, especially on
burned land, about the middle of a warm afternoon, when a rain is
threatening, the horde of black flies descend in force and fury knowing
that their time is short. Then there is no escape. Suits of chain
armour, Nubian ointments of far-smelling potency, would not save you.
You must do as our guides did on the portage, submit to fate and
walk along in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris "bleeding at every
pore,"--or do as Damon and I did, break into ejaculations and a run,
until you reach a place where you can light a smudge and hold your head
over it.
"And yet," said my comrade, as we sat coughing and rubbing our eyes in
the painful shelter of the smoke, "there are worse trials than this in
the civilised districts: social enmities, and newspaper scandals, and
religious persecutions. The blackest fly I ever saw is the Reverend
-----" but here his voice was fortunately choked by a fit of coughing.
A couple of wandering Indians--descendants of the Montagnais, on whose
hunting domain we were travelling--dropped in at our camp that night as
we sat around the fire. They gave us the latest news about the portages
on our further journey; how far they had been blocked with fallen trees,
and whether the water was high or low in the rivers--just as a visitor
at home would talk about the effect of the strikes on the stock market,
and the prospects of the newest organization of the non-voting classes
for the overthrow of Tammany Hall. Every phase of civilisation or
barbarism creates its own conversational currency. The weather, like the
old Spanish dollar, is the only coin that passes everywhere.
But our Indians did not carry much small change about them. They were
dark, silent chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat sucking their
pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their own wooden effigies in front of
a tobacconist's shop,) until the spirit moved them, and they vanished in
their canoe down the dark lake. Our own guides were very different.
They were as full of conversation as a spruce-tree is of gum. When all
shallower themes were exhausted they would discourse of bears and canoes
and lumber and fish, forever. After Damon and I had left the fire and
rolled ourselves in the blankets in our own tent, we could hear the men
going on and on with their simple jests and endless tales of adventure,
until sleep drowned their voices.
It was the sound of a French chanson that woke us early on the morning
of our departure from the Lake of the Bear. A gang of lumbermen were
bringing a lot of logs through the lake. Half-hidden in the cold
gray mist that usually betokens a fine day, and wet to the waist from
splashing about after their unwieldy flock, these rough fellows
were singing at their work as cheerfully as a party of robins in a
cherry-tree at sunrise. It was like the miller and the two girls whom
Wordsworth saw dancing in their boats on the Thames:
"They dance not for me,
Yet mine is their glee!
Thus pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find;
Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind,
Moves all nature to gladness and mirth."
But our later thoughts of the lumbermen were not altogether grateful,
when we arrived that day, after a mile of portage, at the little Riviere
Blanche, upon which we had counted to float us down to Lac Tchitagama,
and found that they had stolen all its water to float their logs down
the Lake of the Bear. The poor little river was as dry as a theological
novel. There was nothing left of it except the bed and the bones; it
was like a Connecticut stream in the middle of August. All its pretty
secrets were laid bare; all its music was hushed. The pools that
lingered among the rocks seemed like big tears; and the voice of the
forlorn rivulets that trickled in here and there, seeking the parent
stream, was a voice of weeping and complaint.
For us the loss meant a hard day's work, scrambling over slippery
stones, and splashing through puddles, and forcing a way through the
tangled thickets on the bank, instead of a pleasant two hours' run on
a swift current. We ate our dinner on a sandbank in what was once the
middle of a pretty pond; and entered, as the sun was sinking, a narrow
wooded gorge between the hills, completely filled by a chain of small
lakes, where travelling became easy and pleasant. The steep shores,
clothed with cedar and black spruce and dark-blue fir-trees, rose sheer
from the water; the passage from lake to lake was a tiny rapid a few
yards long, gurgling through mossy rocks; at the foot of the chain there
was a longer rapid, with a portage beside it. We emerged from the dense
bush suddenly and found ourselves face to face with Lake Tchitagama.
How the heart expands at such a view! Nine miles of shining water lay
stretched before us, opening through the mountains that guarded it on
both sides with lofty walls of green and gray, ridge over ridge, point
beyond point, until the vista ended in
"You orange sunset waning slow."
At a moment like this one feels a sense of exultation. It is a new
discovery of the joy of living. And yet, my friend and I confessed to
each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret mingled
with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had even seen
that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we might never see it
again? Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a
touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious
memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find
another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it
forever.
Our first camp on Tchitagama was at the sunrise end of the lake, in a
bay paved with small round stones, laid close together and beaten firmly
down by the waves. There, and along the shores below, at the mouth of a
little river that foamed in over a ledge of granite, and in the shadow
of cliffs of limestone and feldspar, we trolled and took many fish: pike
of enormous size, fresh-water sharks, devourers of nobler game, fit
only to kill and throw away; huge old trout of six or seven pounds,
with broad tails and hooked jaws, fine fighters and poor food; stupid,
wide-mouthed chub--ouitouche, the Indians call them--biting at hooks
that were not baited for them; and best of all, high-bred onananiche,
pleasant to capture and delicate to eat.
