upon a log that spanned it ten or twelve feet above the water. The
situation was all the more interesting because I saw no possible way
to land my fish. I could not lead him ashore, and my frail tackle
could not be trusted to lift him sheer from that pit to my
precarious perch. What should I do? call for help? but no help was
near. I had a revolver in my pocket and might have shot him through
and through, but that novel proceeding did not occur to me until it
was too late. I would have taken a Sam Patch leap into the water,
and have wrestled with my antagonist in his own element, but I knew
the slack, thus sure to occur, would probably free him; so I peered
down upon the beautiful creature and enjoyed my triumph as far as it
went. He was caught very lightly through his upper jaw, and I
expected every struggle and somersault would break the hold.
Presently I saw a place in the rocks where I thought it possible,
with such an incentive, to get down within reach of the water: by
careful manoeuvring I slipped my pole behind me and got hold of
the line, which I cut and wound around my finger; then I made my way
toward the end of the log and the place in the rocks, leading my
fish along much exhausted on the top of the water. By an effort
worthy the occasion I got down within reach of the fish, and, as I
have already confessed, thrust my thumb into his mouth and pinched
his cheek; he made a spring and was free from my hand and the hook
at the same time; for a moment he lay panting on the top of the
water, then, recovering himself slowly, made his way down through
the clear, cruel element beyond all hope of recapture. My blind
impulse to follow and try to seize him was very strong, but I kept
my hold and peered and peered long after the fish was lost to view,
then looked my mortification in the face and laughed a bitter laugh.
"But, hang it! I had all the fun of catching the fish, and only miss
the pleasure of eating him, which at this time would not be great."
"The fun, I take it," said my soldier, "is in triumphing, and not in
being beaten at the last."
"Well, have it so; but I would not exchange those ten or fifteen
minutes with that trout for the tame two hours you have spent in
catching that string of thirty. To _see_ a big fish after days of
small fry is an event; to have a jump from one is a glimpse of the
sportsman's paradise; and to hook one, and actually have him under
your control for ten minutes,--why, that is paradise itself as long
as it lasts."
One day I went down to the house of a settler a mile below, and
engaged the good dame to make us a couple of loaves of bread, and in
the evening we went down after them. How elastic and exhilarating
the walk was through the cool, transparent shadows! The sun was
gilding the mountains, and its yellow light seemed to be reflected
through all the woods. At one point we looked through and along a
valley of deep shadow upon a broad sweep of mountain quite near and
densely clothed with woods, flooded from base to summit by the
setting sun. It was a wild, memorable scene. What power and
effectiveness in Nature, I thought, and how rarely an artist
catches her touch! Looking down upon or squarely into a mountain
covered with a heavy growth of birch and maple, and shone upon by
the sun, is a sight peculiarly agreeable to me. How closely the
swelling umbrageous heads of the trees fit together, and how the eye
revels in the flowing and easy uniformity, while the mind feels the
ruggedness and terrible power beneath!
As we came back, the light yet lingered on the top of Slide
Mountain.
"'The last that parleys with the setting sun,'"
said I, quoting Wordsworth.
"That line is almost Shakespearean," said my companion. "It suggests
that great hand at least, though it has not the grit and virility of
the more primitive bard. What triumph and fresh morning power in
Shakespeare's lines that will occur to us at sunrise to-morrow!--
"'And jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.'
"Or in this:--
"'Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.'
"There is savage, perennial beauty there, the quality that Wordsworth
and nearly all the modern poets lack."
"But Wordsworth is the poet of the mountains," said I, "and of
lonely peaks. True, he does not express the power and aboriginal
grace there is in them, nor toy with them and pluck them up by the
hair of their heads, as Shakespeare does. There is something in
Peakamoose yonder, as we see it from this point, cutting the blue
vault with its dark, serrated edge, not in the bard of Grasmere; but
he expresses the feeling of loneliness and insignificance that the
cultivated man has in the presence of mountains, and the burden of
solemn emotion they give rise to. Then there is something much more
wild and merciless, much more remote from human interests and ends,
in our long, high, wooded ranges than is expressed by the peaks and
scarred groups of the lake country of Britain. These mountains we
behold and cross are not picturesque,--they are wild and inhuman as
the sea. In them you are in a maze, in a weltering world of woods;
you can see neither the earth nor the sky, but a confusion of the
growth and decay of centuries, and must traverse them by your
compass or your science of woodcraft,--a rift through the trees
giving one a glimpse of the opposite range or of the valley beneath,
and he is more at sea than ever; one does not know his own farm or
settlement when framed in these mountain treetops; all look alike
unfamiliar."
