Nathan, as he was known in all the country, yet he matched well these
woodsy products and conveniences. The birch-tree had given him a large
part of his tuition, and kneeling in his canoe and making it shoot
noiselessly over the water with that subtle yet indescribably expressive
and athletic play of the muscles of the back and shoulders, the boat and
the man seemed born of the same spirit. He had been a hunter and trapper
for over forty years; he had grown gray in the woods, had ripened and
matured there, and everything about him was as if the spirit of the
woods had had the ordering of it; his whole make-up was in a minor
and subdued key, like the moss and the lichens, or like the protective
coloring of the game,--everything but his quick sense and penetrative
glance. He was as gentle and modest as a girl; his sensibilities were
like plants that grow in the shade. The woods and the solitudes had
touched him with their own softening and refining influence; had indeed
shed upon his soil of life a rich deep leaf mould that was delightful,
and that nursed, half concealed, the tenderest and wildest growths.
There was grit enough back of and beneath it all, but he presented
none of the rough and repelling traits of character of the conventional
backwoods-man. In the spring he was a driver of logs on the Kennebec,
usually having charge of a large gang of men; in the winter he was a
solitary trapper and hunter in the forests.
Our first glimpse of Maine waters was Pleasant Pond, which we found by
following a white, rapid, musical stream from the Kennebec three
miles back into the mountains. Maine waters are for the most part
dark-complexioned, Indian-colored streams, but Pleasant Pond is a
pale-face among them both in name and nature. It is the only strictly
silver lake I ever saw. Its waters seem almost artificially white and
brilliant, though of remarkable transparency. I think I detected minute
shining motes held in suspension in it. As for the trout they are
veritable bars of silver until you have cut their flesh, when they
are the reddest of gold. They have no crimson or other spots, and the
straight lateral line is but a faint pencil mark. They appeared to be
a species of lake trout peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten to
twelve inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time of our
visit (last of August) at least, were to be taken only in deep water
upon a hook baited with salt pork. And then you needed a letter
of introduction to them. They were not to be tempted or cajoled by
strangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, although instructed how
it was to be done, until one of the natives, a young and obliging farmer
living hard by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise. I sat
in one end of the boat and he in the other; my pork was the same as his,
and I maneuvered it as directed, and yet those fish knew his hook
from mine in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in five.
Evidently they did not bite because they were hungry, but solely for old
acquaintance' sake.
Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two miles or more in
its greatest diameter, with high, rugged mountains rising up from its
western shore, and low rolling hills sweeping back from its eastern and
northern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never tired, when the
wind was still, of floating along its margin and gazing down into its
marvelously translucent depths. The boulders and fragments of rocks were
seen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, strewing its floor,
and apparently as free from any covering of sediment as when they were
dropped there by the old glaciers aeons ago. Our camp was amid a dense
grove of second growth of white pine on the eastern shore, where, for
one, I found a most admirable cradle in a little depression, outside of
the tent, carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night. The
camper-out is always in luck if he can find, sheltered by the trees, a
soft hole in the ground, even if he has a stone for a pillow. The earth
must open its arms a little for us even in life, if we are to sleep well
upon its bosom. I have often heard my grand-father, who was a soldier of
the Revolution, tell with great gusto how he once bivouacked in a little
hollow made by the overturning of a tree, and slept so soundly that he
did not wake up till his cradle was half full of water from a passing
shower.
