cross a ridge where the hardwoods stand, as their ancestors stood,
untouched by the tools of men. Immense trunks of beech or sugar-maple
or yellow birch tower upward wide apart, the moss of centuries upon
them; far overhead is a delicate tracery of leaves, a dance of light
against the blue, and over all is the blessed silence.
Beyond the ridge the ground slopes downward to a uniform level. Soon
the moss grows deeper underfoot, with a coolness that speaks of
perpetual moisture. The forest becomes dense, almost bewildering; here
a “black growth” of spruce or fir, there a tangle of moosewood, yonder
a swale where impenetrable alder-thickets make it impossible to hold a
straight course. Because all this growth is useless to the lumberman,
there is no cutting to be seen; but because I have passed this way
before, instinctively following the same course like an animal, a faint
winding trail begins to appear, with a bent twig or a blazed tree at
every turn to give direction.
As you move forward more confidently, learning the woodsman’s way of
looking far ahead to pick up the guiding signs before you come to them,
the dim forest suddenly brightens; a wave of light runs in, saying as
it passes overhead that you are near an opening. As if to confirm the
message, the trail runs into a well-worn deer-path, which looks as if
the animals that used it knew well where they were going. Clumps of
delicate young larches spring up ahead; between them open filmy vistas,
like windows draped in lace, and across one vista stretches a ribbon of
silver. A few more steps and—there! my little pond is smiling at you,
reflecting the blue deeps of heaven or the white of passing clouds from
its setting of pale-green larch-trees and crimson mosses.
And now, if you are responsive, you shall have a new impression of this
old world, the wonderful impression which a wilderness lake gives at
the moment of discovery, but never again afterward. As you emerge from
cover of the woods, the pond seems to awaken like a sleeper. See, it
returns your gaze, and on its quiet face is a look of surprise that you
are here. Enjoy that first awakening look; for there is more of wisdom
and pleasure in it, believe me, than in hurrying forth blindly intent
on making a map or catching a trout, or doing something else that calls
for sight to the neglect of insight. All sciences, including
chartography and angling, can easily be learned by any man; but
understanding is a gift of God, and it comes only to those who keep
their hearts open.
Your own nature is here your best guide, and it shows you a surprising
thing: that your old habitual impressions of the world have suddenly
become novel and strange, as if this smiling landscape were but just
created, and you were the first to look with seeing eyes upon the glory
of it. It tells you, further, if you listen to its voice, that creation
is all like this, under necessity to be beautiful, and that the beauty
is still as delightful as when the evening and the morning were the
first day. This dance of water, this rain of light, this shimmer of
air, this upspringing of trees, this blue heaven bending over all—no
artist ever painted such things; no poet ever sang or could sing them.
Like a mother’s infinite tenderness, they await your appreciation, your
silence, your love; but they hide from your description in words or
pigments.
Finally, in the lowest of whispers, your nature tells you that the most
impressive and still most natural thing in this quiet scene is the
conscious life that broods silently over it. As the little pond seems
to awaken, to be alive and sentient, so also does that noble tree
yonder when you view it for the first time, or that delicate orchid
wafting its fragrance over the lonely bog. Each reflects something
greater than itself, and it is that greater “something” which appeals
to you when you enter the solitude. Your impressions here are those of
the first man, a man who found many beautiful things in a garden, and
God walking among them in the cool of the day. Call the brooding life
God or the Infinite or the Unknown or the Great Spirit or the Great
Mystery—what you will; the simple fact is that you have an impression
of a living Being, who first speaks to you in terms of personality that
you understand.
So much, and more, of eternal understanding you may have if you but
tarry a moment under these larches with an open mind. Then, when you
have honored your first impression, which will abide with you always,
you may trace out the physical features of my pond at leisure. Just
here it is not very wide; your eye easily overlooks it to rest with
pleasure on a great mound of moss, colored as no garden of flowers was
ever colored, swelling above the bog on the farther shore. On either
hand the water sparkles wider away, disappearing around a bend with an
invitation to come and see. To the left it ends in velvety shadow under
a bank of evergreen; to the right it seems to merge into the level
shore, where shadow melts with substance in a belt of blended colors. A
few yards back from the shore groups of young larches lift their
misty-green foliage above the caribou moss; they seem not to be rooted
deep in the earth, but to be all standing on tiptoe, as if to look over
the brim of my pond and see their own reflections. Everywhere between
these larch groups are shadowy corridors; and in one of them your eye
is caught by a spot of bright orange. The spot moves, disappears,
flashes out again from the misty green, and a deer steps forth to
complete the wilderness picture with the grace of life.