Not the least of the charm of camping out is your camp-fire at
night. What an artist! What pictures are boldly thrown or faintly
outlined upon the canvas of the night! Every object, every attitude
of your companion is striking and memorable. You see effects and
groups every moment that you would give money to be able to carry
away with you in enduring form. How the shadows leap, and skulk, and
hover about! Light and darkness are in perpetual tilt and warfare,
with first the one unhorsed, then the other. The friendly and
cheering fire, what acquaintance we make with it! We had almost
forgotten there was such an element, we had so long known only its
dark offspring, heat. Now we see the wild beauty uncaged and note
its manner and temper. How surely it creates its own draught and
sets the currents going, as force and enthusiasm always will! It
carves itself a chimney out of the fluid and houseless air. A
friend, a ministering angel, in subjection; a fiend, a fury, a
monster, ready to devour the world, if ungoverned. By day it burrows
in the ashes and sleeps; at night it comes forth and sits upon its
throne of rude logs, and rules the camp, a sovereign queen.
Near camp stood a tall, ragged yellow birch, its partially cast-off
bark hanging in crisp sheets or dense rolls.
"That tree needs the barber," we said, "and shall have a call from
him to-night."
So after dark I touched a match into it, and we saw the flames creep
up and wax in fury until the whole tree and its main branches stood
wrapped in a sheet of roaring flame. It was a wild and striking
spectacle, and must have advertised our camp to every nocturnal
creature in the forest.
What does the camper think about when lounging around the fire at
night? Not much,--of the sport of the day, of the big fish he lost
and might have saved, of the distant settlement, of to-morrow's
plans. An owl hoots off in the mountain and he thinks of him; if a
wolf were to howl or a panther to scream, he would think of him the
rest of the night. As it is, things flicker and hover through his
mind, and he hardly knows whether it is the past or the present that
possesses him. Certain it is, he feels the hush and solitude of the
great forest, and, whether he will or not, all his musings are in
some way cast upon that huge background of the night. Unless he is
an old camper-out, there will be an undercurrent of dread or half
fear. My companion said he could not help but feel all the time that
there ought to be a sentinel out there pacing up and down. One seems
to require less sleep in the woods, as if the ground and the
untempered air rested and refreshed him sooner. The balsam and the
hemlock heal his aches very quickly. If one is awakened often during
the night, as he invariably is, he does not feel that sediment of
sleep in his mind next day that he does when the same interruption
occurs at home; the boughs have drawn it all out of him.
And it is wonderful how rarely any of the housed and tender white
man's colds or influenzas come through these open doors and windows
of the woods. It is our partial isolation from Nature that is
dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely
betrays you.
If one takes anything to the woods to read, he seldom reads it; it
does not taste good with such primitive air.
There are very few camp poems that I know of, poems that would be at
home with one on such an expedition; there is plenty that is weird
and spectral, as in Poe, but little that is woody and wild as this
scene is. I recall a Canadian poem by the late C.D. Shanly--the only
one, I believe, the author ever wrote--that fits well the distended
pupil of the mind's eye about the camp-fire at night. It was printed
many years ago in the "Atlantic Monthly," and is called "The Walker
of the Snow;" it begins thus:--
"'Speed on, speed on, good master;
The camp lies far away;
We must cross the haunted valley
Before the close of day.'"
"That has a Canadian sound," said Aaron; "give us more of it."
"'How the snow-blight came upon me
I will tell you as we go,--
The blight of the shadow hunter
Who walks the midnight snow.'"
And so on. The intent seems to be to personify the fearful cold
that overtakes and benumbs the traveler in the great Canadian
forests in winter. This stanza brings out the silence or desolation
of the scene very effectively,--a scene without sound or motion:--
"'Save the wailing of the moose-bird
With a plaintive note and low;
And the skating of the red leaf
Upon the frozen snow.'
