AFTER THE LOGGERS
I lay listening to the rain spattering against the fly of the tent and
dripping through the roof of birch leaves upon the sputtering fire and
soaking down into the deep, spongy bottom of the forest--softly, as
soft as something breathing and asleep. The guide and the boy beside
me were asleep, but I had been awakened by the rain. The rain always
wakens me. And in my grave, I think, if I lie sleeping under a roof
of forest leaves, I shall wake and listen when it rains. Before the
stars sang together the primordial waters made music to the rising
land; before the winds came murmuring through the trees the waves were
fingering the sweet-tuned sands strung down the sounding shores; and
before the birds found their tongues, or the crickets their little
fiddles, or even the toad had blown his quavering conch, it had rained!
And when it rained--and not until it rained--the whole earth woke into
song. Mother of music is the water, and, for me, the sweetest of her
daughters is the rain, and never sweeter, not even on the shingles, nor
down the rolled, fevered blades of the standing corn, than in the deep
woods at night upon the low slant roof of your tent.
But suddenly the singing stopped, and the myriad rain-notes were turned
to feet, tiny, stirring feet, creeping down the tent, skipping across
the leaves, galloping over the forest floor, and jumping in and out of
the fire. Then a twig snapped. Was that what had awakened me? I rose
up on my elbow slowly. The tent flap was open; the woods were very
dark, the dim light from above the roof of leaves and rain showing
only shadows, and an ashen spot where the camp-fire still spluttered,
and beyond the ashen spot a shadow--different from the other shadows;
a shape--a doe with big ears forward toward the fire! A bit of birch
bark flared in the darkness, and the shape was gone. I could hear her
moving through the ferns; hear her jump a fallen log and step out
among the grating pebbles on the shore. Then all was still, except for
the scampering rain, and the little red-backed wood-mouse among the
camp tins, and the teeth of a porcupine chilled and chattering in the
darkness at the big wood-mouse among the tins, and the rain running
everywhere.
I dropped back upon my pillow and left off listening. How good the
duffle-bag felt beneath my head! And the thick, springy bows of the fir
beneath the bag, how good they felt--springs and mattress in one, laid
underside up, evenly, and a foot deep, all over the tent floor! And how
good they smelled! A bed of balsam-fir boughs is more than a bed; it is
an oblation to Sleep, and not a vain oblation--after miles of paddling
in live water or a day of trailing through the spruce and fir.
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding”
runs the song--
“Into the land of my dreams.”
But, speaking of sleep, there is no trail, except a forest trail, that
winds away to a land of such deep dreamlessness as that of a woodman’s
sleep; and no sleep, from which a man will waken, half so fragrant
and refreshing as his. I do not wish to be carried to the skies “on
flowery beds of ease,” but I should like this balsam-fir bed, for two
or three weeks every summer, in the woods of Maine. A reasonable and a
wholesome wish that, as I lay there wrapped in the fragrant mantle of
my couch, I coveted for city sleepers everywhere.
The odors (we should spell them with a “u”)--the odo_u_rs of the big
woods are so clean and pure and prophylactic! They clear the clogged
senses, and keep them in a kind of antiseptic bath, washing a coated
tongue as no wine can wash it; and tingling along the most snarled of
nerves, straightening, tempering, tuning them till the very heart is
timed to the singing of the firs. My bed of boughs was a full foot
deep, covering every inch of the bottom of the tent, fresh cut that
evening, and so bruised with the treading as we laid them that their
smell, in the close, rainy air of the night, filled the tent like a
cloud. I lay and breathed--as if taking a cure, this tent being the
contagious ward of the great hospital, the Out-of-Doors. All around
me poured the heavy, penetrating vapor distilled from the gums, and
resins, and oils, and sweet healing essences of the woods, mingled here
in the tent with the aromatic balsam of the fir. I breathed it to the
bottom of my lungs; but my lungs were not deep enough; I must breathe
it with hands and feet to get it all; but they were not enough. Then a
breeze swept by the tent, pausing to lay its mouth over my mouth, and,
catching away my little breath, breathed for me its own big breath,
until my very bones, like the bones of the birds, were breathing, and
every vein ran redolent of the breath of the fir.
That breeze blew the sharp, pungent smell of wood smoke past the
tent. I caught it eagerly--the sweet smoke of the cedar logs still
smouldering on the fire. There was no suggestion of hospitals in this
whiff, but camps, rather, and kitchens, altars, caves, the smoke of
whose ancient fires is still strong in our nostrils and cured into the
very substance of our souls.
