of romance. The land is enchanted. Birds dip and sway, advance and
retreat; leaves toss their hands in greeting, or bend and whisper one
to the other; splashes of sun fall heavy as metal through the yielding
screens of branches; little breezes wander hesitatingly here and there
to sink like spent kites on the nearest bar of sun-warmed shingle; the
stream shouts and gurgles, murmurs, hushes, lies still and secret as
though to warn you to discretion, breaks away with a shriek of hilarity
when your discretion has been assured. There is in you a great leisure,
as though the day would never end. There is in you a great keenness.
One part of you is vibrantly alive. Your wrist muscles contract almost
automatically at the swirl of a rise, and the hum of life along the
gossamer of your line gains its communication with every nerve in your
body. The question of gear and method you attack clear-minded. What
fly? Montreal, Parmachenee Belle, Royal Coachman, Silver Doctor,
Professor, Brown Hackle, Cow-dung--these grand lures for the North
Country trout receive each its due test and attention. And on the tail
snell what fisherman has not the Gamble--the unusual, obscure,
multinamed fly which may, in the occultism of his taste, attract the
Big Fellows? Besides, there remains always the handling. Does your
trout to-day fancy the skittering of his food, or the withdrawal in
three jerks, or the inch-deep sinking of the fly? Does he want it
across current or up current; will he rise with a snap, or is he going
to come slowly, or is he going to play? These be problems interesting,
insistent to be solved, with the ready test within the reach of your
skill.
But that alertness is only one side of your mood. No matter how
difficult the selection, how strenuous the fight, there is in you a
large feeling that might almost be described as Buddhistic. Time has
nothing to do with your problems. The world has quietly run down, and
has been embalmed with all its sweetness of light and colour and sound
in a warm Lethe bath of sun. This afternoon is going to last for ever.
You note and enjoy and savour the little pleasures unhurried by the
thought that anything else, whether of pleasure or duty, is to follow.
And so for long delicious eons. The River flows on, ever on; the hills
watch, watch always; the birds sing, the sun shines grateful across
your shoulders; the big trout and the little rise in predestined order,
and make their predestined fight, and go their predestined way either
to liberty or the creel; the pools and the rapids and the riffles slip
by upstream as though they had been withdrawn rather than as though you
had advanced.
Then suddenly the day has dropped its wings. The earth moves forward
with a jar. Things are to be accomplished; things are being
accomplished. The River is hurrying down to the Lake; the birds have
business of their own to attend to, an it please you; the hills are
waiting for something that has not yet happened, but they are ready.
Startled, you look up. The afternoon has finished. Your last step has
taken you over the edge of the shadow cast by the setting sun across
the range of hills.
For the first time you look about you to see where you are. It has not
mattered before. Now you know that shortly it will be dark. Still
remain below you four pools. A great haste seizes you.
"If I take my rod apart and strike through the woods," you argue, "I
can make the Narrows, and I am sure there is a big trout there."
Why the Narrows should be any more likely to contain a big trout than
any of the other three pools you would not be able to explain. In half
an hour it will be dark. You hurry. In the forest it is already
twilight, but by now you know the forest well. Preoccupied, feverish
with your great idea, you hasten on. The birds, silent all in the
brooding of night, rise ghostly to right and left. Shadows steal away
like hostile spies among the treetrunks. The silver of last daylight
gleams ahead of you through the brush. You know it for the Narrows,
whither the instinct of your eagerness has led you as accurately as a
compass through the forest.
Fervently, as though this were of world's affairs the most important,
you congratulate yourself on being in time. Your rod seems to join
itself. In a moment the cast drops like a breath on the molten silver.
Nothing. Another try a trifle lower down. Nothing. A little wandering
breeze spoils your fourth attempt, carrying the leader far to the left.
Curses, deep and fervent. The daylight is fading, draining away. A
fifth cast falls forty feet out. Slowly you drag the flies across the
current, reluctant to recover until the latest possible moment. And so,
when your rod is foolishly upright, your line slack, and your flies
motionless, there rolls slowly up and over the trout of trouts. You see
a broad side, the whirl of a fantail that looks to you to be at least
six inches across; and the current slides on, silver-like, smooth,
indifferent to the wild leap of your heart.
[Illustration: THEN IN THE TWILIGHT THEY BATHE.]
Like a crazy man you shorten your line. Six seconds later your flies
fall skilfully just upstream from where last you saw that wonderful
tail.
