ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but
there was never any outlook over the forest. While descending the
last, I saw many specimens of the great round-leaved orchis, of large
size; one which I measured had leaves, as usual, flat on the ground,
nine and a half inches long, and nine wide, and was two feet high. The
dark, damp wilderness is favorable to some of these orchidaceous
plants, though they are too delicate for cultivation. I also saw the
swamp gooseberry (_Rides lacustre_), with green fruit, and in all the
low ground, where it was not too wet, the _Rubus triflorus_ in fruit.
At one place I heard a very clear and piercing note from a small hawk,
like a single note from a white-throated sparrow, only very much
louder, as he dashed through the tree-tops over my head. I wondered
that he allowed himself to be disturbed by our presence, since it
seemed as if he could not easily find his nest again himself in that
wilderness. We also saw and heard several times the red squirrel, and
often, as before observed, the bluish scales of the fir cones which it
had left on a rock or fallen tree. This, according to the Indian, is
the only squirrel found in those woods, except a very few striped
ones. It must have a solitary time in that dark evergreen forest,
where there is so little life, seventy-five miles from a road as we
had come. I wondered how he could call any particular tree there his
home; and yet he would run up the stem of one out of the myriads, as
if it were an old road to him. How can a hawk ever find him there? I
fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide
us. One of those sombre fir and spruce woods is not complete unless
you hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his fine
alarum,--his spruce voice, like the working of the sap through some
crack in a tree,--the working of the spruce beer. Such an impertinent
fellow would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me. “Oh,” said
I, “I am well acquainted with your family, I know your cousins in
Concord very well. Guess the mail’s irregular in these parts, and
you’d like to hear from ’em.” But my overtures were vain, for he would
withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar-top, and
spring his rattle again.
We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the
walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the
fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely.
The fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances the route
was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences
as high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then
over another fence into a second yard, and so on; and, going back for
his bag, my companion once lost his way and came back without it. In
many places the canoe would have run if it had not been for the fallen
timber. Again it would be more open, but equally wet, too wet for
trees to grow, and no place to sit down. It was a mossy swamp, which
it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very
likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though we saw none.
It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the
scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of
these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger
inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red
squirrel to bark at you. Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does
not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
I did, however, see one dead porcupine; perhaps he had succumbed to
the difficulties of the way. These bristly fellows are a very suitable
small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses.
Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and
they who do the work are called “swampers.” I now perceived the
fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the
roads I ever saw. Nature must have cooperated with art here. However,
I suppose they would tell you that this name took its origin from the
fact that the chief work of roadmakers in those woods is to make the
swamps passable. We came to a stream where the bridge, which had been
made of logs tied together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we
got over as we could. This probably emptied into Mud Pond, and perhaps
the Indian might have come up it and taken us in there if he had known
it. Such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we
were on a path of any kind.
We then crossed another low rising ground, and I, who wore shoes, had
an opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used
boots, had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he
might not be able to get his wet boots on again. He went over the
whole ground, or water, three times, for which reason our progress was
very slow; beside that the water softened our feet, and to some extent
unfitted them for walking. As I sat waiting for him, it would
naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. Therefore, as I
could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was
uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right
course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at
nightfall, I proposed that I should push through with what speed I
could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the
Indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry
my companion’s bag.
Having gone about a mile, and got into low ground again, I heard a
noise like the note of an owl, which I soon discovered to be made by
the Indian, and, answering him, we soon came together. He had reached
the lake, after crossing Mud Pond, and running some rapids below it,
and had come up about a mile and a half on our path. If he had not
come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that
night, for the path branched once or twice before reaching this
particular part of the lake. So he went back for my companion and his
bag, while I kept on. Having waded through another stream, where the
bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away,--and this was
not altogether worse than our ordinary walking, since it was less
muddy,--we continued on, through alternate mud and water, to the shore
of Apmoojenegamook Lake, which we reached in season for a late supper,
instead of dining there, as we had expected, having gone without our
dinner. It was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my
companion had gone over most of it three times, he had walked full a
dozen miles, bad as it was. In the winter, when the water is frozen,
and the snow is four feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a
footman. As it was, I would not have missed that walk for a good deal.
If you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part Mud
Pond, and dilute it with equal parts of Umbazookskus and
Apmoojenegamook; then send a family of musquash through to locate it,
look after the grades and culverts, and finish it to their minds, and
let a hurricane follow to do the fencing.
