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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Canoeing in the wilderness, by Henry David Thoreau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Canoeing in the wilderness
+
+Author: Henry David Thoreau
+
+Editor: Clifton Johnson
+
+Illustrator: Will Hammell
+
+Release Date: January 17, 2011 [eBook #34990]
+[Most recently updated: February 10, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CANOEING IN THE WILDERNESS ***
+
+
+
+
+CANOEING
+IN THE
+WILDERNESS
+
+HENRY D. THOREAU
+
+By Clifton Johnson
+
+
+BATTLEGROUND ADVENTURES. Illustrated.
+A BOOK OF FAIRY-TALE FOXES. Illustrated.
+A BOOK OF FAIRY-TALE BEARS. Illustrated.
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+CANOEING IN THE
+WILDERNESS
+
+[Illustration: _The Indian Guide’s Evening Prayer_ (_page 59_)]
+
+
+
+
+CANOEING IN THE
+WILDERNESS
+
+BY HENRY D. THOREAU
+
+EDITED BY
+CLIFTON JOHNSON
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+WILL HAMMELL
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+1916
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
+COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+_Published April 1916_
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+THE INDIAN GUIDE’S EVENING PRAYER        _Frontispiece_
+
+THE STAGE ON THE ROAD TO MOOSEHEAD LAKE               8
+
+MAKING A CAMP IN THE STREAMSIDE WOODLAND             52
+
+FISHING                                              72
+
+THE RED SQUIRREL                                     78
+
+COMING DOWN THE RAPIDS                              132
+
+SHOOTING THE MOOSE                                  154
+
+CARRYING ROUND THE FALLS                            180
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Thoreau was born at Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and at the
+time he made this wilderness canoe trip he was forty years old. The
+record of the journey is the latter half of his _The Maine Woods_, which
+is perhaps the finest idyl of the forest ever written. It is
+particularly charming in its blending of meditative and poetic fancies
+with the minute description of the voyager’s experiences.
+
+The chief attraction that inspired Thoreau to make the trip was the
+primitiveness of the region. Here was a vast tract of almost virgin
+woodland, peopled only with a few loggers and pioneer farmers, Indians,
+and wild animals. No one could have been better fitted than Thoreau to
+enjoy such a region and to transmit his enjoyment of it to others. For
+though he was a person of culture and refinement, with a college
+education, and had for an intimate friend so rare a man as Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, he was half wild in many of his tastes and impatient of the
+restraints and artificiality of the ordinary social life of the towns
+and cities.
+
+He liked especially the companionship of men who were in close contact
+with nature, and in this book we find him deeply interested in his
+Indian guide and lingering fondly over the man’s characteristics and
+casual remarks. The Indian retained many of his aboriginal instincts and
+ways, though his tribe was in most respects civilized. His home was in
+an Indian village on an island in the Penobscot River at Oldtown, a few
+miles above Bangor.
+
+Thoreau was one of the world’s greatest nature writers, and as the years
+pass, his fame steadily increases. He was a careful and accurate
+observer, more at home in the fields and woods than in village and town,
+and with a gift of piquant originality in recording his impressions. The
+play of his imagination is keen and nimble, yet his fancy is so well
+balanced by his native common sense that it does not run away with him.
+There is never any doubt about his genuineness, or that what he states
+is free from bias and romantic exaggeration.
+
+It is to be noted that he was no hunter. His inquisitiveness into the
+ways of the wild creatures carried with it no desire to shoot them, and
+to his mind the killing of game for mere sport was akin to butchery. The
+kindly and sympathetic spirit constantly manifest in his pages is very
+attractive, and the fellowship one gains with him through his written
+words is both delightful and wholesome. He stimulates not only a love
+for nature, but a love for simple ways of living, and for all that is
+sincere and unaffected in human life, wherever found.
+
+In the present volume various details and digressions that are not of
+interest to most readers have been omitted, but except for such
+elimination Thoreau’s text has been retained throughout. It is believed
+that nothing essential has been sacrificed, and that the narrative in
+this form will be found lively, informing, and thoroughly enjoyable.
+
+CLIFTON JOHNSON.
+
+HADLEY, MASSACHUSETTS.
+
+
+
+
+CANOEING IN THE
+WILDERNESS
+
+
+
+
+CANOEING IN THE WILDERNESS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY JULY 20-23, 1857
+
+
+I started on my third excursion to the Maine woods Monday, July 20,
+1857, with one companion, arriving at Bangor the next day at noon. The
+succeeding morning, a relative of mine who is well acquainted with the
+Penobscot Indians took me in his wagon to Oldtown to assist me in
+obtaining an Indian for this expedition. We were ferried across to the
+Indian Island in a bateau. The ferryman’s boy had the key to it, but the
+father, who was a blacksmith, after a little hesitation, cut the chain
+with a cold chisel on the rock. He told me that the Indians were nearly
+all gone to the seaboard and to Massachusetts, partly on account of the
+smallpox, of which they are very much afraid, having broken out in
+Oldtown. The old chief Neptune, however, was there still.
+
+The first man we saw on the island was an Indian named Joseph Polis,
+whom my relative addressed familiarly as “Joe.” He was dressing a
+deerskin in his yard. The skin was spread over a slanting log, and he
+was scraping it with a stick held by both hands. He was stoutly built,
+perhaps a little above the middle height, with a broad face, and, as
+others said, perfect Indian features and complexion. His house was a
+two-story white one with blinds, the best-looking that I noticed there,
+and as good as an average one on a New England village street. It was
+surrounded by a garden and fruit trees, single cornstalks standing
+thinly amid the beans. We asked him if he knew any good Indian who would
+like to go into the woods with us, that is, to the Allegash Lakes by way
+of Moosehead, and return by the East Branch of the Penobscot.
+
+To which he answered out of that strange remoteness in which the Indian
+ever dwells to the white man, “Me like to go myself; me want to get some
+moose”; and kept on scraping the skin.
+
+The ferryman had told us that all the best Indians were gone except
+Polis, who was one of the aristocracy. He, to be sure, would be the best
+man we could have, but if he went at all would want a great price. Polis
+asked at first two dollars a day but agreed to go for a dollar and a
+half, and fifty cents a week for his canoe. He would come to Bangor with
+his canoe by the seven o’clock train that evening--we might depend on
+him. We thought ourselves lucky to secure the services of this man, who
+was known to be particularly steady and trustworthy.
+
+I spent the afternoon with my companion, who had remained in Bangor, in
+preparing for our expedition, purchasing provisions, hard-bread,[1]
+pork, coffee, sugar, etc., and some india-rubber clothing.
+
+At evening the Indian arrived in the cars, and I led the way, while he
+followed me, three quarters of a mile to my friend’s house, with the
+canoe on his head. I did not know the exact route, but steered by the
+lay of the land, as I do in Boston. I tried to enter into conversation
+with him, but as he was puffing under the weight of his canoe, not
+having the usual apparatus for carrying it, but, above all, as he was an
+Indian, I might as well have been thumping on the bottom of his birch
+the while. In answer to the various observations that I made he only
+grunted vaguely from beneath his canoe once or twice, so that I knew he
+was there.
+
+Early the next morning the stage called for us. My companion and I had
+each a large knapsack as full as it would hold, and we had two large
+rubber bags which held our provisions and utensils. As for the Indian,
+all the baggage he had, beside his axe and gun, was a blanket, which he
+brought loose in his hand. However, he had laid in a store of tobacco
+and a new pipe for the excursion. The canoe was securely lashed
+diagonally across the top of the stage, with bits of carpet tucked under
+the edge to prevent its chafing. The driver appeared as much accustomed
+to carrying canoes in this way as bandboxes.
+
+At the Bangor House we took in four men bound on a hunting excursion,
+one of the men going as cook. They had a dog, a middling-sized brindled
+cur, which ran by the side of the stage, his master showing his head and
+whistling from time to time. But after we had gone about three miles the
+dog was suddenly missing, and two of the party went back for him, while
+the stage, which was full of passengers, waited. At length one man came
+back, while the other kept on. This whole party of hunters declared
+their intention to stop till the dog was found, but the very obliging
+driver was ready to wait a spell longer. He was evidently unwilling to
+lose so many passengers, who would have taken a private conveyance, or
+perhaps the other line of stages, the next day. Such progress did we
+make, with a journey of over sixty miles to be accomplished that day,
+and a rainstorm just setting in. We discussed the subject of dogs and
+their instincts till it was threadbare, while we waited there, and the
+scenery of the suburbs of Bangor is still distinctly impressed on my
+memory.