But six seconds may be a long, long period of time. You have feared and
hoped and speculated and realized; feared that the leviathan has
pricked himself, and so will not rise again; hoped that his appearance
merely indicated curiosity which he will desire further to satisfy;
speculated on whether your skill can drop the fly exactly on that spot,
as it must be dropped; and realized that, whatever be the truth as to
all those fears and hopes and speculations, this is irrevocably your
last chance.
For an instant you allow the flies to drift downstream, to be floated
here and there by idle little eddies, to be sucked down and spat out of
tiny suction-holes. Then cautiously you draw them across the surface of
the waters. _Thump--thump--thump_--your heart slows up with
disappointment. Then mysteriously, like the stirring of the waters by
some invisible hand, the molten silver is broken in its smoothness. The
Royal Coachman quietly disappears. With all the brakes shrieking on
your desire to shut your eyes and heave a mighty heave, you depress
your butt and strike.
Then in the twilight the battle. No leisure is here, only quivering,
intense, agonized anxiety. The affair transcends the moment. Purposes
and necessities of untold ages have concentrated, so that somehow back
of your consciousness rest hosts of disembodied hopes, tendencies,
evolutionary progressions, all breathless lest you prove unequal to the
struggle for which they have been so long preparing.
Responsibility--vast, vague, formless--is yours. Only the fact that you
are wholly occupied with the exigence of the moment prevents your
understanding of what it is, but it hovers dark and depressing behind
your possible failure. You must win. This is no fish; it is opportunity
itself, and once gone it will never return. The mysticism of lower dusk
in the forest, of upper afterglow on the hills, of the chill of evening
waters and winds, of the glint of strange phantoms under the darkness
of cliffs, of the whisperings and shoutings of Things you are too busy
to identify out in the gray of North Country awe--all these menace you
with indeterminate dread. Knee-deep, waist-deep, swift water, slack
water, downstream, upstream, with red eyes straining into the dimness,
with every muscle taut and every nerve quivering, you follow the
ripping of your line. You have consecrated yourself to the uttermost.
The minutes stalk by you gigantic. You are a stable pin-point in
whirling phantasms. And you are very little, very small, very
inadequate among these Titans of circumstance.
Thrice he breaks water, a white and ghostly apparition from the deep.
Your heart stops with your reel, and only resumes its office when again
the line sings safely. The darkness falls, and with it, like the
mysterious strength of Sir Gareth's opponent, falls the power of your
adversary. His rushes shorten. The blown world of your uncertainty
shrinks to the normal. From the haze of your consciousness, as through
a fog, loom the old familiar forest, and the hills, and the River.
Slowly you creep from that strange enchanted land. The sullen trout
yields. In all gentleness you float him within reach of your net.
Quietly, breathlessly you walk ashore, and over the beach, and yet an
unnecessary hundred feet from the water lest he retain still a flop.
Then you lay him upon the stones and lift up your heart in rejoicing.
How you get to camp you never clearly know. Exultation lifts your feet.
Wings, wings, O ye Red Gods, wings to carry the body whither the spirit
hath already soared, and stooped, and circled back in impatience to see
why still the body lingers! Ordinarily you can cross the riffles above
the Halfway Pool only with caution and prayer and a stout staff
craftily employed. This night you can--and do--splash across hand-free,
as recklessly as you would wade a little brook. There is no stumble in
you, for you have done a great deed, and the Red Gods are smiling.
Through the trees glows a light, and in the centre of that light are
leaping flames, and in the circle of that light stand, rough-hewn in
orange, the tent and the table and the waiting figures of your
companions. You stop short, and swallow hard, and saunter into camp as
one indifferent.
Carelessly you toss aside your creel--into the darkest corner, as
though it were unimportant--nonchalantly you lean your rod against the
slant of your tent, wearily you seat yourself and begin to draw off
your drenched garments. Billy bends toward the fire. Dick gets you your
dry clothes. Nobody says anything, for everybody is hungry. No one asks
you any questions, for on the River you get in almost any time of
night.
Finally, as you are hanging your wet things near the fire, you inquire
casually over your shoulder,--
"Dick, have any luck?"
Dick tells you. You listen with apparent interest. He has caught a
three-pounder. He describes the spot and the method and the struggle.
He is very much pleased. You pity him.
The three of you eat supper, lots of supper. Billy arises first,
filling his pipe. He hangs water over the fire for the dish-washing.