We had come out on a point extending into Apmoojenegamook, or
Chamberlain Lake, west of the outlet of Mud Pond, where there was a
broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and
trees. We were rejoiced to see such dry things in that part of the
world. But at first we did not attend to dryness so much as to mud and
wetness. We all three walked into the lake up to our middle to wash
our clothes.
This was another noble lake, called twelve miles long, east and west;
if you add Telos Lake, which, since the dam was built, has been
connected with it by dead water, it will be twenty; and it is
apparently from a mile and a half to two miles wide. We were about
midway its length, on the south side. We could see the only clearing
in these parts, called the “Chamberlain Farm,” with two or three log
buildings close together, on the opposite shore, some two and a half
miles distant. The smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two men
in a canoe from the farm, that being a common signal agreed on when
one wishes to cross. It took them about half an hour to come over, and
they had their labor for their pains this time. Even the English name
of the lake had a wild, woodland sound, reminding me of that
Chamberlain who killed Paugus at Lovewell’s fight.
After putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging the others to
dry on the pole which the Indian arranged over the fire, we ate our
supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore with our feet to the fire,
without pitching our tent, making a thin bed of grass to cover the
stones.
Here first I was molested by the little midge called the no-see-em
(_Simulium nocivum_,--the latter word is not the Latin for no-see-em),
especially over the sand at the water’s edge, for it is a kind of
sand-fly. You would not observe them but for their light-colored
wings. They are said to get under your clothes, and produce a
feverish heat, which I suppose was what I felt that night.
Our insect foes in this excursion, to sum them up, were, first,
mosquitoes, the chief ones, but only troublesome at night, or when we
sat still on shore by day; second, black flies (_Simulium molestum_),
which molested us more or less on the carries by day, as I have before
described, and sometimes in narrower parts of the stream. Harris
mistakes when he says that they are not seen after June. Third,
moose-flies. The big ones, Polis said, were called _Bososquasis_. It
is a stout, brown fly, much like a horse-fly, about eleven sixteenths
of an inch long, commonly rusty-colored beneath, with unspotted wings.
They can bite smartly, according to Polis, but are easily avoided or
killed. Fourth, the no-see-ems above mentioned. Of all these, the
mosquitoes are the only ones that troubled me seriously; but, as I was
provided with a wash and a veil, they have not made any deep
impression.
The Indian would not use our wash to protect his face and hands, for
fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any veil; he, therefore,
suffered from insects now, and throughout this journey, more than
either of us. I think that he suffered more than I did, when neither
of us was protected. He regularly tied up his face in his
handkerchief, and buried it in his blanket, and he now finally lay
down on the sand between us and the fire for the sake of the smoke,
which he tried to make enter his blanket about his face, and for the
same purpose he lit his pipe and breathed the smoke into his blanket.
As we lay thus on the shore, with nothing between us and the stars, I
inquired what stars he was acquainted with, or had names for. They
were the Great Bear, which he called by this name, the Seven Stars,
which he had no English name for, “the morning star,” and “the north
star.”
In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the
shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct,
from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with
the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the
voice of a bird. I could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so
thrilling. When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared
to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to
its wildness. Some idea of bears, wolves, or panthers runs in your
head naturally, and when this note is first heard very far off at
midnight, as you lie with your ear to the ground,--the forest being
perfectly still about you, you take it for granted that it is the
voice of a wolf or some other wild beast, for only the last part is
heard when at a distance,--you conclude that it is a pack of wolves,
baying the moon, or, perchance, cantering after a moose. Strange as it
may seem, the “mooing” of a cow on a mountain-side comes nearest to my
idea of the voice of a bear; and this bird’s note resembled that. It
was the unfailing and characteristic sound of those lakes. We were not
so lucky as to hear wolves howl, though that is an occasional
serenade. Some friends of mine, who two years ago went up the
Caucomgomoc River, were serenaded by wolves while moose-hunting by
moonlight. It was a sudden burst, as if a hundred demons had broke
loose,--a startling sound enough, which, if any, would make your hair
stand on end, and all was still again. It lasted but a moment, and
you’d have thought there were twenty of them, when probably there were
only two or three. They heard it twice only, and they said that it
gave expression to the wilderness which it lacked before. I heard of
some men who, while skinning a moose lately in those woods, were
driven off from the carcass by a pack of wolves, which ate it up.