Such is my pond, hidden away in the heart of a caribou bog, which is
itself well hidden in dense forest. Before I found it the wild ducks
had made it a summer home from time immemorial; and now, since I
disturb it no more, it is possessed in peace by a family of beavers;
yet I still think of it as mine, not by grace of any artificial law or
deed, but by the more ancient right of possession and enjoyment. A
hundred lakes by which I have tented are greater or more splendid; but
the first charm of any wilderness scene is its solitude, and on these
greater lakes the impression of solitude may be broken by the flash of
a paddle-blade in the sun, or the chuck of an ax under the twilight, or
the gleam of a camp-fire through the darkness. But here on my pond you
may know how Adam felt when he looked abroad: no raft has ever ruffled
its surface; no ax-stroke or moan of smitten tree has ever disturbed
its quiet; no camp-fire has ever gleamed on its waters. Its solitude is
still that of the first day; and it has no name, save for the Indian
word that came unbidden at the moment of finding it, like another
Sleeping Beauty, in the woods.
Do you ask how I came to find my pond? Not by searching, but rather by
the odd chance of being myself lost. I had gone astray one afternoon,
and was pushing through some black growth when an alarm rose near at
hand. A deer whistled loudly, crying “Heu! heu! heu!” as he jumped
away, and on the heels of his cry came a quacking of flushed ducks.
Till that moment I thought I knew where I was; but the quacking brought
doubt, and then bewilderment. If a duck tells you anything in the
woods, he tells you of water, plenty of it; but the map showed no body
of water nearer than Big Pine Pond, which I had fished that day, and
which should be three or four miles behind me. Turning in the direction
of the alarm, I soon broke out of the cover upon a caribou bog, a
mysterious expanse never before suspected in that region, and before me
was the gleam of water in the sunshine. “A pond, a new one, and what a
beauty!” I thought with elation, as I caught its awakening look and
feasted my eyes on its glory of color. Then I gave it an Indian name
and hurried away; for I was surely off my course, and the hour was late
for lingering in strange woods. Somewhere to the west of me was the
home lake; so westward I headed, making a return-compass of bent twigs,
till I set my feet in a branch of the old logging-road. And that chance
trail is the one I have ever since followed.
XI
WOODSY IMPRESSIONS
Next morning I returned to explore my find at leisure. One part of that
exploration was to go completely around the bog, to learn its guiding
landmarks and compass-bearings; but an earlier and better part was to
sit quietly beside my pond to hear whatever it might have to say to me.
If that last sounds fanciful, remember that many things are voiceless
in this world, but few are wholly dumb. Of the numberless ponds that
brighten the northern wilderness, some were made by beavers, others by
flood or glacier or earthquake, and no two of them tell the same story
or make the same impression. They are like so many unspoiled Indians,
whom we regard from a distance as being mysteriously alike, but who
have different traditions, ideals, personalities, and even different
languages.
I know not what the spell of any lonely place may be when you make
yourself part of it; I only know that it stirs one strangely, like the
flute note of a wood-thrush or a song without words. Though I never met
with an adventure on my little pond, never cast a fly to learn whether
any trout lurked in its waters, never thought of firing a shot at its
abundant game, yet season after season I returned to it expectantly,
and went away satisfied. Such a pond has a charm of its own, a spell
which our forebears sought to express in terms of nymphs or puckwudgies
or water-sprites. It grows a better crop than trout, attracts a finer
game than deer or water-fowl, and you can seldom visit it without
learning something new about your natural self or the wood folk or the
friendly universe.