You and Dick sit hunched on a log, blissfully happy in the moments of
digestion, ruminative, watching the blaze. The tobacco smoke eddies and
sucks upward to join the wood smoke. Billy moves here and there in the
fulfilment of his simple tasks, casting his shadow wavering and
gigantic against the fire-lit trees. By-and-by he has finished. He
gathers up the straps of Dick's creel, and turns to the shadow for your
own. He is going to clean the fish. It is the moment you have watched
for. You shroud yourself in profound indifference.
"_Sacré!_" shrieks Billy.
You do not even turn your head.
"Jumping giraffes! why, it's a whale!" cries Dick.
You roll a _blasé_ eye in their direction, as though such puerile
enthusiasm wearies you.
"Yes, it's quite a little fish," you concede.
They swarm down upon you, demanding particulars. These you accord
laconically, a word at a time, in answer to direct question, between
puffs of smoke.
"At the Narrows. Royal Coachman. Just before I came in. Pretty fair
fight. Just at the edge of the eddy." And so on. But your soul glories.
The tape-line is brought out. Twenty-nine inches it records. Holy
smoke, what a fish! Your air implies that you will probably catch three
more just like him on the morrow. Dick and Billy make tracings of him
on the birch bark. You retain your lofty calm: but inside you are
little quivers of rapture. And when you awake, late in the night, you
are conscious, first of all, that you are happy, happy, happy, all
through; and only when the drowse drains away do you remember why.
XVIII.
MAN WHO WALKS BY MOONLIGHT.
We had been joined on the River by friends. "Doug," who never fished
more than forty rods from camp, and was always inventing water-gauges,
patent indicators, and other things, and who wore in his soft slouch
hat so many brilliant trout flies that he irresistibly reminded you of
flower-decked Ophelia; "Dinnis," who was large and good-natured, and
bubbling and popular; Johnny, whose wide eyes looked for the first time
on the woods-life, and whose awe-struck soul concealed itself behind
assumptions; "Jim," six feet tall and three feet broad, with whom the
season before I had penetrated to Hudson Bay; and finally, "Doc," tall,
granite, experienced, the best fisherman that ever hit the river. With
these were Indians. Buckshot, a little Indian with a good knowledge of
English; Johnnie Challán, a half-breed Indian, ugly, furtive, an
efficient man about camp; and Tawabinisáy himself. This was an honour
due to the presence of Doc. Tawabinisáy approved of Doc. That was all
there was to say about it.
After a few days, inevitably the question of Kawágama came up. Billy,
Johnnie Challán, and Buckshot squatted in a semi-circle, and drew
diagrams in the soft dirt with a stick. Tawabinisáy sat on a log and
overlooked the proceedings. Finally he spoke.
"Tawabinisáy" (they always gave him his full title; we called him
Tawáb) "tell me lake you find he no Kawágama," translated Buckshot. "He
called Black Beaver Lake."
"Ask him if he'll take us to Kawágama," I requested.
Tawabinisáy looked very doubtful.
"Come on, Tawáb," urged Doc, nodding at him vigorously. "Don't be a
clam. We won't take anybody else up there."
The Indian probably did not comprehend the words, but he liked Doc.
"A'-right," he pronounced laboriously.
Buckshot explained to us his plans.
"Tawabinisáy tell me," said he, "he don' been to Kawágama seven year.
To-morrow he go blaze trail. Nex' day we go."
"How would it be if one or two of us went with him to-morrow to see how
he does it?" asked Jim.
Buckshot looked at us strangely.
"_I_ don't want to follow him," he replied, with a significant
simplicity. "He run like a deer."
"Buckshot," said I, pursuing the inevitable linguistics, "what does
Kawágama mean?"
Buckshot thought for quite two minutes. Then he drew a semicircle.
"W'at you call dat?" he asked.
"Crescent, like moon? half-circle? horseshoe? bow?" we proposed.
Buckshot shook his head at each suggestion. He made a wriggling mark,
then a wide sweep, then a loop.
"All dose," said he, "w'at you call him?"
"Curve!" we cried.
"Áh hah," assented Buckshot, satisfied.
"Buckshot," we went on, "what does Tawabinisáy mean?"
"Man-who-travels-by-moonlight," he replied promptly.
The following morning Tawabinisáy departed, carrying a lunch and a
hand-axe. At four o'clock he was back, sitting on a log and smoking a
pipe. In the meantime we had made up our party.
