black and white spruce and the fir. You paddle along in a narrow canal
through an endless forest, and the vision I have in my mind’s eye,
still, is of the small, dark, and sharp tops of tall fir and spruce
trees, and pagoda-like arbor-vitæs, crowded together on each side,
with various hard woods intermixed. Some of the arbor-vitæs were at
least sixty feet high. The hard woods, occasionally occurring
exclusively, were less wild to my eye. I fancied them ornamental
grounds, with farmhouses in the rear. The canoe and yellow birch,
beech, maple, and elm are Saxon and Norman, but the spruce and fir,
and pines generally, are Indian. The soft engravings which adorn the
annuals give no idea of a stream in such a wilderness as this. The
rough sketches in Jackson’s Reports on the Geology of Maine answer
much better. At one place we saw a small grove of slender sapling
white pines, the only collection of pines that I saw on this voyage.
Here and there, however, was a full-grown, tall, and slender, but
defective one, what lumbermen call a _konchus_ tree, which they
ascertain with their axes, or by the knots. I did not learn whether
this word was Indian or English. It reminded me of the Greek κόγχη,
a conch or shell, and I amused myself with fancying that it
might signify the dead sound which the trees yield when struck. All
the rest of the pines had been driven off.
How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of
the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive
forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and
bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. And, on
the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron
arrow-points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with.
The solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular
spearheads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre
look to the forest. The spruce-tops have a similar but more ragged
outline, their shafts also merely feathered below. The firs were
somewhat oftener regular and dense pyramids. I was struck by this
universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens. The tendency is to
slender, spiring tops, while they are narrower below. Not only the
spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vitæ and white pine, unlike the
soft, spreading second-growth, of which I saw none, all spire upwards,
lifting a dense spearhead of cones to the light and air, at any rate,
while their branches straggle after as they may; as Indians lift the
ball over the heads of the crowd in their desperate game. In this they
resemble grasses, as also palms somewhat. The hemlock is commonly a
tent-like pyramid from the ground to its summit.
After passing through some long rips, and by a large island, we
reached an interesting part of the river called the Pine Stream
Deadwater, about six miles below Ragmuff, where the river expanded to
thirty rods in width and had many islands in it, with elms and
canoe-birches, now yellowing, along the shore, and we got our first
sight of Ktaadn.
Here, about two o’clock, we turned up a small branch three or four
rods wide, which comes in on the right from the south, called Pine
Stream, to look for moose signs. We had gone but a few rods before we
saw very recent signs along the water’s edge, the mud lifted up by
their feet being quite fresh, and Joe declared that they had gone
along there but a short time before. We soon reached a small meadow on
the east side, at an angle in the stream, which was, for the most
part, densely covered with alders. As we were advancing along the edge
of this, rather more quietly than usual, perhaps, on account of the
freshness of the signs,--the design being to camp up this stream, if
it promised well,--I heard a slight crackling of twigs deep in the
alders, and turned Joe’s attention to it; whereupon he began to push
the canoe back rapidly; and we had receded thus half a dozen rods,
when we suddenly spied two moose standing just on the edge of the open
part of the meadow which we had passed, not more than six or seven
rods distant, looking round the alders at us. They made me think of
great frightened rabbits, with their long ears and half-inquisitive,
half-frightened looks; the true denizens of the forest (I saw at
once), filling a vacuum which now first I discovered had not been
filled for me,--_moose_-men, _wood-eaters_, the word is said to
mean,--clad in a sort of Vermont gray, or homespun. Our Nimrod, owing
to the retrograde movement, was now the farthest from the game; but
being warned of its neighborhood, he hastily stood up, and, while we
ducked, fired over our heads one barrel at the foremost, which alone
he saw, though he did not know what kind of creature it was;
whereupon this one dashed across the meadow and up a high bank on the
northeast, so rapidly as to leave but an indistinct impression of its
outlines on my mind. At the same instant, the other, a young one, but
as tall as a horse, leaped out into the stream, in full sight, and
there stood cowering for a moment, or rather its disproportionate
lowness behind gave it that appearance, and uttering two or three
trumpeting squeaks. I have an indistinct recollection of seeing the
old one pause an instant on the top of the bank in the woods, look
toward its shivering young, and then dash away again. The second
barrel was leveled at the calf, and when we expected to see it drop in
the water, after a little hesitation, it, too, got out of the water,
and dashed up the hill, though in a somewhat different direction. All
this was the work of a few seconds, and our hunter, having never seen
a moose before, did not know but they were deer, for they stood partly
in the water, nor whether he had fired at the same one twice or not.
