GRAY CLOUD FROM THE EAST.]
Being thus under the other bank, I would hold the canoe while Billy,
astraddle the other end for the purpose of depressing the water to
within reach of his hand, would bail away the consequences of our
crossing. Then we would make up the quarter of a mile we had lost.
We quit at the Organ Pool about three o'clock of the afternoon. Not
much was said that evening.
The day following we tied into it again. This time we put Dick and
Deuce on an old Indian trail that promised a short cut, with
instructions to wait at the end of it. In the joyous anticipation of
another wet day we forgot they had never before followed an Indian
trail. Let us now turn aside to the adventures of Dick and Deuce.
Be it premised here that Dick is a regular Indian of taciturnity when
it becomes a question of his own experience, so that for a long time we
knew of what follows but the single explanatory monosyllable which you
shall read in due time. But Dick has a beloved uncle. In moments of
expansion to this relative after his return he held forth as to the
happenings of that morning.
Dick and the setter managed the Indian trail for about twenty rods.
They thought they managed it for perhaps twice that distance. Then it
became borne in on them that the bushes went back, the faint
knife-clippings, and the half weather-browned brush-cuttings that alone
constitute an Indian trail had taken another direction, and that they
had now their own way to make through the forest. Dick knew the
direction well enough, so he broke ahead confidently. After a
half-hour's walk he crossed a tiny streamlet. After another half-hour's
walk he came to another. It was flowing the wrong way.
Dick did not understand this. He had never known of little streams
flowing away from rivers and towards eight-hundred-foot hills. This
might be a loop, of course. He resolved to follow it up-stream far
enough to settle the point. The following brought him in time to a
soggy little thicket with three areas of moss-covered mud and two
round, pellucid pools of water about a foot in diameter. As the little
stream had wound and twisted, Dick had by now lost entirely his sense
of direction. He fished out his compass and set it on a rock. The River
flows nearly north-east to the Big Falls, and Dick knew himself to be
somewhere east of the River. The compass appeared to be wrong. Dick was
a youth of sense, so he did not quarrel with the compass; he merely
became doubtful as to which was the north end of the needle--the white
or the black. After a few moments' puzzling he was quite at sea, and
could no more remember how he had been taught as to this than you can
clinch the spelling of a doubtful word after you have tried on paper a
dozen variations. But being a youth of sense he did not desert the
streamlet.
After a short half-mile of stumbling the apparent wrong direction in
the brook's bed, he came to the River. The River was also flowing the
wrong way, and uphill. Dick sat down and covered his eyes with his
hands, as I had told him to do in like instance, and so managed to
swing the country around where it belonged.
Now here was the River--and Dick resolved to desert it for no more
short cuts--but where was the canoe?
This point remained unsettled in Dick's mind, or rather it was
alternately settled in two ways. Sometimes the boy concluded we must be
still below him, so he would sit on a rock to wait. Then, after a few
moments, inactivity would bring him panic. The canoe must have passed
this point long since, and every second he wasted stupidly sitting on
that stone separated him farther from his friends and from food. Then
he would tear madly through the forest. Deuce enjoyed this game, but
Dick did not.
In time Dick found his farther progress along the banks cut off by a
hill. The hill ended abruptly at the water's edge in a sheer rock cliff
thirty feet high. This was in reality the end of the Indian trail short
cut--the point where Dick was to meet us--but he did not know it. He
happened for the moment to be obsessed by one of his canoe up-stream
panics, so he turned inland to a spot where the hill appeared
climbable, and started in to surmount the obstruction.
This was comparatively easy at first. Then the shoulder of the cliff
intervened. Dick mounted still a little higher up the hill, then
higher, then still higher. Far down to his left, through the trees,
broiled the River. The slope of the hill to it had become steeper than
a roof, and at the edge of the eaves came a cliff drop of thirty feet.
Dick picked his way gingerly over curving moss-beds, assisting his
balance by a number of little cedar trees. Then something happened.
Dick says the side of the hill slid out from under him. The fact of the
matter is, probably, the skin-moss over loose rounded stones gave way.