I wonder if our oldest racial memory may not be that of fire, and if
any other form of fire, a coal off any other altar, can touch the
imagination as the coals of a glowing camp-fire. And I wonder if any
other odor takes us farther down our ancestral past than the smell of
wood smoke, and if there is another smoke so sweet as cedar smoke,
when the thin, faint wraith from the smouldering logs curls past your
tent on the slow wind of the woods and drifts away.
It does not matter of what the fire is built. I can still taste the
spicy smoke of the sagebrush in my last desert camp. And how hot that
sagebrush fire! And as sweet as the spicy sage is the smell in my
nostrils of the cypress and gum in my camp-fires of the South. Swamp
or desert or forest, the fire is the lure--the light, the warmth, the
crackle of the flames, and the mystic incense of the smoke rising as a
sweet savor to the deities of the woods and plains.
It is the camp-fire that lures me to the woods when I might go down to
the sea. I love the sea. Perhaps I fear it more; and perhaps I have
not yet learned to pitch my tent and build my fire upon the waves;
certainly I have not yet got used to the fo’c’s’le smell. For, of all
foul odors known to beast or man, the indescribable stench of the
fo’c’s’le is to me the worst. What wild wind of the ocean can blow that
smell away? When bilges are sprayed with attar of roses, and fo’c’s’les
sheathed in sandalwood, and sailors given shower-baths and open fires,
I shall take a vacation before the mast; but until then give me the
woods and my fir-bough bed, and my fire of birch and cedar logs, and
the rain upon my tent.
When I woke at dawn it was still raining; and off and on all day it
rained, spoiling our plans for the climb up Spencer Mountain and
keeping us close to camp and the drying fire. The forest here at the
foot of the mountain was a mixed piece of old-growth timber, that had
been logged for spruce and pine some years before--as every mile of the
forest of Maine has been logged--yet so low and spongy was the bottom
that the timber seems to have overgrown and long since ceased to be fit
for lumber, so that most of it was left standing when the lumber-jacks
went through. We were camped by the side of Spencer Pond in the thick
of these giant trees--yellow birch, canoe birch, maple and spruce,
hemlock and fir and pine--where the shade was so dense and the forest
floor so strewn with fallen trees that only the club mosses, and the
sphagnum, and a few of the deep-woods flowers could grow. The rain made
little difference to my passage here, so low were these lesser forest
forms under the perpetual umbrage of the mighty trees, and I came back
from as far in as I dared to venture on so dull a day, my clothes quite
dry, but my spirit touched with a spell of the forest, which I should
have missed had the sun been shining and the points of the compass
clear.
For in the big woods one is ever conscious of direction, a sense
that is so exaggerated in the deepest bottoms, especially when only
indirect, diffused light fills the shadowy spaces, as to border on
fear. I am never free, in a strange forest, from its haunting Presence;
so close to it that I seem to hear it; seem able to touch it; and when,
for a moment of some minor interest or excitement, I have forgotten to
remember and, looking up, find the Presence gone from me, I am seized
with sudden fright. What other panic comes so softly, yet with more
terrible swiftness? And once the maze seizes you, once you begin to
meet yourself, find yourself running the circle of your back tracks,
the whole mind goes to pieces and madness is upon you.
“Set where you be and holler till I come get ye, if ye’re lost,” the
guide would say. “Climb a tree and holler; don’t run around like a
side-hill gouger, or you’re gone.”
I do not know what sort of animal is Johnny’s side-hill gouger; though
I saw, one day, far up on the side of the mountain a big bare spot
where he had been digging--according to the guide. It is enough for me
that there is such a beast in the woods, and that he gets those who
turn round and round in the forest on rainy days and forget to look up.
The gouger was abroad in the woods to-day. The clouds hung at the base
of the mountains, just above the tops of the trees; the rain came
straight down; the huge fallen trunks lay everywhere criss-cross; and
once beyond the path to the spring the semi-gloom blurred every trail
and put at naught all certainty of direction.
But how this fear sharpened the senses and quickened everything in the
scene about me! I was in the neighborhood of danger, and every dull and
dormant faculty became alert. Nothing would come from among the dusky
trees to harm me; no bear, or lynx, or moose, for they would run away;
it was the dusk itself, and the big trees that would not run away; and
I watched them furtively as they drew nearer and nearer and closed in
deeper about me. I knew enough to “set down and holler” if I got turned
hopelessly around; but this very knowledge of weakness, of inability
to cope alone with these silent, sinister forces, woke all my ancient
fears and called back that brood of more than fabled monsters from
their caves and fens and forest lairs.