From the style in which they went off, and the fact that he was not
used to standing up and firing from a canoe, I judged that we should
not see anything more of them. The Indian said that they were a cow
and her calf,--a yearling, or perhaps two years old, for they
accompany their dams so long; but, for my part, I had not noticed much
difference in their size. It was but two or three rods across the
meadow to the foot of the bank, which, like all the world thereabouts,
was densely wooded; but I was surprised to notice, that, as soon as
the moose had passed behind the veil of the woods, there was no sound
of footsteps to be heard from the soft, damp moss which carpets that
forest, and long before we landed, perfect silence reigned. Joe said,
“If you wound ’em moose, me sure get ’em.”
We all landed at once. My companion reloaded; the Indian fastened his
birch, threw off his hat, adjusted his waistband, seized the hatchet,
and set out. He told me afterward, casually, that before we landed he
had seen a drop of blood on the bank, when it was two or three rods
off. He proceeded rapidly up the bank and through the woods, with a
peculiar, elastic, noiseless, and stealthy tread, looking to right and
left on the ground, and stepping in the faint tracks of the wounded
moose, now and then pointing in silence to a single drop of blood on
the handsome, shining leaves of the _Clintonia borealis_, which, on
every side, covered the ground, or to a dry fern stem freshly broken,
all the while chewing some leaf or else the spruce gum. I followed,
watching his motions more than the trail of the moose. After following
the trail about forty rods in a pretty direct course, stepping over
fallen trees and winding between standing ones, he at length lost it,
for there were many other moose-tracks there, and, returning once more
to the last blood-stain, traced it a little way and lost it again,
and, too soon, I thought, for a good hunter, gave it up entirely. He
traced a few steps, also, the tracks of the calf; but, seeing no
blood, soon relinquished the search.
I observed, while he was tracking the moose, a certain reticence or
moderation in him. He did not communicate several observations of
interest which he made, as a white man would have done, though they
may have leaked out afterward. At another time, when we heard a slight
crackling of twigs and he landed to reconnoitre, he stepped lightly
and gracefully, stealing through the bushes with the least possible
noise, in a way in which no white man does,--as it were, finding a
place for his foot each time.
About half an hour after seeing the moose, we pursued our voyage up
Pine Stream, and soon, coming to a part which was very shoal and also
rapid, we took out the baggage, and proceeded to carry it round, while
Joe got up with the canoe alone. We were just completing our portage
and I was absorbed in the plants, admiring the leaves of the _Aster
macrophyllus_, ten inches wide, and plucking the seeds of the great
round-leaved orchis, when Joe exclaimed from the stream that he had
killed a moose. He had found the cow moose lying dead, but quite warm,
in the middle of the stream, which was so shallow that it rested on
the bottom, with hardly a third of its body above water. It was about
an hour after it was shot, and it was swollen with water. It had run
about a hundred rods and sought the stream again, cutting off a slight
bend. No doubt a better hunter would have tracked it to this spot at
once. I was surprised at its great size, horse-like, but Joe said it
was not a large cow moose. My companion went in search of the calf
again. I took hold of the ears of the moose, while Joe pushed his
canoe down-stream toward a favorable shore, and so we made out, though
with some difficulty, its long nose frequently sticking in the
bottom, to drag it into still shallower water. It was a
brownish-black, or perhaps a dark iron-gray, on the back and sides,
but lighter beneath and in front. I took the cord which served for the
canoe’s painter, and with Joe’s assistance measured it carefully, the
greatest distances first, making a knot each time. The painter being
wanted, I reduced these measures that night with equal care to lengths
and fractions of my umbrella, beginning with the smallest measures,
and untying the knots as I proceeded; and when we arrived at
Chesuncook the next day, finding a two-foot rule there, I reduced the
last to feet and inches; and, moreover, I made myself a two-foot rule
of a thin and narrow strip of black ash, which would fold up
conveniently to six inches. All this pains I took because I did not
wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large. Of the
various dimensions which I obtained I will mention only two. The
distance from the tips of the hoofs of the fore feet, stretched out,
to the top of the back between the shoulders, was seven feet and five
inches. I can hardly believe my own measure, for this is about two
feet greater than the height of a tall horse. (Indeed, I am now
satisfied that this measurement was incorrect, but the other measures
given here I can warrant to be correct, having proved them in a more
recent visit to those woods.) The extreme length was eight feet and
two inches. Another cow moose, which I have since measured in those
woods with a tape, was just six feet from the tip of the hoof to the
shoulders, and eight feet long as she lay.