Thus, it happens on a day when you are waiting beside your pond, or
wending your way to it, that a moose or a fox or a dainty grouse
appears unexpectedly near you; and instantly, without thought or
motive, you “freeze” in your tracks or, if you are not seen, shrink
deeper into the shadow for concealment. The action is natural,
involuntary, instinctive, precisely like the action of a young deer
under similar circumstances; but when it is over you understand it, and
smile at finding yourself becoming more and more like other natural
creatures,—going softly, that is, making yourself inconspicuous without
trying or knowing how, and having no thought of harm to any bird or
beast, but only of watching him or gauging his course while remaining
yourself unseen. Only by some such method can you learn anything worth
knowing about a wild animal: books describe, naturalists classify and
sportsmen kill him; but to understand him you must be a sharer of his
quiet ways.
Comes another day, a day when you are in love with solitude itself,
when you learn with surprise that a man is never lonely when alone in
the woods; that ideals may be quite as companionable as folks; and that
around you in a goodly company are beauty, peace, spacious freedom and
harmonious thoughts, with a hint also, to some minds, of angels and
ministers of grace. The Attendant Spirit of “Comus,” the Ariel of “The
Tempest,” the good fairies of all folk,—these are never understood in
the town, nor in the woods unless you enter them alone.
At a later time, and with a thrill of great wonder, you may discover
the meaning of silence, and of the ancient myth of a lovely goddess of
silence; not the dead silence of a dungeon, which may roar in a man’s
ears till it deafens him or drives him mad, but the exquisite living
silence of nature, a silence which at any moment may break into an
elfin ringing of bells, or into a faintly echoing sound of melody, as
if stars or unseen beings were singing far away.
This impression of melody is often real, not illusory, and may be
explained by the impact of air-currents on resonant shells of wood,
hundreds of which fall to humming with the voice of ’cellos and
wind-harps; but there is another experience of the solitude, more
subtle but none the less real, for which only the psychologist will
venture to give an accounting. Once in a season, perhaps, comes an hour
when, no matter what your plans or desires may be, your mind seems
intent on some unrelated affair of its own. As you hurry over the
trail, you may be thinking of catching a trout or stalking a buck or
building a camp or getting to windward of a corporation; meanwhile your
subconscious mind, disdaining your will or your worry, is busily making
pictures of whatever attractive thing it sees,—radiant little pictures,
sunshiny or wind-swept, which shall be reproduced for your pleasure
long after the important matters which then occupied you are clean
forgotten.
Here is the story of one such picture, a reflection, no doubt, of the
primitive trait or quality called place-memory, which enables certain
animals or savages to recognize any spot on which their eyes have once
rested.
One late afternoon, years after I had found my pond, I crossed the
mountain from distant Ragged Lake, heading for the home lake by a new
route. There was no trail; but near the foot of the western slope of
the hills I picked up an old lumber road which seemed to lead in the
right direction. For a time all went well, and confidently; but when
the road dipped into an immense hollow, and there showed signs of
petering out, I followed it with increasing doubt, not knowing where I
might come out of the woods or be forced to spend the night. As I
circled through a swale, having left the road to avoid a press of
alders that filled it, an ash-tree lifted its glossy head above a
thicket with a cheery “Well met again, pilgrim! Whither away now?”
It was a surprising hail in that wild place, suggestive of dreams or
sleep-walking; but under the illusion was a grain of reality which
brought me to an instant halt. After passing under thousands of silent
trees all day, suddenly here was one speaking to me. And not only that,
but wearing a familiar look, like a face which smiles its recognition
of you while you try in vain to place it. Where, when had I seen that
tree before? No, impossible! I had never before entered this part of
the vast forest. Yet I must have seen it somewhere, or it could not now
stir a familiar memory. Nonsense! just a trick of the imagination. I
must hurry on. Thus my thoughts ran, like a circling hare; and all the
while the ash-tree seemed to be smiling at my perplexity.