What bird or other creature might represent the divinity of Pleasant
Pond I do not know, but its demon, as of most northern inland waters, is
the loon, and a very good demon he is too, suggesting something not so
much malevolent, as arch, sardonic, ubiquitous, circumventing, with just
a tinge of something inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes gleaming
forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his strange
horse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like that of
a lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggests
something almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing quickness,
cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman out of their aim. I
know of but one other bird so quick, and that is the humming-bird, which
I have never been able to kill with a gun. The loon laughs the shot-gun
to scorn, and the obliging young farmer above referred to told me he
had shot at them hundreds of times with his rifle, without effect,--they
always dodged his bullet. We had in our party a breach-loading rifle,
which weapon is perhaps an appreciable moment of time quicker than
the ordinary muzzleloader, and this the poor loon could not or did not
dodge. He had not timed himself to that species of fire-arm, and when,
with his fellow, he swam about within rifle range of our camp, letting
off volleys of his wild ironical ha-ha, he little suspected the
dangerous gun that was matched against him. As the rifle cracked both
loons made the gesture of diving, but only one of them disappeared
beneath the water; and when he came to the surface in a few moments, a
hundred or more yards away, and saw his companion did not follow, but
was floating on the water where he had last seen him, he took the alarm
and sped away in the distance. The bird I had killed was a magnificent
specimen, and I looked him over with great interest. His glossy
checkered coat, his banded neck, his snow-white breast, his powerful
lance-shaped beak, his red eyes, his black, thin, slender, marvelously
delicate feet and legs, issuing from his muscular thighs, and looking
as if they had never touched the ground, his strong wings well forward
while his legs were quite at the apex, and the neat, elegant model of
the entire bird, speed and quickness and strength stamped upon every
feature,--all delighted and lingered in the eye. The loon appears like
anything but a silly bird, unless you see him in some collection, or
in the shop of the taxidermist, where he usually looks very tame and
goose-like. Nature never meant the loon to stand up, or to use his
feet and legs for other purposes than swimming. Indeed, he cannot stand
except upon his tail in a perpendicular attitude, but in the collections
he is poised upon his feet like a barn-yard fowl, all the wildness and
grace and alertness goes out of him. My specimen sits upon a table as
upon the surface of the water, his feet trailing behind him, his body
low and trim, his head elevated and slightly turned as if in the act
of bringing that fiery eye to bear upon you, and vigilance and power
stamped upon every lineament.
The loon is to the fishes what the hawk is to the birds; he swoops down
to unknown depths upon them, and not even the wary trout can elude him.
Uncle Nathan said he had seen the loon disappear and in a moment come up
with a large trout, which he would cut in two with his strong beak, and
swallow piecemeal. Neither the loon nor the otter can bolt a fish under
the water; he must come to the surface to dispose of it. (I once saw a
man eat a cake under water in London.) Our guide told me he had seen the
parent loon swimming with a single young one upon its back. When closely
pressed it dove, or "div" as he would have it, and left the young bird
sitting upon the water. Then it too disappeared, and when the old one
returned and called, it came out from the shore. On the wing overhead,
the loon looks not unlike a very large duck, but when it alights it
ploughs into the water like a bombshell. It probably cannot take flight
from the land, as the one Gilbert White saw and describes in his letters
was picked up in a field, unable to launch itself into the air.
From Pleasant Pond we went seven miles through the woods to Moxie Lake,
following an overgrown lumberman's "tote" road, our canoe and supplies,
etc., hauled on a sled by the young farmer with his three-year-old
steers. I doubt if birch-bark ever made rougher voyage than that. As I
watched it above the bushes, the sled and the luggage being hidden, it
appeared as if tossed in the wildest and most tempestuous sea. When the
bushes closed above it I felt as if it had gone down, or been broken
into a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of creeks
and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the most frightful
manner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it was a regular
bovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid the brush and
boulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage them by signs
and nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud. But we got through
without any serious mishap, passing Mosquito Creek and Mosquito Pond,
and flanking Mosquito Mountain, but seeing no mosquitoes, and brought up
at dusk at a lumberman's old hay-barn, standing in the midst of a lonely
clearing on the shores of Moxie Lake.
Here we passed the night, and were lucky in having a good roof over our
heads, for it rained heavily. After we were rolled in our blankets and
variously disposed upon the haymow, Uncle Nathan lulled us to sleep by a
long and characteristic yarn.