+
+[Illustration: _The Stage on the Road to Moosehead Lake_]
+
+After full half an hour the man returned, leading the dog by a rope. He
+had overtaken him just as he was entering the Bangor House. He was then
+tied on the top of the stage, but, being wet and cold, several times in
+the course of the journey he jumped off, and I saw him dangling by his
+neck. This dog was depended on to stop bears. He had already stopped one
+somewhere in New Hampshire, and I can testify that he stopped a stage in
+Maine. This party of four probably paid nothing for the dog’s ride,
+nor for his run, while our party of three paid two dollars--and were
+charged four--for the light canoe which lay still on the top.
+
+The stage was crowded all the way. If you had looked inside you would
+have thought that we were prepared to run the gantlet of a band of
+robbers, for there were four or five guns on the front seat and one or
+two on the back one, each man holding his darling in his arms. It
+appeared that this party of hunters was going our way, but much farther.
+Their leader was a handsome man about thirty years old, of good height,
+but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly address and faultless toilet.
+He had a fair white complexion as if he had always lived in the shade,
+and an intellectual face, and with his quiet manners might have passed
+for a divinity student who had seen something of the world. I was
+surprised to find that he was probably the chief white hunter of Maine
+and was known all along the road. I afterwards heard him spoken of as
+one who could endure a great deal of exposure and fatigue without
+showing the effect of it; and he could not only use guns, but make them,
+being himself a gunsmith. In the spring he had saved a stage-driver and
+two passengers from drowning in the backwater of the Piscataquis on this
+road, having swum ashore in the freezing water and made a raft and got
+them off--though the horses were drowned--at great risk to himself,
+while the only other man who could swim withdrew to the nearest house to
+prevent freezing. He knew our man, and remarked that we had a good
+Indian there, a good hunter; adding that he was said to be worth six
+thousand dollars. The Indian also knew him, and said to me, “The great
+hunter.”
+
+The Indian sat on the front seat with a stolid expression of face as if
+barely awake to what was going on. Again I was struck by the peculiar
+vagueness of his replies when addressed in the stage or at the taverns.
+He really never said anything on such occasions. He was merely stirred
+up like a wild beast, and passively muttered some insignificant
+response. His answer, in such cases, was vague as a puff of smoke,
+suggesting no _responsibility_, and if you considered it you would find
+that you had got nothing out of him. This was instead of the
+conventional palaver and smartness of the white man, and equally
+profitable. Most get no more than this out of the Indian, and pronounce
+him stolid accordingly. I was surprised to see what a foolish and
+impertinent style a Maine man, a passenger, used in addressing him, as
+if he were a child, which only made his eyes glisten a little. A tipsy
+Canadian asked him at a tavern, in a drawling tone, if he smoked, to
+which he answered with an indefinite “Yes.”
+
+“Won’t you lend me your pipe a little while?” asked the other.
+
+He replied, looking straight by the man’s head, with a face singularly
+vacant to all neighboring interests, “Me got no pipe”; yet I had seen
+him put a new one, with a supply of tobacco, into his pocket that
+morning.
+
+Our little canoe, so neat and strong, drew a favorable criticism from
+all the wiseacres among the tavern loungers along the road. By the
+roadside, close to the wheels, I noticed a splendid great purple fringed
+orchis which I would fain have stopped the stage to pluck, but as this
+had never been known to stop a bear, like the cur on the stage, the
+driver would probably have thought it a waste of time.
+
+When we reached the lake, about half past eight in the evening, it was
+still steadily raining, and in that fresh, cool atmosphere the hylas
+were peeping and the toads ringing about the lake. It was as if the
+season had revolved backward two or three months, or I had arrived at
+the abode of perpetual spring.
+
+We had expected to go upon the lake at once, and, after paddling up two
+or three miles, to camp on one of its islands, but on account of the
+rain we decided to go to one of the taverns for the night.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Hard-bread or ship-bread is a kind of hard biscuit commonly baked in
+large cakes and much used by sailors and soldiers.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FRIDAY, JULY 24.
+
+
+About four o’clock the next morning, though it was quite cloudy,
+accompanied by the landlord to the water’s edge, in the twilight, we
+launched our canoe from a rock on Moosehead Lake. We had a rather small
+canoe for three persons, eighteen and one fourth feet long by two feet
+six and one half inches wide in the middle, and one foot deep within. I
+judged that it would weigh not far from eighty pounds. The Indian had
+recently made it himself, and its smallness was partly compensated for
+by its newness, as well as stanchness and solidity, it being made of
+very thick bark and ribs. Our baggage weighed about one hundred and
+sixty-six pounds. The principal part of the baggage was, as usual,
+placed in the middle of the broadest part, while we stowed ourselves in
+the chinks and crannies that were left before and behind it, where there
+was no room to extend our legs, the loose articles being tucked into the
+ends. The canoe was thus as closely packed as a market basket. The
+Indian sat on a crossbar in the stern, but we flat on the bottom with a
+splint or chip behind our backs to protect them from the crossbar, and
+one of us commonly paddled with the Indian.
+
+Paddling along the eastern side of the lake in the still of the morning,
+we soon saw a few sheldrakes, which the Indian called _Shecorways_, and
+some peetweets on the rocky shore. We also saw and heard loons. It was
+inspiriting to hear the regular dip of the paddles, as if they were our
+fins or flippers, and to realize that we were at length fairly embarked.
+
+Having passed the small rocky isles within two or three miles of the
+foot of the lake, we had a short consultation respecting our course, and
+inclined to the western shore for the sake of its lee; for otherwise,
+if the wind should rise, it would be impossible for us to reach Mount
+Kineo, which is about midway up the lake on the east side, but at its
+narrowest part, where probably we could recross if we took the western
+side. The wind is the chief obstacle to crossing the lakes, especially
+in so small a canoe. The Indian remarked several times that he did not
+like to cross the lakes “in littlum canoe,” but nevertheless, “just as
+we say, it made no odds to him.”
+
+Moosehead Lake is twelve miles wide at the widest place, and thirty
+miles long in a direct line, but longer as it lies. Paddling near the
+shore, we frequently heard the _pe-pe_ of the olive-sided flycatcher,
+also the wood pewee and the kingfisher. The Indian reminding us that he
+could not work without eating, we stopped to breakfast on the main shore
+southwest of Deer Island. We took out our bags, and the Indian made a
+fire under a very large bleached log, using white pine bark from a
+stump, though he said that hemlock was better, and kindling with canoe
+birch bark. Our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch bark,
+laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard-bread, fried
+pork, and strong coffee well sweetened, in which we did not miss the
+milk.
+
+While we were getting breakfast a brood of twelve black dippers,[2] half
+grown, came paddling by within three or four rods, not at all alarmed;
+and they loitered about as long as we stayed, now huddled close
+together, now moving off in a long line, very cunningly.
+
+Looking northward from this place it appeared as if we were entering a
+large bay, and we did not know whether we should be obliged to diverge
+from our course and keep outside a point which we saw, or should find a
+passage between this and the mainland. It was misty dog-day weather, and
+we had already penetrated a smaller bay of the same kind, and knocked
+the bottom out of it, though we had been obliged to pass over a bar
+between an island and the shore, where there was but just breadth and
+depth enough to float the canoe, and the Indian had observed, “Very easy
+makum bridge here,” but now it seemed that if we held on we should be
+fairly embayed. Presently, however, the mist lifted somewhat and
+revealed a break in the shore northward. The Indian immediately
+remarked, “I guess you and I go there.”
+
+This was his common expression instead of saying “we.” He never
+addressed us by our names, though curious to know how they were spelled
+and what they meant. We called him Polis. He had already guessed very
+accurately at our ages, and said that he was forty-eight.
+
+After breakfast I emptied the melted pork that was left into the lake,
+making what the sailors call a “slick,” and watching to see how much it
+spread over and smoothed the agitated surface. The Indian looked at it
+a moment and said, “That make hard paddlum through; hold ’em canoe. So
+say old times.”
+
+We hastily reloaded, putting the dishes loose in the bows, that they
+might be at hand when wanted, and set out again. The western shore, near
+which we paddled along, rose gently to a considerable height and was
+everywhere densely covered with the forest, in which was a large
+proportion of hard wood to enliven and relieve the fir and spruce.
+
+The Indian said that the lichen which we saw hanging from the trees was
+called _chorchorque_. We asked him the names of several birds which we
+heard this morning. The thrush, which was quite common, and whose note
+he imitated, he said was called _Adelungquamooktum_; but sometimes he
+could not tell the name of some small bird which I heard and knew, but
+he said, “I tell all the birds about here; can’t tell littlum noise, but
+I see ’em, then I can tell.”