Dick sat down and began slowly to bump down the slant of the roof. He
never really lost his equilibrium, nor until the last ten feet did he
abandon the hope of checking his descent. Sometimes he did actually
succeed in stopping himself for a moment; but on his attempting to
follow up the advantage, the moss always slipped or the sapling let go
a tenuous hold and he continued on down. At last the River flashed out
below him. He saw the sheer drop. He saw the boiling eddies of the
Halfway Pool, capable of sucking down a saw-log. Then, with a final
rush of loose round stones, he shot the chutes feet first into space.
In the meantime Billy and I repeated our experience of the two previous
days, with a few variations caused by the necessity of passing two
exceptionally ugly rapids whose banks left little footing. We did this
precariously, with a rope. The cold water was beginning to tell on our
vitality, so that twice we went ashore and made hot tea. Just below the
Halfway Pool we began to do a little figuring ahead, which is a bad
thing. The Halfway Pool meant much inevitable labour, with its two
swift rapids and its swirling, eddies, as sedulously to be avoided as
so many steel bear-traps. Then there were a dozen others, and the three
miles of riffles, and all the rest of it. At our present rate it would
take us a week to make the Falls. Below the Halfway Pool we looked for
Dick. He was not to be seen. This made us cross. At the Halfway Pool we
intended to unload for portage, and also to ferry over Dick and the
setter in the lightened canoe. The tardiness of Dick delayed the game.
However, we drew ashore to the little clearing of the Halfway Camp,
made the year before, and wearily discharged our cargo. Suddenly,
upstream, and apparently up in the air, we heard distinctly the excited
yap of a dog. Billy and I looked at each other. Then we looked
upstream.
Close under the perpendicular wall of rock, and fifty feet from the end
of it, waist deep in water that swirled angrily about him, stood Dick.
I knew well enough what he was standing on--a little ledge of shale not
over five or six feet in length and two feet wide--for in lower water I
had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But
I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was
impossible to wade to the spot, impossible to swim to it. And why in
the name of all the woods gods would a man want to wade or swim to it
if he could? The affair, to our cold-benumbed intellects, was simply
incomprehensible.
Billy and I spoke no word. We silently, perhaps a little fearfully,
launched the empty canoe. Then we went into a space of water whose
treading proved us no angels. From the slack water under the cliff we
took another look. It was indeed Dick. He carried a rod-case in one
hand. His fish-creel lay against his hip. His broad hat sat accurately
level on his head. His face was imperturbable. Above, Deuce agonized,
afraid to leap into the stream, but convinced that his duty required
him to do so.
We steadied the canoe while Dick climbed in. You would have thought he
was embarking at the regularly appointed rendezvous. In silence we shot
the rapids, and collected Deuce from the end of the trail, whither he
followed us. In silence we worked our way across to where our duffel
lay scattered. In silence we disembarked.
"In Heaven's name, Dick," I demanded at last, "how did you get
_there_?"
"Fell," said he, succinctly. And that was all.
XIII.
THE HILLS.
We explained carefully to Dick that he had lit on the only spot in the
Halfway Pool where the water was at once deep enough to break his fall
and not too deep to stand in. We also pointed out that he had escaped
being telescoped or drowned by the merest hair's-breadth. From this we
drew moral conclusions. It did us good, but undoubtedly Dick knew it
already.
Now we gave our attention to the wetness of garments, for we were
chilled blue. A big fire and a clothes-rack of forked sticks and a
sapling, an open-air change, a lunch of hot tea and trout and cold
galette and beans, a pipe--and then the inevitable summing up.
We had in two and a half days made the easier half of the distance to
the Falls. At this rate we would consume a week or more in reaching the
starting-point of our explorations. It was a question whether we could
stand a week of ice-water and the heavy labour combined. Ordinarily we
might be able to abandon the canoe and push on afoot, as we were
accustomed to do when trout-fishing, but that involved fording the
river three times--a feat manifestly impossible in present freshet
conditions.
"I t'ink we quit heem," said Billy.
But then I was seized with an inspiration. Judging by the configuration
of the hills, the River bent sharply above the Falls. Why would it not
be possible to cut loose entirely at this point, to strike across
through the forest, and so to come out on the upper reaches? Remained
only the probability of our being able, encumbered by a pack, to scale
the mountains.