The man who ignores such a hint has much to learn about woodcraft,
which is largely a subconscious art; so I sat down to smoke a
council-pipe with myself and the ash-tree over the matter. No sooner
was the mind left to its own unhampered way than it began to piece bits
of a puzzle-picture deftly together; and when the picture was complete
I knew exactly where I was, and where I might quickly find a familiar
trail. Eight years before, in an idle hour when nothing stirred on my
pond, I had explored a mile or so beyond the bog to the south, only to
find a swampy, desolate country without a trail or conspicuous landmark
of any kind. It was while I passed through this waste, seeking nothing
in particular and returning to my pond, that the mind took its snapshot
of a certain tree, and preserved the picture so carefully, so minutely,
that years later the original was instantly recognized. Many similar
ash-trees grew on that flat, each with its glossy crown and its gray
shaft flecked by dark-green moss; what there was in this one to attract
me, what outward grace or inward tree-sprite, I have not yet found out.
Another subconscious record seems to have been made for beauty alone,
with its consequent pleasure, rather than for utility. As I watched my
pond one summer morning, intent on learning what attracted so many deer
to its shores, the mind apparently chose its own moment for making a
perfect picture, a masterpiece, which should hang in its woodsy frame
on my mental wall forever. The sky was wondrously clear, the water
dancing, the air laden with the fragrance of peat and sweet-scented
grass. Deer were slow in coming that morning, and meanwhile nothing of
consequence stirred on my pond; but there was still abundant
satisfaction in the brilliant dragon-flies that balanced on bending
reeds, or in the brood of wild ducks that came bobbing out like young
mischief—makers from a hidden bogan, or even in the face of the pond
itself, as it brightened under a gleam of sunshine or frowned at a
passing cloud or broke into a laugh at the touch of a cat’s-paw wind.
Suddenly all these pleasant minor matters were brushed aside when a
bush quivered and held still on the farther shore.
All morning the bushes had been quivering, showing the silvery side of
their leaves to every breeze; but now their motion spoke of life, and
spoke truly, for out from under the smitten bilberries came a bear to
stand alert in the open. The fore part of his body was lifted up as he
planted his paws on a tussock; his massive head was thrust forward as
he tried to penetrate the far distance with his near-sighted eyes. He
was not suspicious, not a bit; his nose held steady as a pointing
dog’s, instead of rocking up and down, as it does when a bear tries to
steal a message from the air. A moment he poised there, a statue of
ebony against the crimson moss; then he leaped a bogan with surprising
agility, and came at his easy, shuffling gait around a bend of the
shore. Opposite me he sat down to cock his nose at the sky, twisting
his head as he followed the motion of something above him, which I
could not see,—a hornet, perhaps, or a troublesome fly that persisted
in buzzing about his ears. Twice he struck quickly with a paw,
apparently missing the lively thing overhead; for he jumped up, rushed
ahead violently and spun around on the pivot of his toes. Then he
settled soberly to his flat-footed shuffle once more, and disappeared
in a clump of larches, which seemed to open a door for him as he drew
near.
For me that little comedy was never repeated, though I saw many another
on dark days or bright; and the last time I visited my pond I beheld it
sadly altered, its beauty vanished, its shores flooded, its green trees
stark and dead. Unknown to me, however, the mind had made its
photographic record, and always I see my pond, as on that perfect day,
in its setting of misty-green larches and crimson bog. Again its quiet
face changes, like a human face at pleasant thoughts, and over it comes
to me the odor of sweet-scented grass. The sunshine brightens it; the
clouds shadow it; brilliant dragon-flies play among its bending reeds;
the same brood of ducklings glides in or out from bogan to grassy
bogan; and forever the bear, big and glossy black, goes shuffling along
the farther shore.
XII
LARCH-TREES AND DEER
One of the subtler charms of my pond, a thing felt rather than seen,
was a certain air of secrecy which seldom left it. In every wilderness
lake lurks a mystery of some kind, which you cannot hope to
penetrate,—a sense of measureless years, of primal far-off things, of
uncouth creatures dead and gone that haunted its banks before the
infancy of man; but on this little pond, with its sunny waters and open
shore, the mystery was always pleasant, and at times provoking, as if
it might be the place where an end of the rainbow rested.