+
+I observed that I should like to go to school to him to learn his
+language, living on the Indian island the while; could not that be done?
+
+“Oh, yer,” he replied, “good many do so.”
+
+I asked how long he thought it would take. He said one week. I told him
+that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew, and he should tell me
+all he knew, to which he readily agreed.
+
+Mount Kineo, which was generally visible, though occasionally concealed
+by islands or the mainland in front, had a level bar of cloud concealing
+its summit, and all the mountain-tops about the lake were cut off at the
+same height. Ducks of various kinds were quite common, and ran over the
+water before us as fast as a horse trots.
+
+The Indian asked the meaning of _reality_, as near as I could make out
+the word, which he said one of us had used; also of _interrent_, that
+is, intelligent. I observed that he could rarely sound the letter r,
+but used l, as also r for l sometimes; as _load_ for road, _pickelel_
+for pickerel, _Soogle_ Island for Sugar Island. He generally added the
+syllable _um_ to his words, as _paddlum_, etc.
+
+On a point on the mainland where we landed to stretch our legs and look
+at the vegetation, going inland a few steps, I discovered a fire still
+glowing beneath its ashes, where somebody had breakfasted, and a bed of
+twigs prepared for the following night. So I knew not only that they had
+just left, but that they designed to return, and by the breadth of the
+bed that there was more than one in the party. You might have gone
+within six feet of these signs without seeing them. There grew the
+beaked hazel, rue seven feet high, and red osier, whose bark the Indian
+said was good to smoke, “tobacco before white people came to this
+country, Indian tobacco.”
+
+The Indian was always very careful in approaching the shore, lest he
+should injure his canoe on the rocks, letting it swing round slowly
+sidewise, and was still more particular that we should not step into it
+on shore, nor till it floated free, and then should step gently lest we
+should open its seams, or make a hole in the bottom.
+
+After passing Deer Island we saw the little steamer from Greenville, far
+east in the middle of the lake. Sometimes we could hardly tell her from
+an island which had a few trees on it. Here we were exposed to the wind
+from over the whole breadth of the lake, and ran a little risk of being
+swamped. While I had my eye fixed on the spot where a large fish had
+leaped, we took in a gallon or two of water; but we soon reached the
+shore and took the canoe over the bar at Sand-bar Island, a few feet
+wide only, and so saved a considerable distance.
+
+We crossed a broad bay and found the water quite rough. A very little
+wind on these broad lakes raises a sea which will swamp a canoe. Looking
+off from the shore, the surface may appear to be almost smooth a mile
+distant, or if you see a few white crests they appear nearly level with
+the rest of the lake, but when you get out so far, you may find quite a
+sea running, and ere long, before you think of it, a wave will gently
+creep up the side of the canoe and fill your lap, like a monster
+deliberately covering you with its slime before it swallows you, or it
+will strike the canoe violently and break into it. The same thing may
+happen when the wind rises suddenly, though it were perfectly calm and
+smooth there a few minutes before; so that nothing can save you, unless
+you can swim ashore, for it is impossible to get into a canoe when it is
+upset. Since you sit flat on the bottom, though the danger should not be
+imminent, a little water is a great inconvenience, not to mention the
+wetting of your provisions. We rarely crossed even a bay directly, from
+point to point, when there was wind, but made a slight curve
+corresponding somewhat to the shore, that we might the sooner reach it
+if the wind increased.
+
+When the wind is aft, and not too strong, the Indian makes a spritsail
+of his blanket. He thus easily skims over the whole length of this lake
+in a day.
+
+The Indian paddled on one side, and one of us on the other, to keep the
+canoe steady, and when he wanted to change hands he would say, “T’ other
+side.” He asserted, in answer to our questions, that he had never upset
+a canoe himself, though he may have been upset by others.
+
+Think of our little eggshell of a canoe tossing across that great lake,
+a mere black speck to the eagle soaring above it!
+
+My companion trailed for trout as we paddled along, but, the Indian
+warning him that a big fish might upset us, for there are some very
+large ones there, he agreed to pass the line quickly to the stern if he
+had a bite.
+
+While we were crossing this bay, where Mount Kineo rose dark before us
+within two or three miles, the Indian repeated the tradition respecting
+this mountain’s having anciently been a cow moose--how a mighty Indian
+hunter succeeded in killing this queen of the moose tribe with great
+difficulty, while her calf was killed somewhere among the islands in
+Penobscot Bay, and, to his eyes, this mountain had still the form of the
+moose in a reclining posture. He told this at some length and with
+apparent good faith, and asked us how we supposed the hunter could have
+killed such a mighty moose as that. An Indian tells such a story as if
+he thought it deserved to have a good deal said about it, only he has
+not got it to say, and so he makes up for the deficiency by a drawling
+tone, long-windedness, and a dumb wonder which he hopes will be
+contagious.
+
+We approached the land again through pretty rough water, and then
+steered directly across the lake at its narrowest part to the eastern
+side, and were soon partly under the lee of the mountain, having
+paddled about twenty miles. It was now about noon.
+
+We designed to stop there that afternoon and night, and spent half an
+hour looking along the shore northward for a suitable place to camp. At
+length, by going half a dozen rods into the dense spruce and fir wood on
+the side of the mountain almost as dark as a cellar, we found a place
+sufficiently clear and level to lie down on, after cutting away a few
+bushes. The Indian cleared a path to it from the shore with his axe, and
+we then carried up all our baggage, pitched our tent, and made our bed,
+in order to be ready for foul weather, which then threatened us, and for
+the night. He gathered a large armful of fir twigs, breaking them off,
+which he said were the best for our bed, partly, I thought, because they
+were the largest and could be most rapidly collected. It had been
+raining more or less for four or five days, and the wood was even damper
+than usual, but he got dry bark from the under side of a dead leaning
+hemlock, which he said he could always do.
+
+This noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and I referred him
+to my companion, who was a lawyer. It appeared that he had been buying
+land lately--I think it was a hundred acres--but there was probably an
+incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on
+it for this year. He wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and was
+told that if the other man could prove that he bought the grass before
+he, Polis, bought the land, the former could take it whether the latter
+knew it or not. To which he only answered, “Strange!” He went over this
+several times, fairly sat down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he
+meant to confine us to this topic henceforth; but as he made no headway,
+only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white men’s
+institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die.
+
+He said that he had fifty acres of grass, potatoes, etc., somewhere
+above Oldtown, besides some about his house; that he hired a good deal
+of his work, hoeing, etc., and preferred white men to Indians because
+“they keep steady and know how.”
+
+After dinner we returned southward along the shore, in the canoe, on
+account of the difficulty of climbing over the rocks and fallen trees,
+and began to ascend the mountain along the edge of the precipice. But, a
+smart shower coming up just then, the Indian crept under his canoe,
+while we, protected by our rubber coats, proceeded to botanize. So we
+sent him back to the camp for shelter, agreeing that he should come for
+us with his canoe toward night. It had rained a little in the forenoon,
+and we trusted that this would be the clearing-up shower, which it
+proved; but our feet and legs were thoroughly wet by the bushes. The
+clouds breaking away a little, we had a glorious wild view, as we
+ascended, of the broad lake with its numerous forest-clad islands
+extending beyond our sight both north and south, and the boundless
+forest undulating away from its shores on every side, as densely packed
+as a rye-field and enveloping nameless mountains in succession. It was a
+perfect lake of the woods.
+
+Looking southward, the heavens were completely overcast, the mountains
+capped with clouds, and the lake generally wore a dark and stormy
+appearance, but from its surface six or eight miles distant there was
+reflected upward through the misty air a bright blue tinge from the
+unseen sky of another latitude beyond. They probably had a clear sky
+then at the south end of the lake.
+
+Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the “drisk,” with
+some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its
+smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour
+we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of
+nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be
+scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.
+
+If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable
+auspices, I would go to it in foul weather so as to be there when it
+cleared up. We are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most
+fresh and inspiring. There is no serenity so fair as that which is just
+established in a tearful eye.
+
+Jackson, in his “Report on the Geology of Maine,” says: “Hornstone,
+which will answer for flints, occurs in various parts of the State. The
+largest mass of this stone known in the world is Mount Kineo, upon
+Moosehead Lake, which appears to be entirely composed of it, and rises
+seven hundred feet above the lake level. This variety of hornstone I
+have seen in every part of New England in the form of Indian
+arrow-heads, hatchets, chisels, etc., which were probably obtained from
+this mountain by the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.”
