HOMEWARD.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful is dawn in the woods. Sweet the first
opalescent stir, as if the vanguard sunbeams shivered as they dashed
along the chilly reaches of night. And the growth of day, through violet
and rose and all its golden glow of promise, is tender and tenderly
strong, as the deepening passions of dawning love. Presently up comes
the sun very peremptory, and says to people, "Go about your business!
Laggards not allowed in Maine! Nothing here to repent of, while you
lie in bed and curse to-day because it cannot shake off the burden of
yesterday; all clear the past here; all serene the future; into it at
once!"
Birch was ready for us. Objects we travel on, if horses, often stampede
or are stampeded; if wagons, they break down; if shanks, they stiffen;
if feet, they chafe. No such trouble befalls Birch; leak, however, it
will, as ours did this morning. We gently beguiled it into the position
taken tearfully by unwhipped little boys, when they are about to receive
birch. Then, with a firebrand, the pitch of the seams was easily
persuaded to melt and spread a little over the leaky spot, and Birch was
sound as a drum.
Staunch and sound Birch needed to be, for presently Penobscot, always a
skittish young racer, began to grow lively after he had shaken off the
weighty shadow of Katahdin, and, kicking up his heels, went galloping
down hill, so furiously that we were at last, after sundry frantic
plunges, compelled to get off his back before worse befell us. In the
balmy morning we made our first portage through a wood of spruces.
How light our firkin was growing! its pork, its hard-tack, and its
condiments were diffused among us three, and had passed into muscle.
Lake Degetus, as pretty a pocket lake as there is, followed the carry.
Next came Lake Ambajeejus, larger, but hardly less lovely. Those who
dislike long names may use its shorter Indian title, Umdo. We climbed a
granite crag draped with moss long as the beard of a Druid,--a crag on
the south side of Ambajeejus or Umdo. Thence we saw Katahdin, noble as
ever, unclouded in the sunny morning, near, and yet enchantingly vague,
with the blue sky which surrounded it. It was still an isolate pyramid
rising with no effect from the fair blue lakes and the fair green sea
of the birch-forest,--a brilliant sea of woods, gay as the shallows of
ocean shot through with sunbeams and sunlight reflected upward from
golden sands.
We sped along all that exquisite day, best of all our poetic voyage.
Sometimes we drifted and basked in sunshine, sometimes we lingered in
the birchen shade; we paddled from river to lake, from lake to river
again; the rapids whirled us along, surging and leaping under us with
magnificent gallop; frequent carries struck in, that we might not lose
the forester in the waterman. It was a fresh world that we traversed
on our beautiful river-path,--new as if no other had ever parted its
overhanging bowers.
At noon we floated out upon Lake Pemadumcook, the largest bulge of
the Penobscot, and irregular as the verb To Be. Lumbermen name it
Bammydumcook: Iglesias insisted upon this as the proper reading; and as
he was the responsible man of the party, I accepted it. Woods, woody
hills, and woody mountains surround Bammydumcook. I have no doubt parts
of it are pretty and will be famous in good time; but we saw little. By
the time we were fairly out in the lake and away from the sheltering
shore, a black squall to windward, hiding all the West, warned us to
fly, for birches swamp in squalls. We deemed that Birch, having brought
us through handsomely, deserved a better fate: swamped it must not be.
We plied paddle valiantly, and were almost safe behind an arm of the
shore when the storm overtook us, and in a moment more, safe, with a
canoe only half-full of Bammydumcook water.
It is easy to speak in scoffing tone; but when that great roaring
blackness sprang upon us, and the waves, showing their white teeth,
snarled around, we were far from being in the mood to scoff. It is
impossible to say too much of the charm of this gentle scenery, mingled
with the charm of this adventurous sailing. And then there were no
mosquitoes, no alligators, no serpents uncomfortably hugging the trees,
no miasmas lurking near; and blueberries always. Dust there was none,
nor the things that make dust. But Iglesias and I were breathing AIR,
--Air sweet, tender, strong, and pure as an ennobling love. It was a day
very happy, for Iglesias and I were near what we both love almost best
of all the dearly-beloveds. It is such influence as this that rescues
the thought and the hand of an artist from enervating mannerism. He
cannot be satisfied with vague blotches of paint to convey impressions
so distinct and vivid as those he is forced to take direct from a Nature
like this. He must be true and powerful.
The storm rolled by and gave us a noble view of Katahdin, beyond a
broad, beautiful scope of water, and rising seemingly directly from it.
We fled before another squall, over another breadth of Bammydumcook, and
made a portage around a great dam below the lake. The world should know
that at this dam the reddest, spiciest, biggest, thickest wintergreen
berries in the world are to be found, beautiful as they are good.
Birch had hitherto conducted himself with perfect propriety. I, the
novice, had acquired such entire confidence in his stability of
character that I treated him with careless ease, and never listened
to the warnings of my comrades that he would serve me a trick. Cancut
navigated Birch through some white water below the dam, and Birch went
curveting proudly and gracefully along, evidently feeling his oats.
When Iglesias and I came to embark, I, the novice, perhaps a little
intoxicated with wintergreen berries, stepped jauntily into the
laden boat. Birch, alas, failed me. He tilted; he turned; he took in
Penobscot,--took it in by the quart, by the gallon, by the barrel; he
would have sunk without mercy, had not Iglesias and Cancut succeeded
in laying hold of a rock and restoring equilibrium. I could not have
believed it of Birch. I was disappointed, and in consternation; and if
I had not known how entirely it was Birch's fault that everybody
was ducked and everybody now had a wet blanket, I should have felt
personally foolish. I punished myself for another's fault and my own
inexperience by assuming the wet blankets as my share at the next carry.
I suppose few of my readers imagine how many pounds of water a blanket
can absorb.
After camps at Katahdin, any residence in the woods without a stupendous
mountain before the door would have been tame. It must have been this,
and not any wearying of sylvan life, that made us hasten to reach the
outermost log-house at the Millinoket carry before nightfall. The
sensation of house and in-door life would be a new one, and so
satisfying in itself that we should not demand beautiful objects to meet
our first blink of awakening eyes.
An hour before sunset, Cancut steered us toward a beach, and pointed out
a vista in the woods, evidently artificial, evidently a road trodden
by feet and hoofs, and ruled by parallel wheels. A road is one of the
kindliest gifts of brother man to man: if a path in the wilderness, it
comes forward like a friendly guide offering experience and proposing
a comrade dash deeper into the unknown world; if a highway, it is the
great, bold, sweeping character with which civilization writes its
autograph upon a continent. Leaving our plunder on the beach, beyond
the reach of plunderers, whose great domain we were about to enter, we
walked on toward the first house, compelled at parting to believe, that,
though we did not love barbarism less, we loved civilization more. In
the morning, Cancut should, with an ox-cart, bring Birch and our traps
over the three miles of the carry.