Though small enough to give one a sense of possession (one can never
feel that he owns a big lake, or anything else which gives an
impression of grandeur or sublimity), my pond had a mischievous way of
hinting, when you were most comfortable, that it was hiding a secret;
that it might show you, if it would, a much better scene than that you
looked upon. It was shaped somewhat like an immense pair of spectacles,
having two lobes that were flashing bright, with a narrow band of
darker water between; and, what with its bending shores or intervening
larches, you could never see the whole of it from any one place. So,
like eyes that hide their subtlest lights of whim or fancy under
glasses, it often seemed to be holding something in reserve, something
which it would not reveal unless you searched for it. After watching
awhile from one beautiful or restful spot, you began to feel or imagine
that some comedy was passing unseen on the other half of the pond; and
though you resisted the feeling at first, sooner or later you crept
through the screen of larches to know if it were true.
On every side of the pond save one, where a bank of evergreen made
velvet shadows intermingled with spots of heavenly blue, the shores
were thickly spread with mosses, which began to color gloriously in
midsummer, the colors deepening as the season waned, till the
reflecting water appeared as the glimmering center of a gorgeous
Oriental rug. Along the edges of this rug, as a ragged fringe, stood
groups of larches in irregular order,—little fairylike larches that
bore their crown of leaves not as other trees bear them, heavily, but
as a floating mist or nebula of sage green. Like New England ladies of
a past age they seemed, each wearing a precious lace shawl which gave
an air of daintiness to their sterling worth. When the time came for
the leaves to fall, instead of rustling down to earth with a sound of
winter, mournfully, they would scamper away on a merry wind, mingling
their fragrance with that of the ripened grass; and then the twigs
appeared plainly for the first time, with a little knot or twist in
every twig, like toil-worn fingers that the lace had concealed.
Here or there amid this delicate new growth towered the ruin of a
mighty tamarack, or ship-knee larch, such as men sought in the old
clipper-ship days when they needed timbers lighter than oak, and even
tougher to resist the pressure of the gale or the waves’ buffeting.
Once, before the shipmen penetrated thus far into the wilderness, the
tamaracks stood here in noble array, their heads under clouds,
beckoning hungry caribou to feed from the lichens that streamed from
their broad arms above the drifted snow; now most of them are under the
moss, which covered them tenderly when they fell. The few remaining
ones stand as watch-towers for the hawks and eagles; their broken
branches make strange sepia drawings of dragon-knots and hooked beaks
on the blue sky. A tiny moth killed all these great larches; the
caribou moved northward, leaving the country, and the deer moved in to
take possession.
This and many other stories of the past my little pond told me, as I
watched from its shores or followed the game-trails that were spread
like a net about its edges. Back in the woods these trails wandered
about in devious fashion, seeking good browse or easy traveling; while
here or there a faint outgoing branch offered to lead you, if your eyes
were keen, to the distant ridge where a big buck had his daily
loafing-place. On the bog the trails went more circumspectly, uniting
at certain places in a single deep path, a veritable path of ages,
which was the only path that might safely be followed by any creature
with more weight than a fox. The moment you ventured away from it the
ground began to shiver, to quake alarmingly, to sink down beneath your
feet. Only a thin mat of roots kept you afloat; the roots might
anywhere part and drop you into black bottomless ooze, and close
forever over your head. A queer place, one might think, for heavy
beasts to gather, and so it was; but the old caribou-trails or new
deer-paths offered every one of them safe footing.
At first these game-trails puzzled me completely, being so many and so
pointless. That they were in constant use was evident from the
footprints in them, which were renewed almost every morning; yet I
never once saw a deer approach the water to drink or feed. Something
else attracted them; a highway from one feeding-ground to another, it
might be, or the wider outlook which brings deer and caribou out of
their dim woods to sightly places; but there was no certainty in the
matter until the animals themselves revealed the secret. One day, when
a young buck passed my hiding-place as if he were going somewhere, I
followed him to the upper or southern end of the pond. There he joined
four other deer, which were very busy about a certain spot, half hidden
by low bushes, a couple of hundred yards back from the shore. And there
they stayed, apparently eating or drinking, for a full half-hour or
more.