+
+I have myself found hundreds of arrow-heads made of the same material.
+It is generally slate-colored, with white specks, becoming a uniform
+white where exposed to the light and air. I picked up a small thin piece
+which had so sharp an edge that I used it as a knife, and, to see what I
+could do, fairly cut off an aspen one inch thick with it, by bending it
+and making many cuts; though I cut my fingers badly with the back of it
+in the meanwhile.
+
+From the summit of the precipice which forms the southern and eastern
+sides of this mountain peninsula, five or six hundred feet high, we
+probably might have jumped down to the water, or to the seemingly
+dwarfish trees on the narrow neck of land which connects it with the
+main. It is a dangerous place to try the steadiness of your nerves.
+
+The plants which attracted our attention on this mountain were the
+mountain cinquefoil, abundant and in bloom still at the very base by
+the waterside, very beautiful harebells overhanging the precipice,
+bearberry, the Canada blueberry, wild holly, the great round-leafed
+orchis, bunchberry, reddening as we ascended, green at the base of the
+mountain, red at the top, and the small fern _Woodsia ilvensis_, growing
+in tufts, now in fruit. Having explored the wonders of the mountain, and
+the weather being now cleared up, we commenced the descent. We met the
+Indian, puffing and panting, about one third of the way up, but thinking
+that he must be near the top. On reaching the canoe we found that he had
+caught a lake trout weighing about three pounds, while we were on the
+mountain.
+
+When we got to the camp, the canoe was taken out and turned over, and a
+log laid across it to prevent its being blown away. The Indian cut some
+large logs of damp and rotten wood to smoulder and keep fire through the
+night. The trout was fried for supper.
+
+Our tent was of thin cotton cloth and quite small, forming with the
+ground a triangular prism closed at the rear end, six feet long, seven
+wide, and four high, so that we could barely sit up in the middle. It
+required two forked stakes, a smooth ridgepole, and a dozen or more pins
+to pitch it. It kept off dew and wind and an ordinary rain, and answered
+our purpose well enough. We reclined within it till bedtime, each with
+his baggage at his head, or else sat about the fire, having hung our wet
+clothes on a pole before the fire for the night.
+
+As we sat there, just before night, looking out through the dusky wood,
+the Indian heard a noise which he said was made by a snake. He imitated
+it at my request, making a low whistling note--_pheet_--_pheet_--two or
+three times repeated, somewhat like the peep of the hyla, but not so
+loud. He said that he had never seen them while making it, but going to
+the spot he finds the snake. This, he said, was a sign of rain. When I
+had selected this place for our camp he had remarked that there were
+snakes there. “But they won’t do any hurt,” I said.
+
+“Oh, no,” he answered, “just as you say; it makes no difference to me.”
+
+He lay on the right side of the tent, because, as he said, he was partly
+deaf in one ear, and he wanted to lie with his good ear up. As we lay
+there he inquired if I ever heard “Indian sing.” I replied that I had
+not often, and asked him if he would not favor us with a song. He
+readily assented, and, lying on his back, with his blanket wrapped
+around him, he commenced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in
+his own language, which probably was taught his tribe long ago by the
+Catholic missionaries. He translated it to us, sentence by sentence,
+afterward. It proved to be a very simple religious exercise or hymn, the
+burden of which was that there was only one God who ruled all the
+world.
+
+His singing carried me back to the period of the discovery of America,
+when Europeans first encountered the simple faith of the Indian. There
+was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it; nothing of the dark and
+savage, only the mild and infantile. The sentiments of humility and
+reverence chiefly were expressed.
+
+It was a dense and damp spruce and fir wood in which we lay, and, except
+for our fire, perfectly dark; and when I awoke in the night, I either
+heard an owl from deeper in the forest behind us, or a loon from a
+distance over the lake. Getting up some time after midnight to collect
+the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I
+observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly
+regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest
+diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter
+of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or
+scarlet like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the
+glowworm’s. I saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which I
+had often heard of, but never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it,
+with a little hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moosewood
+which the Indian had cut off in a slanting direction the evening before.
+
+Using my knife, I discovered that the light proceeded from that portion
+of the sapwood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular
+ring at the end, and when I pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it
+was all aglow along the log. I was surprised to find the wood quite hard
+and apparently sound, though probably decay had commenced in the sap,
+and I cut out some little triangular chips, and, placing them in the
+hollow of my hand, carried them into the camp, waked my companion, and
+showed them to him. They lit up the inside of my hand, revealing the
+lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like coals of fire raised to a
+white heat.
+
+I noticed that part of a decayed stump within four or five feet of the
+fire, an inch wide and six inches long, soft and shaking wood, shone
+with equal brightness.
+
+I neglected to ascertain whether our fire had anything to do with this,
+but the previous day’s rain and long-continued wet weather undoubtedly
+had.
+
+I was exceedingly interested by this phenomenon. It could hardly have
+thrilled me more if it had taken the form of letters, or of the human
+face. I little thought that there was such a light shining in the
+darkness of the wilderness for me.
+
+The next day the Indian told me their name for the
+light--_artoosoqu’_--and on my inquiring concerning the will-o’-the-wisp
+he said that his “folks” sometimes saw fires passing along at various
+heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. I was prepared
+after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena
+witnessed by “his folks,” they are abroad at all hours and seasons in
+scenes so unfrequented by white men. Nature must have made a thousand
+revelations to them which are still secrets to us.
+
+I did not regret my not having seen this before, since I now saw it
+under circumstances so favorable. I was in just the frame of mind to see
+something wonderful, and this was a phenomenon adequate to my
+circumstances and expectation, and it put me on the alert to see more
+like it. I let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had
+been a fellow creature. A scientific _explanation_, as it is called,
+would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale
+daylight. Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was
+the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It made a believer of me
+more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but
+choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day--not an empty
+chamber in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited
+house. It suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth
+to the same sort of belief or religion. One revelation has been made to
+the Indian, another to the white man. I have much to learn of the
+Indian, nothing of the missionary. I am not sure but all that would
+tempt me to teach the Indian my religion would be his promise to teach
+me _his_. Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I
+was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood.
+
+I kept those little chips and wet them again the next night, but they
+emitted no light.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] The name dipper is applied to several species of water-birds that
+are notable for their skill in diving.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SATURDAY, JULY 25
+
+
+At breakfast, the Indian, evidently curious to know what would be
+expected of him the next day, asked me how I spent the Sunday when at
+home. I told him that I commonly sat in my chamber reading, etc., in the
+forenoon, and went to walk in the afternoon. At which he shook his head
+and said, “Er, that is ver’ bad.”
+
+“How do you spend it?” I asked.
+
+He said that he did no work, that he went to church at Oldtown when he
+was at home; in short, he did as he had been taught by the whites.
+
+When we were washing the dishes in the lakes, many fishes came close up
+to us to get the particles of grease.
+
+The weather seemed to be more settled this morning, and we set out early
+in order to finish our voyage up the lake before the wind arose. Soon
+after starting, the Indian directed our attention to the Northeast
+Carry, which we could plainly see, about thirteen miles distant. This
+carry is a rude wooden railroad running north and south about two miles,
+perfectly straight, from the lake to the Penobscot through a low tract,
+with a clearing three or four rods wide. This opening appeared as a
+clear bright, or light, point in the horizon, resting on the edge of the
+lake. We should not have suspected it to be visible if the Indian had
+not drawn our attention to it. It was a remarkable kind of light to
+steer for--daylight seen through a vista in the forest--but visible as
+far as an ordinary beacon by night.
+
+We crossed a deep wide bay north of Kineo, leaving an island on our left
+and keeping up the eastern side of the lake. We then crossed another
+broad bay, which, as we could no longer observe the shore particularly,
+afforded ample time for conversation. The Indian said that he had got
+his money by hunting, mostly high up the West Branch of the Penobscot,
+and toward the head of the St. John. He had hunted there from a boy, and
+knew all about that region. His game had been beaver, otter, black cat
+(or fisher), sable, moose, etc. Canada lynx were plenty yet in burnt
+grounds. For food in the woods he uses partridges, ducks, dried moose
+meat, hedgehog, etc. Loons, too, were good, only “bile ’em good.”
+
+Pointing into the bay he said that it was the way to various lakes which
+he knew. Only solemn bear-haunted mountains with their great wooded
+slopes were visible. The Indian said that he had been along there
+several times. I asked him how he guided himself in the woods.
+
+“Oh,” said he, “I can tell good many ways.”