Tawabinisáy himself had decided that the two half-breeds must stay at
home. He wished to share his secret only with his own tribesmen. The
fiat grieved Billy, for behold he had already put in much time on this
very search, and naturally desired to be in at the finish. Dick, too,
wanted to go, but him we decided too young and light for a fast march.
Dinnis had to leave the River in a day or so; Johnnie was a little
doubtful as to the tramp, although he concealed his doubt--at least to
his own satisfaction--under a variety of excuses. Jim and Doc would go,
of course. There remained Doug.
We found that individual erecting a rack of many projecting arms--like
a Greek warrior's trophy--at the precise spot where the first rays of
the morning sun would strike it. On the projecting arms he purposed
hanging his wet clothes.
"Doug," said we, "do you want to go to Kawágama to-morrow?"
Doug turned on us a sardonic eye. He made no direct answer, but told
the following story:--
"Once upon a time Judge Carter was riding through a rural district in
Virginia. He stopped at a negro's cabin to get his direction.
"'Uncle,' said he, 'can you direct me to Colonel Thompson's?'
"'Yes, sah,' replied the negro; 'yo' goes down this yah road 'bout two
mile till yo' comes to an ol' ailm tree, and then yo' tu'us sha'p to
th' right down a lane fo' 'bout a qua'ter of a mile. Thah you sees a
big white house. Yo' wants to go through th' ya'd, to a paf that takes
you a spell to a gate. Yo' follows that road to th' lef till yo' comes
to three roads goin' up a hill; and, jedge, _it don' mattah which one
of them thah roads yo' take, yo' gets lost surer 'n hell anyway!_'"
Then Doug turned placidly back to the construction of his trophy.
We interpreted this as an answer, and made up an outfit for five.
The following morning at six o'clock we were under way. Johnnie Challán
ferried us across the river in two instalments. We waved our hands and
plunged through the brush screen.
Thenceforth it was walk half an hour, rest five minutes, with almost
the regularity of clockwork. We timed the Indians secretly, and found
they varied by hardly a minute from absolute fidelity to this schedule.
We had at first, of course, to gain the higher level of the hills, but
Tawabinisáy had the day before picked out a route that mounted as
easily as the country would allow, and through a hardwood forest free
of underbrush. Briefly indicated, our way led first through the big
trees and up the hills, then behind a great cliff knob into a creek
valley, through a quarter-mile of bottom-land thicket, then by an open
strip to the first little lake. This we ferried by means of the bark
canoe carried on the shoulders of Tawabinisáy.
In the course of the morning we thus passed four lakes. Throughout the
entire distance to Kawágama were the fresh axe-blazes the Indian had
made the day before. These were neither so frequent nor as plainly cut
as a white man's trail, but each represented a pause long enough for
the clip of an axe. In addition the trail had been made passable for a
canoe. That meant the cutting out of overhanging branches wherever they
might catch the bow of the craft. In the thicket a little road had been
cleared, and the brush had been piled on either side. To an
unaccustomed eye it seemed the work of two days at least. Yet
Tawabinisáy had picked out his route, cleared and marked it thus,
skirted the shores of the lakes we were able to traverse in the canoe,
and had returned to the River in less time than we consumed in merely
reaching the Lake itself! Truly, as Buckshot said, he must have "run
like a deer."
Tawabinisáy has a delightful grin which he displays when pleased or
good-humoured or puzzled or interested or comprehending, just as a dog
sneezes and wrinkles up his nose in like case. He is essentially
kind-hearted. If he likes you and approves of you, he tries to teach
you, to help you, to show you things. But he never offers to do any
part of your work, and on the march he never looks back to see if you
are keeping up. You can shout at him until you are black in the face,
but never will he pause until rest-time. Then he squats on his heels,
lights his pipe, and grins.
Buckshot adored him. This opportunity of travelling with him was an
epoch. He drank in eagerly the brief remarks of his "old man," and
detailed them to us with solemnity, prefaced always by his "Tawabinisáy
tell me." Buckshot is of the better class of Indian himself, but
occasionally he is puzzled by the woods-noises. Tawabinisáy never. As
we cooked lunch, we heard the sound of steady footsteps in the
forest--_pat_; then a pause; then _pat_; just like a deer
browsing. To make sure I inquired of Buckshot.
"What is it?"
Buckshot listened a moment.
"Deer," said he decisively; then, not because he doubted his own
judgment, but from habitual deference, he turned to where Tawabinisáy
was frying things.