This was the real woods, however, deep, dark, and primeval, and no
mere fantasy of fear. It looked even older than its hoary years, for
the floor was strewn with its mouldering dead, not one generation, but
ages of them, form under form, till only long, faint lines of greener
moss told where the eldest of them had fallen an æon since and turned
to earth. Time leaves on nothing its failing marks so deeply furrowed
as upon men and trees, and here in the woods upon no other trees so
deeply as upon the birches. Lovely beyond all trees in their shining,
slender youth, they grow immeasurably aged with the years, especially
the yellow birch, whose grim, grizzled boles seemed more like weathered
columns of stone than living trees.
One old monster, with a hole in his base that a bear might den in,
towering till his shoulders overtopped the tallest spruce, stood
leaning his gnarled hands upon the air, as a bent and aged man leans
with his knotty hands upon a cane. A hundred years he might have been
leaning so; a hundred years more he might continue in his slow decline,
till, with a crash, he falls to lie for a hundred years to come across
a prostrate form that fell uncounted years before.
I was standing on the tough, hollow rind of such a birch, so long,
long dead that its carcass had gone to dust, leaving only this empty
shell that looked like a broken, half-buried piece of aqueduct. It was
neither tree nor pipe, however, but the House of Porcupines, as I could
plainly hear by the grunting inside. A pile of droppings at the door
of the house told the story of generations of porkies going in and out
before the present family came into their inheritance. I knocked on the
rubbery walls with my foot, but not hard, for I might break through and
hurt Mother or Father Porky, or possibly the baby that I saw along the
pond that night. No careful, right-minded person steps on or hurts a
porcupine in any manner.
I went on out of the sound of their teeth, for chattering teeth are
not consoling, and the woods were gray enough. Gray and vast and
magnificently ruinous, yet eternally new they were, the old walls
slowly crumbling, and over them, out of their heaped disorder, the
fresh walls rising to the high-arched roof that never falls. To-day the
deep, hollow halls were shut to me by the arras of the gloom, and so
smoky rolled the rain beneath the roof that even the black rafters of
the birches were scarcely visible; but all the closer about me, in the
wildest wealth and splendor, lay the furniture of the forest floor.
Never were wools dyed and woven with a pile so rich and deep as the
cover of mosses and lichens that carpeted this rude, cluttered floor.
Rolled and wrinkled and heaped up over the stumps, it lay, nowhere
stretched, nowhere swept, a bronze and green and gold ground, figured
and flowered endlessly; and down the longest, deepest wrinkle a
darkling little stream! It was a warp of sphagnum moss with woof of
lichens, liverworts, ferns, mushrooms, club mosses, and shier flowers
of the shadows, that was woven for the carpet--long, vivid runners
of lycopodium, the fingered sort, or club moss, and its fan-leaved
cousin, the ground pine, now in fruit, its clusters of spikes like
tiny candelabra standing ready to be lighted all over the floor; and
everywhere, on every tree-trunk, stump, and log, and stone the scale
mosses, myriads of them, in blotches of exquisite shapes and colors,
giving the gray-green tone to the walls as the sphagnums gave the
vivid bronze-green to the floor. Down to about the level of my head,
the dominant note in the color scheme of the walls, hung the gray
reindeer moss, tufts and shreds and pointed bunches of it like old
men’s grizzled beards. Some of the spruces and twisted cedars were
covered with it. Shorter in staple than the usnea of the South, stiffer
and lighter in color, it is far less somber and funereal; but a forest
bearded with it looks older than time. This moss is the favorite winter
food of the moose and caribou and deer, and so clean had the moose and
deer eaten it from the trees, up as high as they could reach, that the
effect on a clear day was as if a thin gray fog had settled in the
forest at an even six-foot level from the ground.
Worked in among the lichens and mosses, quite without design, were the
deep-woods flowers--patches of goldthread, beds of foam-flower and
delicate wood-sorrel and the brilliant little bunchberry. Wherever the
sunlight had a chance to touch the cold, boggy bottom it seemed to set
the punk on fire and blaze up into these scarlet berries, stumps and
knolls and slopes aflame with them, to burn on through the gloom until
they should be smothered by the snow. Twin-flower and partridge-berry
were laced in little mats about the bases of the trees; here and there
the big red fruit of trillium and the nodding blue berries of clintonia
were mixed in a spot of gay color with berries of the twisted stalk,
the wild lily-of-the-valley, and the fiery seed-balls of the Indian
turnip.