+
+When I pressed him further he answered, “Sometimes I lookum sidehill,”
+and he glanced toward a high hill or mountain on the eastern shore;
+“great difference between the north and south; see where the sun has
+shone most. So trees--the large limbs bend toward south. Sometimes I
+lookum locks” (rocks).
+
+I asked what he saw on the rocks, but he did not describe anything in
+particular, answering vaguely, in a mysterious or drawling tone, “bare
+locks on lake shore--great difference between north, south, east, west
+side--can tell what the sun has shone on.”
+
+“Suppose,” said I, “that I should take you in a dark night right up here
+into the middle of the woods a hundred miles, set you down, and turn you
+round quickly twenty times, could you steer straight to Oldtown?”
+
+“Oh, yer,” said he, “have done pretty much same thing. I will tell you.
+Some years ago I met an old white hunter at Millinocket; very good
+hunter. He said he could go anywhere in the woods. He wanted to hunt
+with me that day, so we start. We chase a moose all the forenoon, round
+and round, till middle of afternoon, when we kill him. Then I said to
+him, ‘Now you go straight to camp.’
+
+“He said, ‘I can’t do that. I don’t know where I am.’
+
+“‘Where you think camp?’ I asked.
+
+“He pointed so. Then I laugh at him. I take the lead and go right off
+the other way, cross our tracks many times, straight camp.”
+
+“How do you do that?” asked I.
+
+“Oh, I can’t tell _you_,” he replied. “Great difference between me and
+white man.”
+
+It appeared as if the sources of information were so various that he did
+not give a distinct conscious attention to any one, and so could not
+readily refer to any when questioned about it, but he found his way very
+much as an animal does. Perhaps what is commonly called instinct in the
+animal in this case is merely a sharpened and educated sense. Often,
+when an Indian says, “I don’t know,” in regard to the route he is to
+take, he does not mean what a white man would by those words, for his
+Indian instinct may tell him still as much as the most confident white
+man knows. He does not carry things in his head, nor remember the route
+exactly, like a white man, but relies on himself at the moment. Not
+having experienced the need of the other sort of knowledge--all labeled
+and arranged--he has not acquired it.
+
+The hunter with whom I talked in the stage knew some of the resources of
+the Indian. He said that he steered by the wind, or by the limbs of the
+hemlocks, which were largest on the south side; also sometimes, when he
+knew that there was a lake near, by firing his gun and listening to hear
+the direction and distance of the echo from over it.
+
+As the forenoon advanced the wind increased. The last bay which we
+crossed before reaching the desolate pier at the Northeast Carry, was
+two or three miles over, and the wind was southwesterly. After going a
+third of the way, the waves had increased so as occasionally to wash
+into the canoe, and we saw that it was worse ahead. At first we might
+have turned about, but were not willing to. It would have been of no use
+to follow the course of the shore, for the waves ran still higher there
+on account of the greater sweep the wind had. At any rate it would have
+been dangerous now to alter our course, because the waves would have
+struck us at an advantage. It will not do to meet them at right angles,
+for then they will wash in both sides, but you must take them
+quartering. So the Indian stood up in the canoe and exerted all his
+skill and strength for a mile or two, while I paddled right along in
+order to give him more steerage-way. For more than a mile he did not
+allow a single wave to strike the canoe as it would, but turned it
+quickly from this side to that, so that it would always be on or near
+the crest of a wave when it broke, where all its force was spent, and we
+merely settled down with it. At length I jumped out onto the end of the
+pier against which the waves were dashing violently, in order to lighten
+the canoe and catch it at the landing, which was not much sheltered, but
+just as I jumped we took in two or three gallons of water. I remarked to
+the Indian, “You managed that well,” to which he replied: “Ver’ few men
+do that. Great many waves; when I look out for one, another come quick.”
+
+While the Indian went to get cedar bark, etc., to carry his canoe with,
+we cooked the dinner on the shore in the midst of a sprinkling rain. He
+prepared his canoe for carrying in this wise. He took a cedar shingle or
+splint eighteen inches long and four or five wide, rounded at one end,
+that the corners might not be in the way, and tied it with cedar bark by
+two holes made midway, near the edge on each side, to the middle
+crossbar of the canoe. When the canoe was lifted upon his head bottom
+up, this shingle, with its rounded end uppermost, distributed the weight
+over his shoulders and head, while a band of cedar bark, tied to the
+crossbar on each side of the shingle, passed round his breast, and
+another longer one, outside of the last, round his forehead; also a hand
+on each side rail served to steer the canoe and keep it from rocking. He
+thus carried it with his shoulders, head, breast, forehead, and both
+hands, as if the upper part of his body were all one hand to clasp and
+hold it. A cedar tree furnished all the gear in this case, as it had the
+woodwork of the canoe. One of the paddles rested on the crossbars in the
+bows. I took the canoe upon my head and found that I could carry it with
+ease, but I let him carry it, not caring to establish a different
+precedent. This shingle remained tied to the crossbar throughout the
+voyage, was always ready for the carries, and also served to protect the
+back of one passenger.
+
+We were obliged to go over this carry twice, our load was so great. But
+the carries were an agreeable variety, and we improved the opportunity
+to gather the rare plants which we had seen, when we returned
+empty-handed.
+
+We reached the Penobscot about four o’clock, and found there some St.
+Francis Indians encamped on the bank. They were making a canoe and
+drying moose meat. Their camp was covered with spruce bark. They had a
+young moose, taken in the river a fortnight before, confined in a sort
+of cage of logs piled up cob-fashion, seven or eight feet high. It was
+quite tame, about four feet high, and covered with moose flies. There
+was a large quantity of cornel, red maple, and also willow and aspen
+boughs, stuck through between the logs on all sides, butt ends out, and
+on their leaves it was browsing. It looked at first as if it were in a
+bower rather than a pen.
+
+Our Indian said that _he_ used _black_ spruce roots to sew canoes with,
+obtaining it from high lands or mountains. The St. Francis Indians
+thought that _white_ spruce roots might be best. But the former said,
+“No good, break, can’t split ’em.”
+
+I told him I thought that I could make a canoe, but he expressed great
+doubt of it; at any rate he thought that my work would not be “neat” the
+first time.
+
+Having reloaded, we paddled down the Penobscot. We saw a splendid yellow
+lily by the shore, which I plucked. It was six feet high and had twelve
+flowers, in two whorls, forming a pyramid. We afterward saw many more
+thus tall along this stream, and on the East Branch. The Indian said
+that the roots were good for soup, that is, to cook with meat, to
+thicken it, taking the place of flour. They get them in the fall. I dug
+some, and found a mass of bulbs pretty deep in the earth, two inches in
+diameter, looking, and even tasting, somewhat like raw green corn on the
+ear.
+
+When we had gone about three miles down the Penobscot, we saw through
+the tree-tops a thunder-shower coming up in the west, and we looked out
+a camping-place in good season, about five o’clock.
+
+I will describe the routine of camping. We generally told the Indian
+that we would stop at the first suitable place, so that he might be on
+the lookout for it. Having observed a clear, hard, and flat beach to
+land on, free from mud, and from stones which would injure the canoe,
+one would run up the bank to see if there were open and level space
+enough for the camp between the trees, or if it could be easily cleared,
+preferring at the same time a cool place, on account of insects.
+Sometimes we paddled a mile or more before finding one to our minds, for
+where the shore was suitable the bank would often be too steep, or else
+too low and grassy, and therefore mosquitoey. We then took out the
+baggage and drew up the canoe. The Indian cut a path to the spot we had
+selected, which was usually within two or three rods of the water, and
+we carried up our baggage.
+
+One, perhaps, takes birch bark, always at hand, and dead dry wood, and
+kindles a fire five or six feet in front of where we intend to lie. It
+matters not, commonly, on which side this is, because there is little or
+no wind in so dense a wood at that season; and then he gets a kettle of
+water from the river, and takes out the pork, bread, coffee, etc., from
+their several packages.
+
+Another, meanwhile, having the axe, cuts down the nearest dead rock
+maple or other dry hard wood, collecting several large logs to last
+through the night, also a green stake, with a notch or fork to it, which
+is slanted over the fire, perhaps resting on a rock or forked stake, to
+hang the kettle on, and two forked stakes and a pole for the tent.
+
+[Illustration: _Making a Camp in the Streamside Woodland_]
+
+The third man pitches the tent, cuts a dozen or more pins with his knife
+to fasten it down with, and then collects an armful or two of fir twigs,
+arbor-vitæ, spruce, or hemlock, whichever is at hand, and makes the
+bed, beginning at either end, and laying the twigs wrong side up, in
+regular rows, covering the stub ends of the last row; first, however,
+filling the hollows, if there are any, with coarser material.