"The rest of the poem runs thus:--
"'And said I, Though dark is falling,
And far the camp must be,
Yet my heart it would be lightsome
If I had but company.
"'And then I sang and shouted,
Keeping measure as I sped,
To the harp-twang of the snow-shoe
As it sprang beneath my tread.
"'Nor far into the valley
Had I dipped upon my way,
When a dusky figure joined me
In a capuchin of gray,
"'Bending upon the snow-shoes
With a long and limber stride;
And I hailed the dusky stranger,
As we traveled side by side.
"'But no token of communion
Gave he by word or look,
And the fear-chill fell upon me
At the crossing of the brook.
"'For I saw by the sickly moonlight,
As I followed, bending low,
That the walking of the stranger
Left no foot-marks on the snow.
"'Then the fear-chill gathered o'er me,
Like a shroud around me cast,
As I sank upon the snow-drift
Where the shadow hunter passed.
"'And the otter-trappers found me,
Before the break of day,
With my dark hair blanched and whitened
As the snow in which I lay.
"'But they spoke not as they raised me;
For they knew that in the night
I had seen the shadow hunter
And had withered in his sight.
"'Sancta Maria speed us!
The sun is fallen low:
Before us lies the valley
Of the Walker of the Snow!'"
"Ah!" exclaimed my companion. "Let us pile on more of those dry
birch-logs; I feel both the 'fear-chill' and the 'cold-chill'
creeping over me. How far is it to the valley of the Neversink?"
"About three or four hours' march, the man said."
"I hope we have no haunted valleys to cross?"
"None," said I, "but we pass an old log cabin about which there
hangs a ghostly superstition. At a certain hour in the night, during
the time the bark is loose on the hemlock, a female form is said to
steal from it and grope its way into the wilderness. The tradition
runs that her lover, who was a bark-peeler and wielded the spud, was
killed by his rival, who felled a tree upon him while they were at
work. The girl, who helped her mother cook for the 'hands,' was
crazed by the shock, and that night stole forth into the woods and
was never seen or heard of more. There are old hunters who aver that
her cry may still be heard at night at the head of the valley
whenever a tree falls in the stillness of the forest."
"Well, I heard a tree fall not ten minutes ago," said Aaron; "a
distant, rushing sound with a subdued crash at the end of it, and
the only answering cry I heard was the shrill voice of the screech
owl off yonder against the mountain. But maybe it was not an owl,"
said he after a moment; "let us help the legend along by believing
it was the voice of the lost maiden."
"By the way," continued he, "do you remember the pretty creature we
saw seven years ago in the shanty on the West Branch, who was really
helping her mother cook for the hands, a slip of a girl twelve or
thirteen years old, with eyes as beautiful and bewitching as the
waters that flowed by her cabin? I was wrapped in admiration till
she spoke; then how the spell was broken! Such a voice! It was like
the sound of pots and pans when you expected to hear a lute."
The next day we bade farewell to the Rondout, and set out to cross
the mountain to the east branch of the Neversink.
"We shall find tame waters compared with these, I fear,--a shriveled
stream brawling along over loose stones, with few pools or deep
places."
Our course was along the trail of the bark-men who had pursued the
doomed hemlock to the last tree at the head of the valley. As we
passed along, a red steer stepped out of the bushes into the road
ahead of us, where the sunshine fell full upon him, and, with a
half-scared, beautiful look, begged alms of salt. We passed the
Haunted Shanty; but both it and the legend about it looked very tame
at ten o'clock in the morning. After the road had faded out, we took
to the bed of the stream to avoid the gauntlet of the underbrush,
skipping up the mountain from boulder to boulder. Up and up we went,
with frequent pauses and copious quaffing of the cold water. My
soldier declared a "haunted valley" would be a godsend; anything
but endless dragging of one's self up such an Alpine stairway. The
winter wren, common all through the woods, peeped and scolded at us
as we sat blowing near the summit, and the oven-bird, not quite sure
as to what manner of creatures we were, hopped down a limb to within
a few feet of us and had a good look, then darted off into the
woods to tell the news. I also noted the Canada warbler, the
chestnut-sided warbler, and the black-throated blue-back,--the
latter most abundant of all. Up these mountain brooks, too, goes the
belted kingfisher, swooping around through the woods when he spies
the fisherman, then wheeling into the open space of the stream and
literally making a "blue streak" down under the branches.