When afterward I asked an Indian at the carry how much taller the
male was, he answered, “Eighteen inches,” and made me observe the
height of a cross-stake over the fire, more than four feet from the
ground, to give me some idea of the depth of his chest. Another
Indian, at Oldtown, told me that they were nine feet high to the top
of the back, and that one which he tried weighed eight hundred pounds.
The length of the spinal projections between the shoulders is very
great. A white hunter, who was the best authority among hunters that I
could have, told me that the male was not eighteen inches taller than
the female; yet he agreed that he was sometimes nine feet high to the
top of the back, and weighed a thousand pounds. Only the male has
horns, and they rise two feet or more above the shoulders,--spreading
three or four, and sometimes six feet,--which would make him in all,
sometimes, eleven feet high! According to this calculation, the moose
is as tall, though it may not be as large, as the great Irish elk,
_Megaceros Hibernicus_, of a former period, of which Mantell says that
it “very far exceeded in magnitude any living species, the skeleton”
being “upward of ten feet high from the ground to the highest point of
the antlers.” Joe said, that, though the moose shed the whole horn
annually, each new horn has an additional prong; but I have noticed
that they sometimes have more prongs on one side than on the other. I
was struck with the delicacy and tenderness of the hoofs, which divide
very far up, and the one half could be pressed very much behind the
other, thus probably making the animal surer-footed on the uneven
ground and slippery moss-covered logs of the primitive forest. They
were very unlike the stiff and battered feet of our horses and oxen.
The bare, horny part of the fore foot was just six inches long, and
the two portions could be separated four inches at the extremities.
The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. Why should
it stand so high at the shoulders? Why have so long a head? Why have
no tail to speak of? for in my examination I overlooked it entirely.
Naturalists say it is an inch and a half long. It reminded me at once
of the camelopard, high before and low behind,--and no wonder, for,
like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. The upper lip projected two
inches beyond the lower for this purpose. This was the kind of man
that was at home there; for, as near as I can learn, that has never
been the residence, but rather the hunting-ground of the Indian. The
moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then,
when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the
poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and
leafy horns,--a sort of fucus or lichen in bone,--to be the inhabitant
of such a forest as this!
Here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids, Joe now proceeded to
skin the moose with a pocket-knife, while I looked on; and a tragical
business it was,--to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced
with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the
ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which
was made to hide it. The ball had passed through the shoulder-blade
diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was
partially flattened. My companion keeps it to show to his
grandchildren. He has the shanks of another moose which he has since
shot, skinned and stuffed, ready to be made into boots by putting in a
thick leather sole. Joe said, if a moose stood fronting you, you must
not fire, but advance toward him, for he will turn slowly and give you
a fair shot. In the bed of this narrow, wild, and rocky stream,
between two lofty walls of spruce and firs, a mere cleft in the forest
which the stream had made, this work went on. At length Joe had
stripped off the hide and dragged it trailing to the shore, declaring
that it weighed a hundred pounds, though probably fifty would have
been nearer the truth. He cut off a large mass of the meat to carry
along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the
hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned. I was
surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the
side of the carcass, as the simplest course, not fearing that any
creature would touch it; but nothing did. This could hardly have
happened on the bank of one of our rivers in the eastern part of
Massachusetts; but I suspect that fewer small wild animals are
prowling there than with us. Twice, however, in this excursion, I had
a glimpse of a species of large mouse.
This stream was so withdrawn, and the moose-tracks were so fresh, that
my companions, still bent on hunting, concluded to go farther up it
and camp, and then hunt up or down at night. Half a mile above this,
at a place where I saw the _Aster puniceus_ and the beaked hazel, as
we paddled along, Joe, hearing a slight rustling amid the alders, and
seeing something black about two rods off, jumped up and whispered,
“Bear!” but before the hunter had discharged his piece, he corrected
himself to “Beaver!”--“Hedgehog!” The bullet killed a large hedgehog
more than two feet and eight inches long. The quills were rayed out
and flattened on the hinder part of its back, even as if it had lain
on that part, but were erect and long between this and the tail. Their
points, closely examined, were seen to be finely bearded or barbed,
and shaped like an awl, that is, a little concave, to give the barbs
effect. After about a mile of still water, we prepared our camp on the
right side, just at the foot of a considerable fall. Little chopping
was done that night, for fear of scaring the moose. We had moose meat
fried for supper. It tasted like tender beef, with perhaps more
flavor,--sometimes like veal.