I had asked him, half jocosely, if he believed in "spooks"; but he took
my question seriously, and without answering it directly, proceeded to
tell us what he himself had known and witnessed. It was, by the way,
extremely difficult either to surprise or to steal upon any of Uncle
Nathan's private opinions and beliefs about matters and things. He
was as shy of all debatable subjects as a fox is of a trap. He usually
talked in a circle, just as he hunted moose and caribou, so as not to
approach his point too rudely and suddenly. He would keep on the lee
side of his interlocutor in spite of all one could do. He was thoroughly
good and reliable, but the wild creatures of the woods, in pursuit
of which he had spent so much of his life, had taught him a curious
gentleness and indirection, and to keep himself in the back-ground; he
was careful that you should not scent his opinions upon any subject at
all polemic, but he would tell you what he had seen and known. What he
had seen and known about spooks was briefly this:--In company with
a neighbor he was passing the night with an old recluse who lived
somewhere in these woods. Their host was an Englishman, who had the
reputation of having murdered his wife some years before in another part
of the country, and, deserted by his grown-up children, was eking out
his days in poverty amid these solitudes. The three men were sleeping
upon the floor, with Uncle Nathan next to a rude partition that divided
the cabin into two rooms. At his head there was a door that opened into
this other apartment. Late at night, Uncle Nathan said, he awoke and
turned over, and his mind was occupied with various things, when he
heard somebody behind the partition. He reached over and felt that both
of his companions were in their places beside him, and he was somewhat
surprised. The person, or whatever it was, in the other room moved about
heavily, and pulled the table from its place beside the wall to the
middle of the floor. "I was not dreaming," said Uncle Nathan; "I felt of
my eyes twice to make sure, and they were wide open." Presently the door
opened; he was sensible of the draught upon his head, and a woman's form
stepped heavily past him; he felt the "swirl" of her skirts as she went
by. Then there was a loud noise in the room as if some one had fallen
their whole length upon the floor. "It jarred the house," said he, "and
woke everybody up. I asked old Mr. ------ if he heard that noise. 'Yes,'
said he, 'it was thunder.' But it was not thunder, I know that;" and
then added, "I was no more afraid than I am this minute. I never was the
least mite afraid in my life. And my eyes were wide open," he repeated;
"I felt of them twice; but whether that was the speret of that man's
murdered wife or not I cannot tell. They said she was an uncommon heavy
woman." Uncle Nathan was a man of unusually quick and acute senses, and
he did not doubt their evidence on this occasion any more than he did
when they prompted him to level his rifle at a bear or a moose.
Moxie Lake lies much lower than Pleasant Pond, and its waters compared
with those of the latter are as copper compared with silver. It is very
irregular in shape; now narrowing to the dimensions of a slow moving
grassy creek, then expanding into a broad deep basin with rocky shores,
and commanding the noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that the
pond-lily and the speckled trout are found together,--the fish the soul
of the purest spring water, the flower the transfigured spirit of the
dark mud and slime of sluggish summer streams and ponds; yet in Moxie
they were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid the birches,
poplars, and white cedars near the head of the lake, where the best
fishing at this season was to be had. Moxie has a small oval head,
rather shallow, but bumpy with rocks; a long, deep neck, full of
springs, where the trout lie; and a very broad chest, with two islands
tufted with pine-trees for breasts. We swam in the head, we fished in
the neck, or in a small section of it, a space about the size of the
Adam's apple, and we paddled across and around the broad expanse below.
Our birch bark was not finished and christened till we reached Moxie.
The cedar lining was completed at Pleasant Pond, where we had the use
of a bateau, but the rosin was not applied to the seams till we reached
this lake. When I knelt down in it for the first time and put its
slender maple paddle into the water, it sprang away with such quickness
and speed that it disturbed me in my seat. I had spurred a more restive
and spirited steed than I was used to. In fact, I had never been in
a craft that sustained so close a relation to my will, and was so
responsive to my slightest wish. When I caught my first large trout from
it, it sympathized a little too closely, and my enthusiasm started a
leak, which, however, with a live coal and a piece of rosin, was quickly
ended. You cannot perform much of a war-dance in a birch-bark canoe:
better wait till you get on dry land. Yet as a boat it is not so shy and
"ticklish" as I had imagined. One needs to be on the alert, as becomes a
sportsman and an angler, and in his dealings with it must charge himself
with three things,--precision, moderation, and circumspection.