At last the stream which had been our guide was lost under the
rocks, and before long the top was gained. These mountains are
horse-shaped. There is always a broad, smooth back, more or less
depressed, which the hunter aims to bestride; rising rapidly from
this is pretty sure to be a rough, curving ridge that carries the
forest up to some highest peak. We were lucky in hitting the saddle,
but we could see a little to the south the sharp, steep neck of the
steed sweeping up toward the sky with an erect mane of balsam fir.
These mountains are steed-like in other respects: any timid and
vacillating course with them is sure to get you into trouble. One
must strike out boldly, and not be disturbed by the curveting and
shying; the valley you want lies squarely behind them, but farther
off than you think, and if you do not go for it resolutely, you will
get bewildered and the mountain will play you a trick.
I may say that Aaron and I kept a tight rein and a good pace till we
struck a water-course on the other side, and that we clattered down
it with no want of decision till it emptied into a larger stream
which we knew must be the East Branch. An abandoned fishpole lay on
the stones, marking the farthest point reached by some fisherman.
According to our reckoning, we were five or six miles above the
settlement, with a good depth of primitive woods all about us.
We kept on down the stream, now and then pausing at a likely place
to take some trout for dinner, and with an eye out for a good
camping-ground. Many of the trout were full of ripe spawn, and a few
had spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the
stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither
had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led,
indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen
treetops and among the loose stones. At rare intervals it beamed
upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us our
best attention in return.
The day was quite spent before we had pitched our air-woven tent
and prepared our dinner, and we gathered boughs for our bed in the
gloaming. Breakfast had to be caught in the morning and was not
served early, so that it was nine o'clock before we were in motion.
A little bird, the red-eyed vireo, warbled most cheerily in the
trees above our camp, and, as Aaron said, "gave us a good send-off."
We kept down the stream, following the inevitable bark road.
My companion had refused to look at another "dividing ridge" that
had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open
road or travel alone. Two hours' tramp brought us to an old clearing
with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had
been occupied by the bark and lumber men. The prospect for trout was
so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and
inviting, shone upon by the dreamy August sun, that we concluded to
tarry here until the next day. It was a page of pioneer history
opened to quite unexpectedly. A dim footpath led us a few yards to a
superb spring, in which a trout from the near creek had taken up his
abode. We took possession of what had been a shingle-shop, attracted
by its huge fireplace. We floored it with balsam boughs, hung its
walls with our "traps," and sent the smoke curling again from its
disused chimney.
The most musical and startling sound we heard in the woods greeted
our ears that evening about sundown as we sat on a log in front of
our quarters,--the sound of slow, measured pounding in the valley
below us. We did not know how near we were to human habitations, and
the report of the lumberman's mallet, like the hammering of a great
woodpecker, was music to the ear and news to the mind. The air was
still and dense, and the silence such as alone broods over these
little openings in the primitive woods. My soldier started as if he
had heard a signal-gun. The sound, coming so far through the forest,
sweeping over those great wind-harps of trees, became wild and
legendary, though probably made by a lumberman driving a wedge or
working about his mill.
We expected a friendly visit from porcupines that night, as we saw
where they had freshly gnawed all about us; hence, when a red
squirrel came and looked in upon us very early in the morning and
awoke us by his snickering and giggling, my comrade cried out,
"There is your porcupig." How the frisking red rogue seemed to enjoy
what he had found! He looked in at the door and snickered, then in
at the window, then peeked down from between the rafters and
cachinnated till his sides must have ached; then struck an attitude
upon the chimney, and fairly squealed with mirth and ridicule. In
fact, he grew so obstreperous, and so disturbed our repose, that we
had to "shoo" him away with one of our boots. He declared most
plainly that he had never before seen so preposterous a figure as we
cut lying there in the corner of that old shanty.