This of the loon--I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,--is a
long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my
ear,--_hoo-hoo-ooooo_, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key,
having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly
like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at
ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language
were but a dialect of my own, after all. Formerly, when lying awake at
midnight in those woods, I had listened to hear some words or
syllables of their language, but it chanced that I listened in vain
until I heard the cry of the loon. I have heard it occasionally on the
ponds of my native town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the
surrounding scenery.
I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a
loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the
other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.
* * * * *
TUESDAY, July 28.
When we awoke, we found a heavy dew on our blankets. I lay awake very
early, and listened to the clear, shrill _ah, te te, te te, te_ of
the white-throated sparrow, repeated at short intervals, without the
least variation, for half an hour, as if it could not enough express
its happiness. Whether my companions heard it or not, I know not, but
it was a kind of matins to me, and the event of that forenoon.
It was a pleasant sunrise, and we had a view of the mountains in the
southeast. Ktaadn appeared about southeast by south. A double-topped
mountain, about southeast by east, and another portion of the same,
east-southeast. The last the Indian called Nerlumskeechticook, and
said that it was at the head of the East Branch, and we should pass
near it on our return that way.
We did some more washing in the lake this morning, and with our
clothes hung about on the dead trees and rocks, the shore looked like
washing-day at home. The Indian, taking the hint, borrowed the soap,
and, walking into the lake, washed his only cotton shirt on his
person, then put on his pants and let it dry on him.
I observed that he wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish
flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, and strong
linen or duck pants, which also had been white, blue woolen stockings,
cowhide boots, and a Kossuth hat. He carried no change of clothing,
but putting on a stout, thick jacket, which he laid aside in the
canoe, and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a
blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and
strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked
off at once, ready to be gone all summer. This looked very
independent; a few simple and effective tools, and no india-rubber
clothing. He was always the first ready to start in the morning, and
if it had not held some of our property, would not have been obliged
to roll up his blanket. Instead of carrying a large bundle of his own
extra clothing, etc., he brought back the greatcoats of moose tied up
in his blanket. I found that his outfit was the result of a long
experience, and in the main hardly to be improved on, unless by
washing and an extra shirt. Wanting a button here, he walked off to a
place where some Indians had recently encamped, and searched for one,
but I believe in vain.
Having softened our stiffened boots and shoes with the pork fat, the
usual disposition of what was left at breakfast, we crossed the lake
early, steering in a diagonal direction, northeasterly about four
miles, to the outlet, which was not to be discovered till we were
close to it. The Indian name, _Apmoojenegamook_, means lake that is
crossed, because the usual course lies across, and not along it. This
is the largest of the Allegash lakes, and was the first St. John water
that we floated on. It is shaped in the main like Chesuncook. There
are no mountains or high hills very near it. At Bangor we had been
told of a township many miles farther northwest; it was indicated to
us as containing the highest land thereabouts, where, by climbing a
particular tree in the forest, we could get a general idea of the
country. I have no doubt that the last was good advice, but we did not
go there. We did not intend to go far down the Allegash, but merely to
get a view of the great lakes which are its source, and then return
this way to the East Branch of the Penobscot. The water now, by good
rights, flowed northward, if it could be said to flow at all.
After reaching the middle of the lake, we found the waves as usual
pretty high, and the Indian warned my companion, who was nodding, that
he must not allow himself to fall asleep in the canoe lest he should
upset us; adding, that when Indians want to sleep in a canoe, they lie
down straight on the bottom. But in this crowded one that was
impossible. However, he said that he would nudge him if he saw him
nodding.
A belt of dead trees stood all around the lake, some far out in the
water, with others prostrate behind them, and they made the shore, for
the most part, almost inaccessible. This is the effect of the dam at
the outlet. Thus the natural sandy or rocky shore, with its green
fringe, was concealed and destroyed. We coasted westward along the
north side, searching for the outlet, about one quarter of a mile
distant from this savage-looking shore, on which the waves were
breaking violently, knowing that it might easily be concealed amid
this rubbish, or by the overlapping of the shore. It is remarkable how
little these important gates to a lake are blazoned. There is no
triumphal arch over the modest inlet or outlet, but at some
undistinguished point it trickles in or out through the uninterrupted
forest, almost as through a sponge.