"Billy," said I, "have you ever been over in those hills?".
"No," said he.
"Do you know anything about the country? Are there any trails?"
"Dat countree is belong Tawabinisáy. He know heem. I don' know heem. I
t'ink he is have many hills, some lak'."
"Do you think we can climb those hills with packs?"
Billy cast a doubtful glance on Dick. Then his eye lit up.
"Tawabinisáy is tell me 'bout dat Lak' Kawágama. P'rhaps we fine heem."
In so saying Billy decided the attempt. What angler on the River has
not discussed--again idly, again academically--that mysterious Lake
alive with the burnished copper trout, lying hidden and wonderful in
the high hills, clear as crystal, bottomed with gravel like a fountain,
shaped like a great crescent whose curves were haunted of forest trees
grim and awesome with the solemnity of the primeval? That its exact
location was known to Tawabinisáy alone, that the trail to it was
purposely blinded and muddled with the crossing of many little ponds,
that the route was laborious--all those things, along with the minor
details so dear to winter fire-chats, were matters of notoriety.
Probably more expeditions to Kawágama have been planned--in
February--than would fill a volume with an account of anticipated
adventures. Only, none of them ever came off. We were accustomed to
gaze at the forbidden cliff ramparts of the hills, to think of the
Idiot's Delight, and the Halfway Pool, and the Organ Pool, and the
Burned Rock Pool, and the Rolling Stone Pool, and all the rest of them
even up to the Big Falls; and so we would quietly allow our February
plannings to lapse. One man Tawabinisáy had honoured. But this man,
named Clement, a banker from Peoria, had proved unworthy. Tawabinisáy
told how he caught trout, many, many trout, and piled them on the
shores of Kawágama to defile the air. Subsequently this same
"sportsman" buried another big catch on the beach of Superior. These
and other exploits finally earned him his exclusion from the delectable
land. I give his name because I have personally talked with his guides,
and heard their circumstantial accounts of his performances. Unless
three or four woodsmen are fearful liars, I do Mr. Clement no
injustice.
Since then Tawabinisáy had hidden himself behind his impenetrable grin.
So you can easily see that the discovery of Kawágama would be a feat
worthy even high hills.
That afternoon we rested and made our cache. A cache in the forest
country is simply a heavily constructed rustic platform on which
provisions and clothing are laid and wrapped completely about in sheets
of canoe bark tied firmly with strips of cedar bark, or withes made
from a bush whose appearance I know well, but whose name I cannot say.
In this receptacle we left all our canned goods, our extra clothing,
and our Dutch oven. We retained for transportation some pork, flour,
rice, baking-powder, oatmeal, sugar, and tea, cooking utensils,
blankets, the tent, fishing-tackle, and the little pistol. As we were
about to go into the high country where presumably both game and fish
might lack, we were forced to take a full supply for four--counting
Deuce as one--to last ten days. The packs counted up about one hundred
and fifteen pounds of grub, twenty pounds of blankets, ten of tent, say
eight or ten of hardware including the axe, about twenty of duffel.
This was further increased by the idiosyncrasy of Billy. He, like most
woodsmen, was wedded to a single utterly foolish article of personal
belonging, which he worshipped as a fetish, and without which he was
unhappy. In his case it was a huge winter overcoat that must have
weighed fifteen pounds. The total amounted to about one hundred and
ninety pounds. We gave Dick twenty, I took seventy-six, and Billy
shouldered the rest.
The carrying we did with the universal tump-line. This is usually
described as a strap passed about a pack and across the forehead of the
bearer. The description is incorrect. It passes across the top of the
head. The weight should rest on the small of the back just above the
hips--not on the broad of the back as most beginners place it. Then the
chin should be dropped, the body slanted sharply forward, and you may
be able to stagger forty rods at your first attempt.