These touches of color were like the effect of flowers about a stately,
somber room, for this was an ancient and a solemn house of mighty folk.
If the little people came to dwell in the shadow of these noble great
they must be content with whatever crumbs of sunshine fell from the
heaven-spread table over them to the damp and mouldering floor. There
were corners so dark that only the coral orchid and the Indian pipe
pushed up through the mat of leaves; and other spots, half open to
the sky, where the cinnamon fern and the lady fern waved their lovely
plumes, and the wood fern, the beech, the oak, and the crested shield
ferns grew together, forced thus to share the scanty light dropped to
them from the overflowing feast above.
But I never saw mushrooms in such marvelous shapes and colors and
in such indescribable abundance as here. The deep forest was like a
natural cavern for them, its cold, dank twilight feeding their elfin
lamps until the whole floor was lighted with their ghostly glow.
Clearest and coldest burned the pale-green amanita, and with it,
surpassingly beautiful in color and design, the egg-topped muscaria,
its baleful taper in a splotched and tinted shade of blended orange
yellows, fading softly toward the rim. Besides these, and shorter
on their stems, were white and green and purple russulas, and great
burning red ones, the size of large poinsettia blooms; and groups of
brown boletus, scattered golden chanterelles, puff-balls, exquisite
coral clusters, and, strangest of them all, like handfuls of frosted
fog, the snowy medusa. These last I gathered for my lunch, together
with some puff-balls and a few campestris, whose spores, I suppose, may
have been brought into the woods with the horses when this tract was
lumbered years ago. But I had little appetite for mushrooms. It was the
sight of them, dimly luminous in the rain, that held me, their squat
lamps burning with a spectral light which filled the dusky spaces of
the forest full of goblin gloom.
As I sat watching the uncanny lights there was a rush of small feet
down the birch at my back, a short stop just above my head, and a
volley of windy talk that might have blown out every elf light in
the neighborhood. It was very sudden and, breaking into the utter
stillness, it was almost startling. A moose could hardly have made more
noise. I said nothing back nor took any notice of him. He could kick
up the biggest sort of a rumpus if he wished to, for the woods needed
it. I only wondered that he had a tongue, dwelling forever here in
this solitude. But a red squirrel’s tongue is equal to any solitude,
and more than once I have caught him talking against it, challenging
the silence of all outdoors, as I have seen small boys challenge each
other to a blatting-match.
By and by I turned, and so startled him that he dropped a cluster of
green berries from his mouth almost upon my head. It was a large bunch
of arbor vitæ berries that he was going to store away, for, though
he sleeps much of the winter, he is an inveterate hoarder, working
overtime, down the summer, as if the approaching winter were to be
seven lean years long.
I was glad he had not obtruded earlier, but now he reminded me properly
that it was long past noon, and high time for me to get back to camp.
It was later than I thought, for the woods had gradually grown lighter,
the rain had almost ceased, and by the time I reached camp had stopped
altogether. While we were at supper the sun broke through on the edge
of the west and ran the rounded basin of the pond over-full with gold.
I stepped down to the shore to watch the glorious closing of the day.
The clouds had lifted nearly to the tops of the mountains, where their
wings were still spread, feathering the sky with gray for far around; a
few fallen plumes lying snowy white upon the dark slopes of the lesser
hills; then pouring down the hills into the pond, splashing over the
gleaming mountains and up against the sky, burst the flood of golden
light with indescribable glory.
“All ready,” said the guide, touching me on the arm, and I stepped into
the bow of the canoe as he pushed quietly off. An Indian never moved
with softer paddle, nor ever did a birch-bark canoe glide off with the
ease of this one under the hand of John Eastman, as we moved along in
the close shadows of the shore.
The light was passing, but the flush of color still lay on the lovely
face of the water with a touch of warmth and life that seemed little
less than joy; a serene, but not a solemn joy, for there was too much
girlish roundness and freshness to the countenance of the water, too
much happiness in the little hills and woods that watched her, and in
the jealous old mountain that frowned darkly down. Mine, too, were the
eyes of a lover, and in my heart was the lover’s pain, for what had I
to offer this eternal youth and loveliness?