Trout weighing four and five pounds have been taken at Moxie, but none
of that size came to our hand. I realized the fondest hopes I had dared
to indulge in when I hooked the first two-pounder of my life, and my
extreme solicitude lest he get away I trust was pardonable. My friend,
in relating the episode in camp, said I implored him to row me down in
the middle of the lake that I might have room to manoeuver my fish. But
the slander has barely a grain of truth in it. The water near us showed
several old stakes broken off just below the surface, and my fish was
determined to wrap my leader about one of these stakes; it was only for
the clear space a few yards farther out that I prayed. It was not long
after that my friend found himself in an anxious frame of mind. He
hooked a large trout, which came home on him so suddenly that he had
not time to reel up his line, and in his extremity he stretched his tall
form into the air and lifted up his pole to an incredible height. He
checked the trout before it got under the boat, but dared not come down
an inch, and then began his amusing further elongation in reaching for
his reel with one hand while he carried it ten feet into the air with
the other. A step-ladder would perhaps have been more welcome to him
just then than at any other moment during his life. But the trout was
saved, though my friend's buttons and suspenders suffered.
We learned a new trick in fly-fishing here, worth disclosing. It was not
one day in four that the trout would take the fly on the surface. When
the south wind was blowing and the clouds threatened rain, they would
at times, notably about three o'clock, rise handsomely. But on all other
occasions it was rarely that we could entice them up through the twelve
or fifteen feet of water. Earlier in the season they are not so lazy and
indifferent, but the August languor and drowsiness were now upon them.
So we learned by a lucky accident to fish deep for them, even weighting
our leaders with a shot, and allowing the flies to sink nearly to the
bottom. After a moment's pause we would draw them slowly up, and when
half or two thirds of the way to the top the trout would strike, when
the sport became lively enough. Most of our fish were taken in this
way. There is nothing like the flash and the strike at the surface, and
perhaps only the need of food will ever tempt the genuine angler into
any more prosaic style of fishing; but if you must go below the surface,
a shotted leader is the best thing to use.
Our camp-fire at night served more purposes than one; from its embers
and flickering shadows, Uncle Nathan read us many a tale of his life
in the woods. They were the same old hunter's stories, except that they
evidently had the merit of being strictly true, and hence were not very
thrilling or marvelous. Uncle Nathan's tendency was rather to tone down
and belittle his experiences than to exaggerate them. If he ever bragged
at all (and I suspect he did just a little, when telling us how he
outshot one of the famous riflemen of the American team, whom he was
guiding through these woods), he did it in such a sly, round-about
way that it was hard to catch him at it. His passage with the rifleman
referred to shows the difference between the practical off-hand skill of
the hunter in the woods and the science of the long-range target hitter.
Mr. Bull's Eye had heard that his guide was a capital shot and had seen
some proof of it, and hence could not rest till he had had a trial of
skill with him. Uncle Nathan, being the challenged party, had the right
to name the distance and the conditions. A piece of white paper the size
of a silver dollar was put upon a tree twelve rods off, the contestants
to fire three shots each off-hand. Uncle Nathan's first bullet barely
missed the mark, but the other two were planted well into it. Then the
great rifleman took his turn, and missed every time.
"By hemp!" said Uncle Nathan, "I was sorry I shot so well, Mr. ------
took it so to heart; and I had used his own rifle, too. He did not get
over it for a week."
But far more ignominious was the failure of Mr. Bull's Eye when he saw
his first bear. They were paddling slowly and silently down Dead River,
when the guide heard a slight noise in the bushes just behind a little
bend. He whispered to the rifleman, who sat kneeling in the bow of
the boat, to take his rifle. But instead of doing so he picked up his
two-barreled shot-gun. As they turned the point, there stood a bear
not twenty yards away, drinking from the stream. Uncle Nathan held the
canoe, while the man who had come so far in quest of this very game was
trying to lay down his shot-gun and pick up his rifle. "His hand moved
like the hand of a clock," said Uncle Nathan, "and I could hardly keep
my seat. I knew the bear would see us in a moment more, and run." Instead
of laying his gun by his side, where it belonged, he reached it across
in front of him and laid it upon his rifle, and in trying to get the
latter from under it a noise was made; the bear heard it and raised his
head. Still there was time, for as the bear sprang into the woods he
stopped and looked back,--"as I knew he would," said the guide; yet
the marksman was not ready. "By hemp! I could have shot three bears,"
exclaimed Uncle Nathan, "while he was getting that rifle to his face!"