+
+Commonly, by the time the bed is made, or within fifteen or twenty
+minutes, the water boils, the pork is fried, and supper is ready. We eat
+this sitting on the ground, or a stump, around a large piece of birch
+bark for a table, each holding a dipper in one hand and a piece of
+ship-bread or fried pork in the other, frequently making a pass with his
+hand, or thrusting his head into the smoke, to avoid the mosquitoes.
+
+Next, pipes are lit by those who smoke, and veils are donned by those
+who have them, and we hastily examine and dry our plants, anoint our
+faces and hands, and go to bed.
+
+Though you have nothing to do but see the country, there’s rarely any
+time to spare, hardly enough to examine a plant, before the night or
+drowsiness is upon you.
+
+Such was the ordinary experience, but this evening we had camped earlier
+on account of the rain, and had more time. We found that our camp was on
+an old indistinct supply-road, running along the river. What is called a
+road there shows no ruts or trace of wheels, for they are not used; nor,
+indeed, of runners, since they are used only in the winter when the snow
+is several feet deep. It is only an indistinct vista through the wood,
+which it takes an experienced eye to detect.
+
+We had no sooner pitched our tent than the thunder-shower burst on us,
+and we hastily crept under it, drawing our bags after us, curious to see
+how much of a shelter our thin cotton roof was going to be in this
+excursion. Though the violence of the rain forced a fine shower through
+the cloth before it was fairly wetted and shrunk, with which we were
+well bedewed, we managed to keep pretty dry, only a box of matches
+having been left out and spoiled, and before we were aware of it the
+shower was over, and only the dripping trees imprisoned us.
+
+Wishing to see what fishes were in the river there, we cast our lines
+over the wet bushes on the shore, but they were repeatedly swept down
+the swift stream in vain. So, leaving the Indian, we took the canoe,
+just before dark, and dropped down the river a few rods to fish at the
+mouth of a sluggish brook. We pushed up this a rod or two, but were soon
+driven off by the mosquitoes. While there we heard the Indian fire his
+gun twice in rapid succession. His object was to clean out and dry it
+after the rain, and he then loaded it with ball, being now on ground
+where he expected to meet with large game. This sudden loud crashing
+noise in the still aisles of the forest affected me like an insult to
+nature, or ill manners at any rate, as if you were to fire a gun in a
+hall or temple. It was not heard far, however, except along the river,
+the sound being rapidly hushed up or absorbed by the damp trees and
+mossy ground.
+
+The Indian made a little smothered fire of damp leaves close to the back
+of the camp, that the smoke might drive through and keep out the
+mosquitoes, but just before we fell asleep this suddenly blazed up and
+came near setting fire to the tent.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SUNDAY, JULY 26
+
+
+The note of the white-throated sparrow was the first heard in the
+morning, and with this all the woods rang. Though commonly unseen, their
+simple _ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te_, so sharp and piercing, was as
+distinct to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the
+darkest of the forest would be to the eye. We were commonly aroused by
+their lively strain very early. What a glorious time they must have in
+that wilderness, far from mankind!
+
+I told the Indian that we would go to church to Chesuncook this morning,
+some fifteen miles. It was settled weather at last. A few swallows
+flitted over the water, we heard Maryland yellow-throats along the
+shore, the notes of the chickadee, and, I believe, redstarts.
+Moose-flies of large size pursued us in midstream.
+
+The Indian thought that we should lie by on Sunday. Said he, “We come
+here lookum things, look all round, but come Sunday look up all that,
+and then Monday look again.”
+
+He spoke of an Indian of his acquaintance who had been with some
+ministers to Katahdin and had told him how they conducted. This he
+described in a low and solemn voice. “They make a long prayer every
+morning and night, and at every meal. Come Sunday, they stop ’em, no go
+at all that day--keep still--preach all day--first one, then another,
+just like church. Oh, ver’ good men. One day going along a river, they
+came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while. They go
+right ashore--stop there, go no farther that day--they have meeting
+there, preach and pray just like Sunday. Then they go back and carry the
+body with them. Oh, they ver’ good men.”
+
+I judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and
+that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see
+Katahdin.
+
+However, the Indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we
+would go along he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he
+no takum pay for what he do Sunday then ther’s no harm, but if he takum
+pay then wrong. I told him that he was stricter than white men.
+Nevertheless, I noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the Sundays
+at last.
+
+He appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud
+voice, in Indian, kneeling before the camp, morning and
+evening--sometimes scrambling up in haste when he had forgotten this,
+and saying them with great rapidity. In the course of the day he
+remarked, “Poor man rememberum God more than rich.”
+
+We soon passed the island where I had camped four years before. The
+deadwater, a mile or two below it, the Indian said was “a great place
+for moose.” We saw the grass bent where a moose came out the night
+before, and the Indian said that he could smell one as far as he could
+see him, but he added that if he should see five or six to-day close by
+canoe he no shoot ’em. Accordingly, as he was the only one of the party
+who had a gun, or had come a-hunting, the moose were safe.
+
+Just below this a cat owl flew heavily over the stream, and he, asking
+if I knew what it was, imitated very well the common _hoo, hoo, hoo,
+hoorer, hoo_, of our woods.
+
+We carried a part of the baggage about Pine Stream Falls, while the
+Indian went down in the canoe. A Bangor merchant had told us that two
+men in his employ were drowned some time ago while passing these falls
+in a bateau, and a third clung to a rock all night and was taken off in
+the morning. There were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on
+this carry and the neighboring shores. I measured the largest canoe
+birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the carry. It was
+fourteen and one half feet in circumference at two feet from the ground,
+but at five feet divided into three parts. The Indian cut a small woody
+knob as big as a filbert from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old
+balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good medicine.
+
+After we had embarked and gone half a mile, my companion remembered that
+he had left his knife, and we paddled back to get it, against the strong
+and swift current. This taught us the difference between going up and
+down the stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter of a
+mile, we should have gone down a mile and half at least. So we landed,
+and while he and the Indian were gone back for it, I watched the motions
+of the foam, a kind of white waterfowl near the shore, forty or fifty
+rods below. It alternately appeared and disappeared behind the rock,
+being carried round by an eddy.
+
+Immediately below these falls was the Chesuncook Deadwater, caused by
+the flowing back of the lake. As we paddled slowly over this, the Indian
+told us a story of his hunting thereabouts, and something more
+interesting about himself. It appeared that he had represented his tribe
+at Augusta, and once at Washington. He had a great idea of education,
+and would occasionally break out into such expressions as this,
+“Kademy--good thing--I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there. You been
+college?”
+
+We steered across the northwest end of the lake. It is an agreeable
+change to cross a lake after you have been shut up in the woods, not
+only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. It is
+one of the surprises which Nature has in store for the traveler in the
+forest. To look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water was
+liberating and civilizing even. The lakes also reveal the mountains, and
+give ample scope and range to our thought. Already there were half a
+dozen log huts about this end of the lake, though so far from a road. In
+these woods the earliest settlements are clustering about the lakes,
+partly, I think, for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest
+clearings. Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking
+advantage of its improvements.
+
+About noon we turned northward up a broad kind of estuary, and at its
+northeast corner found the Caucomgomoc River, and after going about a
+mile from the lake reached the Umbazookskus. Our course was up the
+Umbazookskus, but as the Indian knew of a good camping-place, that is, a
+cool place where there were few mosquitoes, about half a mile farther up
+the Caucomgomoc, we went thither. So quickly we changed the civilizing
+sky of Chesuncook for the dark wood of the Caucomgomoc. On reaching the
+Indian’s camping-ground on the south side, where the bank was about a
+dozen feet high, I read on the trunk of a fir tree blazed by an axe an
+inscription in charcoal which had been left by him. It was surmounted by
+a drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the sign used by
+his family always. The drawing, though rude, could not be mistaken for
+anything but a bear, and he doubted my ability to copy it. The
+inscription ran thus. I interline the English of his Indian as he gave
+it to me.
+
+      (The figure of a bear in a boat.)
+                July 26
+                 1853
+
+               _niasoseb_
+             We alone Joseph
+               _Polis  elioi_
+                Polis  start
+               _sia  olta_
+                for  Oldtown
+               _onke  ni_
+                right away
+               _quambi_
+
+                 July 15
+                  1855
+               _niasoseb_
+
+He added now below:--
+
+                  1857
+                 July 26
+                Jo. Polis
+
+This was one of his homes. I saw where he had sometimes stretched his
+moose-hides on the sunny north side of the river where there was a
+narrow meadow.