The prow of the canoe swerved with a telling movement that sent my eyes
quick to the shore, to see a snow-shoe rabbit racing down a little
cove hard at me, with something--a stir of alder leaves, a sound of
long, leaping feet making off into the swamp--that had been pursuing
him. It was probably a wildcat that had leaped and missed the rabbit
and seen us from within his covert. What lightning eyes and lightning
legs, thus to leap and turn together! The rabbit had run almost to the
canoe, and sat listening from behind a root at the edge of the water,
ears straight up and body so tense with excitement that we nosed along
close enough to touch him with a paddle before he had eyes and ears
for us. Even then it was his twitching, sensitive nose that warned
him, for his keen ears caught no sound; and, floating down upon him
thus, we must have looked to his innocent eyes as much like a log or a
two-headed moose as like men.
Softly in and out with the narrow fret of shadow that hemmed the margin
of the pond swam the gray canoe, a creature of the water, a very part
of our creature selves, our amphibious body, the form we swam with
before the hills were born. Brother to the muskrat and the beaver, I
stemmed along, as much at home as they among the pickerel-weed and the
cow-lilies, and leaving across the silvery patches of the open water as
silent a wake as they.
Nothing could move across such silvery quiet without a trail. So
stirless was the water that the wake of a feeding fish was visible a
hundred yards away. Within the tarnished smooches of the lily-pads a
muskrat might move about and not be seen; but not a trout could swirl
close to the burnished surface of the open water without a ripple that
ran whispering into every little inlet around the shore. The circle of
the pond was almost perfect, so that I roved, at a glance, the whole
curving shore-line, watching keenly for whatever might come down to
feed or drink.
We came up to a patch of pickerel-weed and frightened a brood of
half-grown sheldrakes that went rushing off across the water, kicking
up a streak of suds and making a noise like the launching of a fleet
of tiny ships. Heading into a little cove, we met a muskrat coming
straight across our bows. A dip of the paddle sent us almost into her.
A quicker dive she never made nor a more startling one, for the smack
as she struck the water jumped me half out of the canoe. Her head
broke the surface a dozen yards beyond us, and we followed her into the
mouth of a stream and on to a hummock into which she swam as a boat
swims under a bridge, or more as a train runs into a tunnel, for an
arching hole opened into the mound, just above the level of the stream,
through which she had glided out of sight. Hardly had she disappeared
before she popped up again from deep under the mound, at the other
side, and close to the canoe, starting back once more down-stream. She
had dodged us. Her nose and eyes and ears were just above the water and
a portion of her back; her bladelike tail was arched, its middle point,
only, above the surface, its sheering, perpendicular edges doing duty
as propeller, keel, and rudder all at once.
As she made off the guide squeaked shrilly with his lips. Instantly
she turned and came back, swimming round and round the canoe, trying
to interpret the sounds, puzzled to know how they could come from the
canoe, and fearing that something might be wrong inside the house. She
dived to find out. By this time two young ones had floated into the
mouth of the tunnel, thinking their mother was calling them, blinking
there in the soft light so close that I might have reached them with my
hand. Satisfied that the family was in order, the old rat reappeared,
and no amount of false squeaking would turn her back.
A few bends up the stream and we heard the sound of falling water at
the beaver dam. Fresh work had been done on the dam; but we waited
in vain for a sight of the workers. They would not go on with their
building. One of the colony (there were not more than two families of
them, I think) swam across the stream, and came swiftly down to within
a few feet of us, when, scenting us, perhaps, he warped short about
and vanished among the thick bushes that trailed from the bank of the
stream.
A black duck came over, just above our heads, with wings whirring like
small airplane propellers, as she bore straight out toward the middle
of the pond. We were passing a high place along the shore when a dark
object, a mere spot of black, seemed to move off at the side of us
against the white line of the pebbles, and I found that I was already
being sent silently toward it. My pulse quickened, for the thing moved
very slowly; and behind it a lesser blur that also moved--very slowly;
so deep was the darkness of the overhanging trees, however, that the
nose of the canoe ploughed softly into the sand beside the creatures,
and I had not made out the fat old porcupine, and, creeping a foot or
two behind her, as if he might catch up by to-morrow, perhaps, the baby
porky.
The old mother was feeding on bits of lily-pads washed up along the
shore, picking them from among the stones with her paws as if she
intended to finish her supper by to-morrow, perhaps, when her baby had
covered the foot or two of space between them and caught up with her.