Our second camp was on a sandy point at the sunset end of the lake--a
fine place for bathing, and convenient to the wild meadows and blueberry
patches, where Damon went to hunt for bears. He did not find any; but
once he heard a great noise in the bushes, which he thought was a bear;
and he declared that he got quite as much excitement out of it as if it
had had four legs and a mouthful of teeth.
He brought back from one of his expeditions an Indian letter, which he
had found in a cleft stick by the river. It was a sheet of birch-bark
with a picture drawn on it in charcoal; five Indians in a canoe paddling
up the river, and one in another canoe pointing in another direction; we
read it as a message left by a hunting party, telling their companions
not to go on up the river, because it was already occupied, but to turn
off on a side stream.
There was a sign of a different kind nailed to an old stump behind
our camp. It was the top of a soap-box, with an inscription after this
fashion:
A.D. MEYER & B. LEVIT
Soap Mfrs. N. Y.
CAMPED HERE JULY 18--
1 TROUT 17 12 POUNDS. II OUAN
ANISHES 18 12 POUNDS. ONE
PIKE 147 12 LBS.
There was a combination of piscatorial pride and mercantile enterprise
in this quaint device, that took our fancy. It suggested also a curious
question of psychology in regard to the inhibitory influence of horses
and fish upon the human nerve of veracity. We named the place "Point
Ananias."
And yet, in fact, it was a wild and lonely spot, and not even the Hebrew
inscription could spoil the sense of solitude that surrounded us when
the night came, and the storm howled across the take, and the
darkness encircled us with a wall that only seemed the more dense and
impenetrable as the firelight blazed and leaped within the black ring.
"How far away is the nearest house, Johnny?"
"I don't know; fifty miles, I suppose."
"And what would you do if the canoes were burned, or if a tree fell and
smashed them?"
"Well, I'd say a Pater noster, and take bread and bacon enough for
four days, and an axe, and plenty of matches, and make a straight line
through the woods. But it wouldn't be a joke, M'sieu', I can tell you."
The river Peribonca, into which Lake Tchitagama flows without a break,
is the noblest of all the streams that empty into Lake St. John. It is
said to be more than three hundred miles long, and at the mouth of the
lake it is perhaps a thousand feet wide, flowing with a deep, still
current through the forest. The dead-water lasted for several miles;
then the river sloped into a rapid, spread through a net of islands, and
broke over a ledge in a cataract. Another quiet stretch was followed by
another fall, and so on, along the whole course of the river.
We passed three of these falls in the first day's voyage (by portages so
steep and rough that an Adirondack guide would have turned gray at the
sight of them), and camped at night just below the Chute du Diable,
where we found some ouananiche in the foam. Our tents were on an islet,
and all around we saw the primeval, savage beauty of a world unmarred by
man,
The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite,
rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The after-glow in the western
sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the cedars, and
over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens but glorifying
the earth. There was something large and generous and untrammelled in
the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman's rhapsodies:--
"Earth of departed sunsets! Earth of the mountains misty-topped! Earth
of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of
shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!"
All the next day we went down with the current. Regiments of black
spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped with a
thick tuft of matted cones and branches. Tall white birches leaned out
over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own beauty in the
moving mirror. There were touches of colour on the banks, the ragged
pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always reminds me of a happy,
good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-drops of the jewel-weed, and the
intense blue of the closed gentian, that strange flower which, like a
reticent heart, never opens to the light. Sometimes the river spread out
like a lake, between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again
it divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the islands
as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of rock without a
fall. There were eight of these huge natural dams in the course of that
day's journey. Sometimes we followed one of the side canals, and made
the portage at a distance from the main cataract; and sometimes we ran
with the central current to the very brink of the chute, darting aside
just in time to escape going over. At the foot of the last fall we made
our camp on a curving beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon
in fishing.
It was interesting to see how closely the guides could guess at the
weight of the fish by looking at them. The ouananiche are much longer
in proportion to their weight than trout, and a novice almost always
overestimates them. But the guides were not deceived. "This one will
weigh four pounds and three-quarters, and this one four pounds, but
that one not more than three pounds; he is meagre, M'sieu', BUT he is
meagre." When we went ashore and tried the spring balance (which every
angler ought to carry with him, as an aid to his conscience), the guides
guess usually proved to be within an ounce or two of the fact. Any one
of the senses can be educated to do the work of the others. The eyes of
these experienced fishermen were as sensitive to weight as if they had
been made to use as scales.
Below the last fall the Peribonca flows for a score of miles with an
unbroken, ever-widening stream, through low shores of forest and bush
and meadow. Near its mouth the Little Peribonca joins it, and the
immense flood, nearly two miles wide, pours into Lake St. John. Here
we saw the first outpost of civilisation--a huge unpainted storehouse,
where supplies are kept for the lumbermen and the new settlers. Here
also we found the tiny, lame steam launch that was to carry us back to
the Hotel Roberval. Our canoes were stowed upon the roof of the cabin,
and we embarked for the last stage of our long journey.