+
+After we had selected a place for our camp, and kindled our fire, almost
+exactly on the site of the Indian’s last camp here, he, looking up,
+observed, “That tree danger.”
+
+It was a dead part, more than a foot in diameter, of a large canoe
+birch, which branched at the ground. This branch, rising thirty feet or
+more, slanted directly over the spot which we had chosen for our bed. I
+told him to try it with his axe, but he could not shake it perceptibly,
+and, therefore, seemed inclined to disregard it, and my companion
+expressed his willingness to run the risk. But it seemed to me that we
+should be fools to lie under it, for though the lower part was firm,
+the top, for aught we knew, might be just ready to fall, and we should
+at any rate be very uneasy if the wind arose in the night. It is a
+common accident for men camping in the woods to be killed by a falling
+tree. So the camp was moved to the other side of the fire.
+
+The Indian said that the Umbazookskus, being a dead stream with broad
+meadows, was a good place for moose, and he frequently came a-hunting
+here, being out alone three weeks or more from Oldtown. He sometimes,
+also, went a-hunting to the Seboois Lakes, taking the stage, with his
+gun and ammunition, axe and blankets, hard-bread and pork, perhaps for a
+hundred miles of the way, and jumped off at the wildest place on the
+road, where he was at once at home, and every rod was a tavern-site for
+him. Then, after a short journey through the woods, he would build a
+spruce-bark canoe in one day, putting but few ribs into it, that it
+might be light, and, after doing his hunting with it on the lakes,
+would return with his furs the same way he had come. Thus you have an
+Indian availing himself of the advantages of civilization, without
+losing any of his woodcraft, but proving himself the more successful
+hunter for it.
+
+This man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. Our
+tent was of a kind new to him, but when he had once seen it pitched it
+was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked
+stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time,
+though I am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered
+several times.
+
+Now I thought I would observe how he spent his Sunday. While I and my
+companion were looking about at the trees and river he went to sleep.
+Indeed, he improved every opportunity to get a nap, whatever the day.
+
+Rambling about the woods at this camp, I noticed that they consisted
+chiefly of firs, spruce, red maple, birch, and, along the river, the
+hoary alder. I could trace the outlines of large birches that had fallen
+long ago, collapsed and rotted and turned to soil, by faint
+yellowish-green lines of featherlike moss, eighteen inches wide and
+twenty or thirty feet long, crossed by other similar lines.
+
+Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the
+settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not
+distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry. The waterfalls
+which I heard were not without their dams and mills to my imagination;
+and several times I found that I had been regarding the steady rushing
+sound of the wind from over the woods beyond the rivers as that of a
+train of cars. Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always
+thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.
+
+I asked the Indian to make us a sugar-bowl of birch bark, which he did,
+using the great knife which dangled in a sheath from his belt; but the
+bark broke at the corners when he bent it up, and he said it was not
+good--that there was a great difference in this respect between the bark
+of one canoe birch and that of another.
+
+My companion, wishing to distinguish between the black and white spruce,
+asked Polis to show him a twig of the latter, which he did at once,
+together with the black; indeed, he could distinguish them about as far
+as he could see them. As the two twigs appeared very much alike, my
+companion asked the Indian to point out the difference; whereupon the
+latter, taking the twigs, instantly remarked, as he passed his hand over
+them successively in a stroking manner, that the white was rough, that
+is, the needles stood up nearly perpendicular, but the black smooth,
+that is, as if bent down. This was an obvious difference, both to sight
+and touch.
+
+I asked him to get some black spruce root and make some thread.
+Whereupon, without looking up at the trees overhead, he began to grub in
+the ground, instantly distinguishing the black spruce roots, and cutting
+off a slender one, three or four feet long, and as big as a pipestem, he
+split the end with his knife, and taking a half between the thumb and
+forefinger of each hand, rapidly separated its whole length into two
+equal semi-cylindrical halves. Then, giving me another root, he said,
+“You try.”
+
+But in my hands it immediately ran off one side, and I got only a very
+short piece. Though it looked easy, I found that there was a great art
+in splitting these roots. The split is skillfully humored by bending
+short with this hand or that, and so kept in the middle. He then took
+off the bark from each half, pressing a short piece of cedar bark
+against the convex side with both hands, while he drew the root upward
+with his teeth. An Indian’s teeth are strong, and I noticed that he
+used his often where we should have used a hand. They amounted to a
+third hand. He thus obtained in a moment a very neat, tough, and
+flexible string, which he could tie into a knot, or make into a fishline
+even. He said that you would be obliged to give half a dollar for spruce
+root enough for a canoe, thus prepared.
+
+He had discovered the day before that his canoe leaked a little, and
+said that it was owing to stepping into it violently. I asked him where
+he would get pitch to mend it with, for they commonly use hard pitch,
+obtained of the whites at Oldtown. He said that he could make something
+very similar, and equally good, of material which we had with us; and he
+wished me to guess what. But I could not, and he would not tell me,
+though he showed me a ball of it when made, as big as a pea and like
+black pitch, saying, at last, that there were some things which a man
+did not tell even his wife.
+
+Being curious to see what kind of fishes there were in this dark, deep,
+sluggish river, I cast in my line just before night, and caught several
+small sucker-like fishes, which the Indian at once rejected, saying that
+they were good for nothing. Also, he would not touch a pout, which I
+caught, and said that neither Indians nor whites thereabouts ever ate
+them. But he said that some small silvery fishes, which I called white
+chivin, were the best fish in the Penobscot waters, and if I would toss
+them up the bank to him, he would cook them for me. After cleaning them,
+not very carefully, leaving the heads on, he laid them on the coals and
+so broiled them.
+
+[Illustration: _Fishing_]
+
+Returning from a short walk, he brought a vine in his hand, saying that
+it made the best tea of anything in the woods. It was the creeping
+snowberry, which was quite common there, its berries just grown. So we
+determined to have some tea made of this. It had a slight
+checkerberry flavor, and we both agreed that it was really better
+than the black tea which we had brought. We thought it quite a
+discovery, and that it might well be dried and sold in the shops. I for
+one, however, am not an old tea-drinker and cannot speak with authority
+to others. The Indian said that they also used for tea a certain herb
+which grew in low ground, which he did not find there, and Labrador tea;
+also hemlock leaves, the last especially in winter when the other plants
+were covered with snow; and various other things. We could have had a
+new kind of tea every night.
+
+Just before night we saw a _musquash_, the only one we saw in this
+voyage, swimming downward on the opposite side of the stream. The
+Indian, wishing to get one to eat, hushed us, saying, “Stop, me call
+’em”; and, sitting flat on the bank, he began to make a curious
+squeaking, wiry sound with his lips, exerting himself considerably. I
+was greatly surprised--thought that I had at last got into the
+wilderness, and that he was a wild man indeed, to be talking to a
+musquash! I did not know which of the two was the strangest to me. He
+seemed suddenly to have quite forsaken humanity, and gone over to the
+musquash side. The musquash, however, as near as I could see, did not
+turn aside, and the Indian said that he saw our fire; but it was evident
+that he was in the habit of calling the musquash to him, as he said. An
+acquaintance of mine who was hunting moose in these woods a month after
+this, tells me that his Indian in this way repeatedly called the
+musquash within reach of his paddle in the moonlight, and struck at
+them.
+
+The Indian said a particularly long prayer this Sunday evening, as if to
+atone for working in the morning.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+MONDAY, JULY 27
+
+
+Having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the Indian always carefully
+attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each having taken a
+look, as usual, to see that nothing was left, we set out again,
+descending the Caucomgomoc, and turning northeasterly up the
+Umbazookskus. This name, the Indian said, meant _Much Meadow River_. We
+found it now very wide on account of the rains. The space between the
+woods, chiefly bare meadow, was from fifty to two hundred rods in
+breadth.
+
+In the water on the meadows grew sedges, wool-grass, the common blue
+flag abundantly, its flower just showing itself above the high water, as
+if it were a blue water-lily, and higher in the meadows a great many
+clumps of a peculiar narrow-leaved willow. Here also grew the red
+osier, its large fruit now whitish.
+
+It was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there
+was quite an echo from them, but when I was shouting in order to awake
+it, the Indian reminded me that I should scare the moose, which he was
+looking out for, and which we all wanted to see.