Use soon accustoms you to carrying, however. The first time I ever did
any packing I had a hard time stumbling a few hundred feet over a hill
portage with just fifty pounds on my back. By the end of that same trip
I could carry a hundred pounds and a lot of miscellaneous traps, like
canoe-poles and guns, without serious inconvenience and over a long
portage. This quickly-gained power comes partly from a strengthening of
the muscles of the neck, but more from a mastery of balance. A pack can
twist you as suddenly and expertly on your back as the best of
wrestlers. It has a head lock on you, and you have to go or break your
neck. After a time you adjust your movements, just as after a time you
can travel on snow-shoes through heavy down timber without taking
conscious thought as to the placing of your feet.
But at first packing is as near infernal punishment as merely mundane
conditions can compass. Sixteen brand-new muscles ache, at first dully,
then sharply, then intolerably, until it seems you cannot bear it
another second. You are unable to keep your feet. A stagger means an
effort at recovery, and an effort at recovery means that you trip when
you place your feet, and that means, if you are lucky enough not to be
thrown, an extra tweak for every one of the sixteen new muscles. At
first you rest every time you feel tired. Then you begin to feel very
tired every fifty feet. Then you have to do the best you can, and prove
the pluck that is in you.
Mr. Tom Friant, an old woodsman of wide experience, has often told me
with relish of his first try at carrying. He had about sixty pounds,
and his companion double that amount. Mr. Friant stood it a few
centuries and then sat down. He couldn't have moved another step if a
gun had been at his ear.
"What's the matter?" asked his companion.
"Del," said Friant, "I'm all in. I can't navigate. Here's where I
quit."
"Can't you carry her any farther?"
"Not an inch."
"Well, pile her on. I'll carry her for you."
Friant looked at him a moment in silent amazement.
"Do you mean to say that you are going to carry your pack and mine
too?"
"That's what I mean to say. I'll do it if I have to."
Friant drew a long breath.
"Well," said he at last, "if a little sawed-off cuss like you can
wiggle under a hundred and eighty, I guess I can make it under sixty."
"That's right," said Del imperturbably. "_If you think you can, you
can_."
"And I did," ends Friant, with a chuckle.
Therein lies the whole secret. The work is irksome, sometimes even
painful, but if you think you can do it, you can, for though great is
the protest of the human frame against what it considers abuse, greater
is the power of a man's grit.
We carried the canoe above the larger eddies, where we embarked
ourselves and our packs for traverse, leaving Deuce under strict
command to await a second trip. Deuce disregarded the strict command.
From disobedience came great peril, for when he attempted to swim
across after us he was carried downstream, involved in a whirlpool,
sucked under, and nearly drowned. We could do nothing but watch. When,
finally, the River spued out a frightened and bedraggled dog, we drew a
breath of very genuine relief, for Deuce was dear to us through much
association.
The canoe we turned bottom up and left in the bushes, and so we set off
through the forest.
At the end of fifteen minutes we began to mount a gentle ascent. The
gentle ascent speedily became a sharp slope, the sharp slope an abrupt
hill, and the latter finally an almost sheer face of rock and thin
soil. We laid hold doggedly of little cedars; we dug our fingers into
little crevices, and felt for the same with our toes; we perspired in
streams and breathed in gasps; we held the strained muscles of our
necks rigid, for the twisting of a pack meant here a dangerous fall; we
flattened ourselves against the face of the mountain with always the
heavy, ceaseless pull of the tump-line attempting to tear us backward
from our holds. And so at last, when the muscles of our thighs refused
to strengthen our legs for the ascent of another foot, we would turn
our backs to the slant and sink gratefully into the only real luxury in
the world.
For be it known that real luxury cannot be bought; it must be worked
for. I refer to luxury as the exquisite savour of a pleasant sensation.