The morning boded rain, the week to which we had limited ourselves
drew near its close, and we concluded to finish our holiday worthily
by a good square tramp to the railroad station, twenty-three miles
distant, as it proved. Two miles brought us to stumpy fields, and to
the house of the upper inhabitant. They told us there was a short
cut across the mountain, but my soldier shook his head.
"Better twenty miles of Europe," said he, getting Tennyson a little
mixed, "than one of Cathay, or Slide Mountain either."
Drops of the much-needed rain began to come down, and I hesitated in
front of the woodshed.
"Sprinkling weather always comes to some bad end," said Aaron, with
a reminiscence of an old couplet in his mind, and so it proved, for
it did not get beyond a sprinkle, and the sun shone out before noon.
In the next woods I picked up from the middle of the road the tail
and one hind leg of one of our native rats, the first I had ever
seen except in a museum. An owl or fox had doubtless left it the
night before. It was evident the fragments had once formed part of a
very elegant and slender creature. The fur that remained (for it was
not hair) was tipped with red. My reader doubtless knows that the
common rat is an importation, and that there is a native American
rat, usually found much farther south than the locality of which I
am writing, that lives in the woods,--a sylvan rat, very wild and
nocturnal in his habits, and seldom seen even by hunters or woodmen.
Its eyes are large and fine, and its form slender. It looks like
only a far-off undegenerate cousin of the filthy creature that has
come to us from the long-peopled Old World. Some creature ran
between my feet and the fire toward morning, the last night we slept
in the woods, and I have little doubt it was one of these wood-rats.
The people in these back settlements are almost as shy and furtive
as the animals. Even the men look a little scared when you stop them
by your questions. The children dart behind their parents when you
look at them. As we sat on a bridge resting,--for our packs still
weighed fifteen or twenty pounds each,--two women passed us with
pails on their arms, going for blackberries. They filed by with
their eyes down like two abashed nuns.
[Illustration: SOME PEOPLE OF THE CATSKILLS]
In due time we found an old road, to which we had been directed,
that led over the mountain to the West Branch. It was a hard pull,
sweetened by blackberries and a fine prospect. The snowbird was
common along the way, and a solitary wild pigeon shot through the
woods in front of us, recalling the nests we had seen on the East
Branch,--little scaffoldings of twigs scattered all through the
trees.
It was nearly noon when we struck the West Branch, and the sun was
scalding hot. We knew that two and three pound trout had been taken
there, and yet we wet not a line in its waters. The scene was
primitive, and carried one back to the days of his grandfather,
stumpy fields, log fences, log houses and barns. A boy twelve or
thirteen years old came out of a house ahead of us eating a piece of
bread and butter. We soon overtook him and held converse with him.
He knew the land well, and what there was in the woods and the
waters. He had walked out to the railroad station, fourteen miles
distant, to see the cars, and back the same day. I asked him about
the flies and mosquitoes, etc. He said they were all gone except the
"blunder-heads;" there were some of them left yet.
"What are blunder-heads?" I inquired, sniffing new game.
"The pesky little fly that gets into your eye when you are
a-fishing."
Ah, yes! I knew him well. We had got acquainted some days before,
and I thanked the boy for the name. It is an insect that hovers
before your eye as you thread the streams, and you are forever
vaguely brushing at it under the delusion that it is a little spider
suspended from your hat-brim; and just as you want to see clearest,
into your eye it goes, head and ears, and is caught between the
lids. You miss your cast, but you catch a "blunder-head."
We paused under a bridge at the mouth of Biscuit Brook and ate our
lunch, and I can recommend it to be as good a wayside inn as the
pedestrian need look for. Better bread and milk than we had there I
never expect to find. The milk was indeed so good that Aaron went
down to the little log house under the hill a mile farther on and
asked for more; and being told they had no cow, he lingered five
minutes on the doorstone with his sooty pail in his hand, putting
idle questions about the way and distance to the mother while
he refreshed himself with the sight of a well-dressed and
comely-looking young girl, her daughter.
"I got no milk," said he, hurrying on after me, "but I got something
better, only I cannot divide it."
"I know what it is," replied I; "I heard her voice."