We reached the outlet in about an hour, and carried over the dam
there, which is quite a solid structure, and about one quarter of a
mile farther there was a second dam. The reader will perceive that the
result of this particular damming about Chamberlain Lake is, that the
head-waters of the St. John are made to flow by Bangor. They have thus
dammed all the larger lakes, raising their broad surfaces many feet;
Moosehead, for instance, some forty miles long, with its steamer on
it; thus turning the forces of nature against herself, that they might
float their spoils out of the country. They rapidly run out of these
immense forests all the finer, and more accessible pine timber, and
then leave the bears to watch the decaying dams, not clearing nor
cultivating the land, nor making roads, nor building houses, but
leaving it a wilderness as they found it. In many parts, only these
dams remain, like deserted beaver-dams. Think how much land they have
flowed, without asking Nature’s leave! When the State wishes to endow
an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw
represents an academy; a gang, a university.
The wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes.
She feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest
trees. Many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the
survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest
having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and
all is still again. It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a
forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the
mouse gnaws them,--to get his living. You tell me that he has a more
interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens. He speaks of
a “berth” of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm
might. When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you
that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump;
as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool
of oxen. In my mind’s eye, I can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a
yoke binding them together, and brazen-tipped horns betraying their
servitude, taking their stand on the stump of each giant pine in
succession throughout this whole forest, and chewing their cud there,
until it is nothing but an ox-pasture, and run out at that. As if it
were good for the oxen, and some terebinthine or other medicinal
quality ascended into their nostrils. Or is their elevated position
intended merely as a symbol of the fact that the pastoral comes next
in order to the sylvan or hunter life?
The character of the logger’s admiration is betrayed by his very mode
of expressing it. If he told all that was in his mind, he would say,
it was so big that I cut it down and then a yoke of oxen could stand
on its stump. He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the
tree. Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump,
and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can,
if you had not cut it down. What right have you to celebrate the
virtues of the man you murdered?
The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving
forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins,
but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot
read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He
ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills
and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his _a b c_
in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and
Dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a _pine-tree_
shilling (as if to signify the pine’s value to him), puts up a
_dee_strict schoolhouse, and introduces Webster’s spelling-book.
Below the last dam, the river being swift and shallow, though broad
enough, we two walked about half a mile to lighten the canoe. I made
it a rule to carry my knapsack when I walked, and also to keep it tied
to a crossbar when in the canoe, that it might be found with the canoe
if we should upset.
I heard the dog-day locust here, and afterward on the carries, a sound
which I had associated only with more open, if not settled countries.
The area for locusts must be small in the Maine woods.
We were now fairly on the Allegash River, which name our Indian said
meant hemlock bark. These waters flow northward about one hundred
miles, at first very feebly, then southeasterly two hundred and fifty
more to the Bay of Fundy. After perhaps two miles of river, we entered
Heron Lake, called on the map _Pongokwahem_, scaring up forty or fifty
young _shecorways_, sheldrakes, at the entrance, which ran over the
water with great rapidity, as usual in a long line.
This was the fourth great lake, lying northwest and southeast, like
Chesuncook and most of the long lakes in that neighborhood, and,
judging from the map, it is about ten miles long. We had entered it on
the southwest side, and saw a dark mountain northeast over the lake,
not very far off nor high, which the Indian said was called Peaked
Mountain, and used by explorers to look for timber from. There was
also some other high land more easterly. The shores were in the same
ragged and unsightly condition, encumbered with dead timber, both
fallen and standing, as in the last lake, owing to the dam on the
Allegash below. Some low points or islands were almost drowned.
I saw something white a mile off on the water, which turned out to be
a great gull on a rock in the middle, which the Indian would have been
glad to kill and eat, but it flew away long before we were near; and
also a flock of summer ducks that were about the rock with it. I
asking him about herons, since this was Heron Lake, he said that he
found the blue heron’s nests in the hardwood trees. I thought that I
saw a light-colored object move along the opposite or northern shore,
four or five miles distant. He did not know what it could be, unless
it were a moose, though he had never seen a white one; but he said
that he could distinguish a moose “anywhere on shore, clear across the
lake.”
Rounding a point, we stood across a bay for a mile and a half or two
miles, toward a large island, three or four miles down the lake. We
met with ephemeræ (shadfly) midway, about a mile from the shore, and
they evidently fly over the whole lake. On Moosehead I had seen a
large devil’s-needle half a mile from the shore, coming from the
middle of the lake, where it was three or four miles wide at least. It
had probably crossed. But at last, of course, you come to lakes so
large that an insect cannot fly across them; and this, perhaps, will
serve to distinguish a large lake from a small one.