The keenest sense-impressions are undoubtedly those of contrast. In
looking back over a variety of experience, I have no hesitation at all
in selecting as the moment in which I have experienced the liveliest
physical pleasure one hot afternoon in July. The thermometer might have
stood anywhere. We would have placed childlike trust in any of its
statements, even three figures great. Our way had led through unbroken
forest oppressed by low brush and an underfooting of brakes. There had
been hills. Our clothes were wringing wet, to the last stitch; even the
leather of the tump-line was saturated. The hot air we gulped down did
not seem to satisfy our craving for oxygen any more than lukewarm water
ever seems to cut a real thirst. The woods were literally like an oven
in their hot dryness. Finally we skirted a little hill, and at the base
of that hill a great tree had fallen, and through the aperture thus
made in the forest a tiny current of cool air flowed like a stream. It
was not a great current, nor a wide; if we moved three feet in any
direction, we were out of it. But we sat us down directly across its
flow. And never have dinners or wines or men or women, or talks of
books or scenery or adventure or sport, or the softest, daintiest
refinements of man's invention given me the half of luxury I drank in
from that little breeze. So the commonest things--a dash of cool water
on the wrists, a gulp of hot tea, a warm, dry blanket, a whiff of
tobacco, a ray of sunshine--are more really the luxuries than all the
comforts and sybaritisms we buy. Undoubtedly the latter would also rise
to the higher category if we were to work for their essence instead of
merely signing club cheques or paying party calls for them.
Which means that when we three would rest our packs against the side of
that hill, and drop our head-straps below our chins, we were not at all
to be pitied, even though the forest growth denied us the encouragement
of knowing how much farther we had to go.
Before us the trees dropped away rapidly, so that twenty feet out in a
straight line we were looking directly into their tops. There, quite on
an equality with their own airy estate, we could watch the fly-catchers
and warblers conducting their small affairs of the chase. It lent us
the illusion of imponderability; we felt that we too might be able to
rest securely on graceful gossamer twigs. And sometimes, through a
chance opening, we could see down over billows of waving leaves to a
single little spot of blue, like a turquoise sunk in folds of green
velvet, which meant that the River was dropping below us. This, in the
mercy of the Red Gods, was meant as encouragement.
The time came, however, when the ramparts we scaled rose sheer and bare
in impregnability. Nothing could be done on the straight line, so we
turned sharp to the north. The way was difficult, for it lay over great
fragments of rock stricken from the cliff by winter, and further
rendered treacherous by the moss and wet by a thousand trickles of
water. At the end of one hour we found what might be called a ravine,
if you happened not to be particular, or a steep cleft in the precipice
if you were. Here we deserted the open air for piled-up brushy tangles,
many sharp-cornered rock fragments, and a choked streamlet. Finally the
whole outfit abruptly ceased. We climbed ten feet of crevices and stood
on the ridge.
The forest trees shut us in our own little area, so that we were for
the moment unable to look abroad over the country.
The descent, abrupt where we had mounted, stretched away gently toward
the north and west. And on that slope, protected as it was from the
severer storms that sweep up the open valleys in winter, stood the most
magnificent primeval forest it has ever been my fortune to behold. The
huge maple, beech, and birch trees lifted column-like straight up to a
lucent green canopy, always twinkling and shifting in the wind and the
sunlight. Below grew a thin screen of underbrush, through which we had
no difficulty at all in pushing, but which threw about us face-high a
tender green partition. The effect was that of a pew in an
old-fashioned church, so that, though we shared the upper stillnesses,
a certain delightful privacy of our own seemed assured us. This privacy
we knew to be assured also to many creatures besides ourselves. On the
other side of the screen of broad leaves we sensed the presence of
life. It did not intrude on us, nor were we permitted to intrude on it.
But it was there. We heard it rustling, pattering, scrambling,
whispering, scurrying with a rush of wings. More subtly we felt it, as
one knows of a presence in a darkened room. By the exercise of
imagination and experience we identified it in its manifestations--the
squirrel, the partridge, the weasel, the spruce hens, once or twice the
deer. We knew it saw us perfectly, although we could not see it, and
that gave us an impression of companionship; so the forest was not
lonely.
Next to this double sense of isolation and company was the feeling of
transparent shadow. The forest was thick and cool. Only rarely did the
sun find an orifice in the roof through which to pour a splash of
liquid gold. All the rest was in shadow. But the shadow was that of the
bottom of the sea--cool, green, and, above all, transparent. We saw
into the depth of it, but dimly, as we would see into the green
recesses of a tropic ocean. It possessed the same liquid quality.
Finally the illusion overcame us completely. We bathed in the shadows
as though they were palpable, and from that came great refreshment.