She was so intent on this serious and deliberate business that she
never looked up as I stopped beside her; she only grunted and chattered
her teeth; but I disturbed the baby, apparently, for he speeded up,
and pretty soon came alongside his mother, who turned savagely upon
him and told him to mind his manners, which he did by humping into a
little heap, sticking his head down between two stones, and raying the
young quills out across his back in a fan of spines. He didn’t budge
for about five minutes. Then he hurried again--right up beside the old
one--a thing so highly improper in porkypinedom, and so deleterious to
porkypine health, that she turned and, with another growl, humped her
fat little porky again into a quiet and becoming bunch of quills. This
time she read him a lecture on the “Whole Duty of Children.” It was in
the porcupine-pig language, and her teeth clicked so that I am not sure
I got it verbatim, but I think she said, quite distinctly:
“A child should always say what’s true,
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table:
_At least as far as he is able_”--
for, seeing him so obediently and properly humped, she repented her of
her severity and, reaching out with her left paw, picked up a nice,
whole lily-pad and, turning half around, handed it to him as much as
to say, “There, now; but chew it up very thoroughly, as you did the
handle of the carving-knife in the camp last night.”
It was a sweet glimpse into the family life of the woods; and as the
canoe backed off and turned again down-stream I was saying to myself:
“Every night my prayers I say,
And get my dinner every day,
And every day that I’ve been good
I get an orange after food”--
or a nice, round lily-pad.
The precious light was fading, and we had yet more than half the magic
circle of the shore to round. As we passed out into the pond again a
flock of roosting blackbirds whirred noisily from the “pucker-brush,”
or sweet-gale bushes, frightened by the squeal of the bushes against
the sides of the canoe; and hardly had their whirring ceased when,
ahead of me, his head up, his splendid antlers tipped with fire, stood
a magnificent buck. He had heard the birds, or had scented us, and,
whirling in his tracks, curiosity, defiance, and alarm in every line of
his tense, tawny body, stood for one eternal instant in my eye, when,
shaking off his amazement, he turned and, bounding over the sweet-gale
and alders, went crashing into the swamp.
I had neither camera nor gun; but, better than both, I had eyes--not
such good eyes as John Eastman’s, for he could see in the dark--but
mine with my spectacles were better than a camera; for mine are a
moving-picture theater--screen, film, machine, and camera, all behind
my spectacles, and this glorious creature for the picture, with the
dark hills beyond, the meadowy margin of the pond in the foreground,
and over the buck, and the pond, and the dark green hills, and over me
a twilight that never was nor ever can be thrown upon a screen!
I had come into the wilds of Maine without so much as a
fish-line--though I have fished months of my life away, and am not
unwilling to fish away a considerable portion of whatever time may
still be left me. But am I not able, in these later days, to spend my
time “in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments
than, these,--employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling?
For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come
with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indians and
hunters make of Nature!... Strange that so few ever come to the woods
to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen
arms to the light,--to see its perfect success; but most are content to
behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem
_that_ its true success!... Every creature is better alive than dead,
men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will
rather preserve its life than destroy it.”
Thoreau did not teach me that truth, for every lover of life discovers
it himself; but how long before me it was that he found it out,
and how many other things besides it he found out here in the big
woods! Three-quarters of a century ago he camped on Katahdin, and on
Chesuncook, and down the Allegash; but now he camps wherever a tent is
pitched or a fire is lighted in the woods of Maine. His name is on the
tongue of every forest tree, and on every water; and over every carry
at twilight may be seen his gray canoe and Indian guide.
And I wonder, a century hence, who will camp here where I am camping,
and here discover again the woods of Maine? For the native shall
return. And as “every creature is better alive than dead, man and
moose and pine tree”; and as “he who understands it aright will rather
preserve _his_ life than destroy it” so shall he seek his healing here.
The light had gone out of the sky. It was after nine o’clock. A deep
purple had flowed in and filled the basin of the pond, thickening
about its margins till nothing but the long chalk-marks of the birches
showed double along the shore. The high, inverted cone of Spencer stood
just in front of the canoe as we headed out across the pond toward the
camp, its shadow and its substance only faint suggestions now, for all
things had turned to shadow, the solid substance of the day having been
dissolved in this purple flood and poured into the beaker of the night.
A moose “barked” off on a marshy point near the dam behind us; a loon
went laughing over, shaking the hollow sides of Spencer and all the
echoing walls of the woods with his weird and mirthless cry. Against
the black base of the mountain a faint bluish cloud appeared--the smoke
of our camp-fire that, slowly sinking through the heavy air, spread out
to meet us over the hushed and sleeping pond.