Poor Mr. Bull's Eye was deeply humiliated. "Just the chance I had been
looking for," he said, "and my wits suddenly left me."
As a hunter Uncle Nathan always took the game on its own terms, that of
still-hunting. He even shot foxes in this way, going into the fields in
the fall just at break of day, and watching for them about their mousing
haunts. One morning, by these tactics, he shot a black fox; a fine
specimen, he said, and a wild one, for he stopped and looked and
listened every few yards.
He had killed over two hundred moose, a large number of them at night on
the lakes. His method was to go out in his canoe and conceal himself by
some point or island, and wait till he heard the game. In the fall
the moose comes into the water to eat the large fibrous roots of the
pond-lilies. He splashes along till he finds a suitable spot, when he
begins feeding, sometimes thrusting his bead and neck several feet under
water. The hunter listens, and when the moose lifts his head and the
rills of water run from it, and he hears him "swash" the lily roots
about to get off the mud, it is his time to start. Silently as a shadow
he creeps up on the moose, who by the way, it seems, never expects the
approach of danger from the water side. If the hunter accidentally
makes a noise the moose looks toward the shore for it. There is always a
slight gleam on the water, Uncle Nathan says, even in the darkest night,
and the dusky form of the moose can be distinctly seen upon it. When the
hunter sees this darker shadow he lifts his gun to the sky and gets the
range of its barrels, then lowers it till it covers the mark, and fires.
The largest moose Uncle Nathan ever killed is mounted in the State House
at Augusta. He shot him while hunting in winter on snow-shoes. The moose
was reposing upon the ground, with his head stretched out in front of
him, as one may sometimes see a cow resting. The position was such that
only a quartering shot through the animal's hip could reach its heart.
Studying the problem carefully, and taking his own time, the hunter
fired. The moose sprang into the air, turned, and came with tremendous
strides straight toward him. "I knew he had not seen or scented me,"
said Uncle Nathan, "but, by hemp, I wished myself somewhere else just
then; for I was lying right down in his path." But the noble animal
stopped, a few yards short, and fell dead with a bullet-hole through his
heart.
When the moose yard in the winter, that is, restrict their wanderings
to a well-defined section of the forest or mountain, trampling down the
snow and beating paths in all directions, they browse off only the most
dainty morsels first; when they go over the ground a second time they
crop a little cleaner; the third time they sort still closer, till by
and by nothing is left. Spruce, hemlock, poplar, the barks of various
trees, everything within reach, is cropped close. When the hunter comes
upon one of these yards the problem for him to settle is, Where are the
moose? for it is absolutely necessary that he keep on the lee side of
them. So he considers the lay of the land, the direction of the wind,
the time of day, the depth of the snow, examines the spoor, the cropped
twigs, and studies every hint and clew like a detective. Uncle Nathan
said he could not explain to another how he did it, but he could usually
tell in a few minutes in what direction to look for the game. His
experience had ripened into a kind of intuition or winged reasoning that
was above rules.
He said that most large game, deer, caribou, moose, bear, when started
by the hunter and not much scared, were sure to stop and look back
before disappearing from sight: he usually waited for this last and best
chance to fire. He told us of a huge bear he had seen one morning while
still-hunting foxes in the fields; the bear saw him, and got into the
woods before he could get a good shot. In her course some distance up
the mountain was a bald, open spot, and he felt sure when she crossed
this spot she would pause and look behind her; and sure enough, like
Lot's wife, her curiosity got the better of her; she stopped to have a
final look, and her travels ended there and then.