As we came out of the river-mouth, the opposite shore of the lake was
invisible, and a stiff "Nor'wester" was rolling big waves across the
bar. It was like putting out into the open sea. The launch laboured and
puffed along for four or five miles, growing more and more asthmatic
with every breath. Then there was an explosion in the engine-room. Some
necessary part of the intestinal machinery had blown out. There was a
moment of confusion. The captain hurried to drop the anchor, and the
narrow craft lay rolling in the billows.
What to do? The captain shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman. "Wait
here, I suppose." But how long? "Who knows? Perhaps till to-morrow;
perhaps the day after. They will send another boat to look for us in the
course of time."
But the quarters were cramped; the weather looked ugly; if the wind
should rise, the cranky launch would not be a safe cradle for the night.
Damon and I preferred the canoes, for they at least would float if they
were capsized. So we stepped into the frail, buoyant shells of bark once
more, and danced over the big waves toward the shore. We made a camp on
a wind-swept point of sand, and felt like shipwrecked mariners. But it
was a gilt-edged shipwreck. For our larder was still full, and as if to
provide us with the luxuries as well as the necessities of life, Nature
had spread an inexhaustible dessert of the largest and most luscious
blueberries around our tents.
After supper, strolling along the beach, we debated the best way of
escape; whether to send one of our canoes around the eastern shore of
the lake that night, to meet the steamer at the Island House and bring
it to our rescue; or to set out the next morning, and paddle both canoes
around the western end of the lake, thirty miles, to the Hotel Roberval.
While we were talking, we came to a dry old birch-tree, with ragged,
curling bark. "Here is a torch," cried Damon, "to throw light upon the
situation." He touched a match to it, and the flames flashed up the tall
trunk until it was transformed into a pillar of fire. But the sudden
illumination burned out, and our counsels were wrapt again in darkness
and uncertainty, when there came a great uproar of steam-whistles from
the lake. They must be signalling for us. What could it mean?
We fired our guns, leaped into a canoe, leaving two of the guides to
break camp, and paddled out swiftly into the night. It seemed an endless
distance before we found the feeble light where the crippled launch
was tossing at anchor. The captain shouted something about a larger
steamboat and a raft of logs, out in the lake, a mile or two beyond.
Presently we saw the lights, and the orange glow of the cabin windows.
Was she coming, or going, or standing still? We paddled on as fast as
we could, shouting and firing off a revolver until we had no more
cartridges. We were resolved not to let that mysterious vessel escape
us, and threw ourselves with energy into the novel excitement of chasing
a steamboat in the dark.
Then the lights began to swing around; the throbbing of paddle-wheels
grew louder and louder; she was evidently coming straight toward us. At
that moment it flashed upon us that, while she had plenty of lights,
we had none! We were lying, invisible, right across her track. The
character of the steamboat chase was reversed. We turned and fled, as
the guides say, a quatre pattes, into illimitable space, trying to
get out of the way of our too powerful friend. It makes considerable
difference, in the voyage of life, whether you chase the steamboat, or
the steamboat chases you.
Meantime our other canoe had approached unseen. The steamer passed
safely between the two boats, slackening speed as the pilot caught our
loud halloo! She loomed up above us like a man-of-war, and as we climbed
the ladder to the main-deck we felt that we had indeed gotten out of the
wilderness. My old friend, Captain Savard, made us welcome. He had been
sent out, much to his disgust, to catch a runaway boom of logs and tow
it back to Roberval; it would be an all night affair; but we must take
possession of his stateroom and make ourselves comfortable; he would
certainly bring us to the hotel in time for breakfast. So he went off on
the upper deck, and we heard him stamping about and yelling to his crew
as they struggled to get their unwieldy drove of six thousand logs in
motion.
All night long we assisted at the lumbermen's difficult enterprise. We
heard the steamer snorting and straining at her clumsy, stubborn convoy.
The hoarse shouts of the crew, disguised in a mongrel dialect which made
them (perhaps fortunately) less intelligible and more forcible, mingled
with our broken dreams.
But it was, in fact, a fitting close of our voyage. For what were
we doing? It was the last stage of the woodman's labour. It was the
gathering of a wild herd of the houses and churches and ships and
bridges that grow in the forests, and bringing them into the fold of
human service. I wonder how often the inhabitant of the snug Queen
Anne cottage in the suburbs remembers the picturesque toil and varied
hardship that it has cost to hew and drag his walls and floors and
pretty peaked roofs out of the backwoods. It might enlarge his home,
and make his musings by the winter fireside less commonplace, to give a
kindly thought now and then to the long chain of human workers through
whose hands the timber of his house has passed, since it first felt the
stroke of the axe in the snow-bound winter woods, and floated, through
the spring and summer, on far-off lakes and little rivers, au large.
1894.