We have been paddling for more than an hour, through dark and slowly
moving water. Two or three hundred yards has been the limit of the view
ahead, as the stream swerves gracefully from the slightest rise of land,
and flows now east, now north, now east, now south again. So long a
stretch of navigable water is not common on the Delectable River, and we
make the most of it, moving leisurely, and prisoning the everchanging
picture with the imperfect camera of the eyes. Presently a too-familiar
sound is heard above the dipping of the paddles, and the Indian at the
stern announces, "Bogwah!"--which word in the tongue of the Chippewa
signifies a shallow. And as we round the next bend we see the swifter
water, the rocks in midstream, and the gently slanting line of treetops.
"Bogwah" spells work--dragging canoes over sandy and pebbly
river-bottom, or unloading and carrying around the foam of perilous
rapids. For compensation there is the pleasure of splashing ankle-deep
and deeper in the cool current, and casting for trout in the "laughing
shallow," which I much prefer to the "dreaming pool." They who choose it
may fish from boat or ledge: for me, to wade and cast is the poetry of
angling.
Assured that the "bogwah" before us extends for half a mile or more, we
decide for luncheon, and the canoes are beached on an island, submerged
in springtime, but at low water a heap of yellow sands. And I wish I
might reconstruct for you the picture which memory too faintly outlines.
Mere words will not do it, and yet one is impelled to try. "All
literature," says Mr. Arnold Bennett, in one of his stimulating essays,
"is the expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion, caused by a
sensation of the interestingness of life. What drives a historian to
write history? Nothing but the overwhelming impression forced upon him
by the survey of past times. He is forced into an attempt to
reconstitute the picture for others."
And so you are to imagine a marshy, brushy open, circular in shape, from
which the hills and forest recede for a considerable distance, and into
which a lazy brook comes to merge with the Delectable River; a place to
which the moose travel in great numbers, as hoofmarks and cropped
vegetation bear witness; a wild place, that must be wonderful in mist
and moonlight. Now it is drenched with sunrays from a vaporless sky,
and the white-throat is singing all around us--not the usual three sets
of three notes, but seven triplets. Elsewhere on the River, days apart,
I heard that prolonged melody, and although I have looked in the bird
books for record of so sustained a song, I have not found it.