"Qwaw?" he inquired.
Tawabinisáy never even looked up.
"Adjí-domo" (squirrel), said he.
We looked at each other incredulously. It sounded like a deer. It did
not sound in the least like a squirrel. An experienced Indian had
pronounced it a deer. Nevertheless it was a squirrel.
We approached Kawágama by way of a gradual slope clothed with a
beautiful beech and maple forest whose trees were the tallest of those
species I have ever seen. Ten minutes brought us to the shore. There
was no abrupt bursting in on Kawágama through screens of leaves; we
entered leisurely to her presence by way of an ante-chamber whose
spaciousness permitted no vulgar surprises. After a time we launched
our canoe from a natural dock afforded by a cedar root, and so stood
ready to cross to our permanent camp. But first we drew our knives and
erased from a giant birch the half-grown-over name of the banker
Clement.
There seems to me little use in telling you that Kawágama is about four
miles long by a mile wide, is shaped like a crescent, and lies in a
valley surrounded by high hills; nor that its water is so transparent
that the bottom is visible until it fades into the sheer blackness of
depth; nor that it is alive with trout; nor that its silence is the
silence of a vast solitude, so that always, even at daybreak or at high
midday, it seems to be late afternoon. That would convey little to you.
I will inform you quite simply that Kawágama is a very beautiful
specimen of the wilderness lake; that it is as the Lord made it; and
that we had a good time.
Did you ever fish with the fly from a birch-bark canoe on absolutely
still water? You do not seem to move. But far below you, gliding,
silent, ghostlike, the bottom slips beneath. Like a weather-vane in an
imperceptible current of air, your bow turns to right or left in
apparent obedience to the mere will of your companion. And the flies
drop softly like down. Then the silence becomes sacred. You
whisper--although there is no reason for your whispering; you move
cautiously, lest your reel scrape the gunwale. An inadvertent click of
the paddle is a profanation. The only creatures in all God's world
possessing the right to utter aloud a single syllable are the loon,
far away, and the winter wren, near at hand. Even the trout fight
grimly, without noise, their white bodies flashing far down in the
dimness.
Hour after hour we stole here and there like conspirators. Where showed
the circles of a fish's rise, thither crept we to drop a fly on their
centre as in the bull's-eye of a target. The trout seemed to linger
near their latest capture, so often we would catch one exactly where we
had seen him break water some little time before. In this was the charm
of the still hunt. Shoal water, deep water, it seemed all the same to
our fortunes. The lake was full of fish, and beautiful fish they were,
with deep, glowing bronze bellies, and all of from a pound to a pound
and a half in weight. The lake had not been fished. Probably somewhere
in those black depths over one of the bubbling spring-holes that must
feed so cold and clear a body of water, are big fellows lying, and
probably the crafty minnow or spoon might lure them out. But we were
satisfied with our game.
At other times we paddled here and there in exploration of coves,
inlets, and a tiny little brook that flowed westward from a reed marsh
to join another river running parallel to our own.
The Indians had erected a huge lean-to of birch bark, from the ribs of
which hung clothes and the little bags of food. The cooking-fire was
made in front of it between two giant birch trees. At evening the light
and heat reflected strongly beneath the shelter, leaving the forest in
impenetrable darkness. To the very edge of mystery crowded the strange
woods noises, the eerie influences of the night, like wolves afraid of
the blaze. We felt them hovering, vague, huge, dreadful, just outside
the circle of safety our fire had traced about us. The cheerful flames
were dancing familiars who cherished for us the home feeling in the
middle of a wilderness.
Two days we lingered, then took the back track. A little after noon we
arrived at the camp, empty save for Johnnie Challán. Towards dark the
fishermen straggled in. Time had been paid them in familiar coinage.
They had demanded only accustomed toll of the days, but we had returned
laden with strange and glittering memories.
XIX.
APOLOGIA.
The time at last arrived for departure.
Deep laden were the canoes; heavy laden were we. The Indians shot away
down the current. We followed for the last time the dim blazed trail,
forded for the last time the shallows of the river. At the Burned Rock
Pool we caught our lunch fish from the ranks of leviathans. Then the
trodden way of the Fur Trail, worn into a groove so deep and a surface
so smooth that vegetation has left it as bare as ever, though the Post
has been abandoned these many years. At last the scrub spruce, and the
sandy soil, and the blue, restless waters of the Great Lake. With the
appearance of the fish-tug early the following day the summer ended.