After supper, the moon having risen, we proceeded to hunt a mile up
this stream, first “carrying” about the falls. We made a picturesque
sight, wending single file along the shore, climbing over rocks and
logs, Joe, who brought up the rear, twirling his canoe in his hands as
if it were a feather, in places where it was difficult to get along
without a burden. We launched the canoe again from the ledge over
which the stream fell, but after half a mile of still water, suitable
for hunting, it became rapid again, and we were compelled to make our
way along the shore, while Joe endeavored to get up in the birch
alone, though it was still very difficult for him to pick his way amid
the rocks in the night. We on the shore found the worst of walking, a
perfect chaos of fallen and drifted trees, and of bushes projecting
far over the water, and now and then we made our way across the mouth
of a small tributary on a kind of network of alders. So we went
tumbling on in the dark, being on the shady side, effectually scaring
all the moose and bears that might be thereabouts. At length we came
to a standstill, and Joe went forward to reconnoitre; but he reported
that it was still a continuous rapid as far as he went, or half a
mile, with no prospect of improvement, as if it were coming down from
a mountain. So we turned about, hunting back to the camp through the
still water. It was a splendid moonlight night, and I, getting sleepy
as it grew late,--for I had nothing to do,--found it difficult to
realize where I was. This stream was much more unfrequented than the
main one, lumbering operations being no longer carried on in this
quarter. It was only three or four rods wide, but the firs and spruce
through which it trickled seemed yet taller by contrast. Being in this
dreamy state, which the moonlight enhanced, I did not clearly discern
the shore, but seemed, most of the time, to be floating through
ornamental grounds,--for I associated the fir-tops with such
scenes;--very high up some Broadway, and beneath or between their
tops, I thought I saw an endless succession of porticoes and columns,
cornices and façades, verandas and churches. I did not merely fancy
this, but in my drowsy state such was the illusion. I fairly lost
myself in sleep several times, still dreaming of that architecture and
the nobility that dwelt behind and might issue from it: but all at
once I would be aroused and brought back to a sense of my actual
position by the sound of Joe’s birch horn in the midst of all this
silence calling the moose, _ugh_, _ugh_, _oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo_, and I
prepared to hear a furious moose come rushing and crashing through the
forest, and see him burst out on to the little strip of meadow by our
side.
But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I
had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it,
though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manœuvred; but
one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. The
afternoon’s tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence,
destroyed the pleasure of my adventure. It is true, I came as near as
is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself; and as it
is, I think that I could spend a year in the woods, fishing and
hunting just enough to sustain myself, with satisfaction. This would
be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which
you had raised, which also attracts me. But this hunting of the moose
merely for the satisfaction of killing him,--not even for the sake of
his hide,--without making any extraordinary exertion or running any
risk yourself, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side
pasture and shooting your neighbor’s horses. These are God’s own
horses, poor, timid creatures, that will run fast enough as soon as
they smell you, though they are nine feet high. Joe told us of some
hunters who a year or two before had shot down several oxen by night,
somewhere in the Maine woods, mistaking them for moose. And so might
any of the hunters; and what is the difference in the sport, but the
name? In the former case, having killed one of God’s and _your own_
oxen, you strip off its hide,--because that is the common trophy, and,
moreover, you have heard that it may be sold for moccasins,--cut a
steak from its haunches, and leave the huge carcass to smell to heaven
for you. It is no better, at least, than to assist at a
slaughter-house.
This afternoon’s experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the
motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness. The explorers
and lumberers generally are all hirelings, paid so much a day for
their labor, and as such they have no more love for wild nature than
wood-sawyers have for forests. Other white men and Indians who come
here are for the most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many
moose and other wild animals as possible. But, pray, could not one
spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with
other employments than these,--employments perfectly sweet and
innocent and ennobling? For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or
sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and
imperfect use Indians and hunters make of nature! No wonder that their
race is so soon exterminated. I already, and for weeks afterward, felt
my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was
reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one
would pluck a flower.
With these thoughts, when we reached our camping-ground, I decided to
leave my companions to continue moose-hunting down the stream, while I
prepared the camp, though they requested me not to chop much nor make
a large fire, for fear I should scare their game. In the midst of the
damp fir wood, high on the mossy bank, about nine o’clock of this
bright moonlight night, I kindled a fire, when they were gone, and,
sitting on the fir twigs, within sound of the falls, examined by its
light the botanical specimens which I had collected that afternoon,
and wrote down some of the reflections which I have here expanded; or
I walked along the shore and gazed up the stream, where the whole
space above the falls was filled with mellow light. As I sat before
the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, I
remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you
came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or
moose was watching the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly
upon me on account of the murder of the moose.
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives
and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,--to see
its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of
many broad boards brought to market, and deem _that_ its true success!
But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards
and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of
a man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law
affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a
dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can
he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale
oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who
slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the
elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger
race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our
bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every
creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and
he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than
destroy it.
[Illustration: _Pine Tree, Boar Mountain_]