+
+Having paddled several miles up the Umbazookskus, it suddenly contracted
+to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the larches and other trees
+approaching the bank and leaving no open meadow. We landed to get a
+black spruce pole for pushing against the stream. The one selected was
+quite slender, cut about ten feet long, merely whittled to a point, and
+the bark shaved off.
+
+While we were thus employed, two Indians in a canoe hove in sight round
+the bushes, coming down stream. Our Indian knew one of them, an old man,
+and fell into conversation with him. He belonged at the foot of
+Moosehead. The other was of another tribe. They were returning from
+hunting. I asked the younger if they had seen any moose, to which he
+said “No”; but I, seeing the moose-hides sticking out from a great
+bundle made with their blankets in the middle of the canoe, added, “Only
+their hides.”
+
+As he was a foreigner, he may have wished to deceive me, for it is
+against the law for white men and foreigners to kill moose in Maine at
+this season. But perhaps he need not have been alarmed, for the
+moose-wardens are not very particular. I heard of one who, being asked
+by a white man going into the woods what he would say if he killed a
+moose, answered, “If you bring me a quarter of it I guess you won’t be
+troubled.” His duty being, as he said, only to prevent the
+“indiscriminate” slaughter of them for their hides. I suppose that he
+would consider it an _indiscriminate_ slaughter when a quarter was not
+reserved for himself.
+
+We continued along through the most extensive larch wood which I had
+seen--tall and slender trees with fantastic branches. You do not find
+straggling trees of this species here and there throughout the wood, but
+rather a little forest of them. The same is the case with the white and
+red pines and some other trees, greatly to the convenience of the
+lumberer. They are of a social habit, growing in “veins,” “clumps,”
+“groups,” or “communities,” as the explorers call them, distinguishing
+them far away, from the top of a hill or a tree, the white pines
+towering above the surrounding forest, or else they form extensive
+forests by themselves. I should have liked to come across a large
+community of pines which had never been invaded by the lumbering army.
+
+[Illustration: _The Red Squirrel_]
+
+We saw some fresh moose-tracks along the shore. The stream was only from
+one and one half to three rods wide, quite winding, with occasional
+small islands, meadows, and some very swift and shallow places. When
+we came to an island the Indian never hesitated which side to take, as
+if the current told him which was the shortest and deepest. It was lucky
+for us that the water was so high. We had to walk but once on this
+stream, carrying a part of the load, at a swift and shallow reach, while
+he got up with the canoe, not being obliged to take out, though he said
+it was very strong water. Once or twice we passed the red wreck of a
+bateau which had been stove some spring.
+
+While making this portage I saw many splendid specimens of the great
+purple fringed orchis, three feet high. It is remarkable that such
+delicate flowers should here adorn these wilderness paths.
+
+The Umbazookskus is called ten miles long. Having poled up the narrowest
+part some three or four miles, the next opening in the sky was over
+Umbazookskus Lake, which we suddenly entered about eleven o’clock in the
+forenoon. It stretches north-westerly four or five miles. We crossed
+the southeast end to the carry into Mud Pond.
+
+Hodge, who went through this way to the St. Lawrence in the service of
+the State, calls the portage here a mile and three quarters long. The
+Indian said this was the wettest carry in the State, and as the season
+was a very wet one we anticipated an unpleasant walk. As usual he made
+one large bundle of the pork-keg, cooking-utensils, and other loose
+traps, by tying them up in his blanket. We should be obliged to go over
+the carry twice, and our method was to carry one half part way, and then
+go back for the rest.
+
+Our path ran close by the door of a log hut in a clearing at this end of
+the carry, which the Indian, who alone entered it, found to be occupied
+by a Canadian and his family, and that the man had been blind for a
+year. This was the first house above Chesuncook, and was built here, no
+doubt, because it was the route of the lumberers in the winter and
+spring.
+
+After a slight ascent from the lake through the springy soil of the
+Canadian’s clearing, we entered on a level and very wet and rocky path
+through the dense evergreen forest, a loosely paved gutter merely, where
+we went leaping from rock to rock and from side to side in the vain
+attempt to keep out of the water and mud. It was on this carry that the
+white hunter whom I met in the stage, as he told me, had shot two bears
+a few months before. They stood directly in the path and did not turn
+out for him. He said that at this season bears were found on the
+mountains and hillsides in search of berries and were apt to be saucy.
+
+Here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land
+in the State. This very spot was described as “covered with the greatest
+abundance of pine,” but now this appeared to me, comparatively, an
+uncommon tree there--and yet you did not see where any more could have
+stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc.
+
+The Indian with his canoe soon disappeared before us, but ere long he
+came back and told us to take a path which turned off westward, it being
+better walking, and, at my suggestion, he agreed to leave a bough in the
+regular carry at that place that we might not pass it by mistake.
+Thereafter, he said, we were to keep the main path, and he added, “You
+see ’em my tracks.”
+
+But I had not much faith that we could distinguish his tracks, since
+others had passed over the carry within a few days. We turned off at the
+right place, but were soon confused by numerous logging-paths coming
+into the one we were on. However, we kept what we considered the main
+path, though it was a winding one, and in this, at long intervals, we
+distinguished a faint trace of a footstep. This, though comparatively
+unworn, was at first a better, or, at least, a dryer road than the
+regular carry which we had left. It led through an arbor-vitæ wilderness
+of the grimmest character. The great fallen and rotting trees had been
+cut through and rolled aside, and their huge trunks abutted on the path
+on each side, while others still lay across it two or three feet high.
+
+It was impossible for us to discern the Indian’s trail in the elastic
+moss, which, like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as
+well as the earth. Nevertheless, I did occasionally detect the track of
+a man, and I gave myself some credit for it. I carried my whole load at
+once, a heavy knapsack, and a large rubber bag containing our bread and
+a blanket, swung on a paddle, in all about sixty pounds; but my
+companion preferred to make two journeys by short stages while I waited
+for him. We could not be sure that we were not depositing our loads each
+time farther off from the true path.
+
+As I sat waiting for my companion, he would seem to be gone a long time,
+and I had ample opportunity to make observations on the forest. I now
+first began to be seriously molested by the black fly, a very small but
+perfectly formed fly of that color, about one tenth of an inch long,
+which I felt, and then saw, in swarms about me, as I sat by a wider and
+more than usually doubtful fork in this dark forest path. Remembering
+that I had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a thoughtful hand in
+Bangor, I made haste to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to
+find it effectual, as long as it was fresh, or for twenty minutes, not
+only against black flies, but all the insects that molested us. They
+would not alight on the part thus defended. It was composed of sweet oil
+and oil of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor.
+However, I finally concluded that the remedy was worse than the disease,
+it was so disagreeable and inconvenient to have your face and hands
+covered with such a mixture.
+
+Three large slate-colored birds of the jay genus, the Canada jay, came
+flitting silently and by degrees toward me, and hopped down the limbs
+inquisitively to within seven or eight feet. Fish hawks from the lake
+uttered their sharp whistling notes low over the top of the forest near
+me, as if they were anxious about a nest there.
+
+After I had sat there some time I noticed at this fork in the path a
+tree which had been blazed, and the letters “Chamb. L.” written on it
+with red chalk. This I knew to mean Chamberlain Lake. So I concluded
+that on the whole we were on the right course.
+
+My companion having returned with his bag, we set forward again. The
+walking rapidly grew worse and the path more indistinct, and at length
+we found ourselves in a more open and regular swamp made less passable
+than ordinary by the unusual wetness of the season. We sank a foot deep
+in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees. The trail
+was almost obliterated, being no more than a musquash leaves in similar
+places when he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a
+musquash trail in some places. We concluded that if Mud Pond was as
+muddy as the approach to it was wet, it certainly deserved its name. It
+would have been amusing to behold the dogged and deliberate pace at
+which we entered that swamp, without interchanging a word, as if
+determined to go through it, though it should come up to our necks.
+Having penetrated a considerable distance into this and found a tussock
+on which we could deposit our loads, though there was no place to sit,
+my companion went back for the rest of his pack.
+
+After a long while my companion came back, and the Indian with him. We
+had taken the wrong road, and the Indian had lost us. He had gone back
+to the Canadian’s camp and asked him which way we had probably gone,
+since he could better understand the ways of white men, and he told him
+correctly that we had undoubtedly taken the supply road to Chamberlain
+Lake. The Indian was greatly surprised that we should have taken what he
+called a “tow,” that is, tote, toting, or supply, road instead of a
+carry path,--that we had not followed his tracks,--said it was
+“strange,” and evidently thought little of our woodcraft.
+
+Having held a consultation and eaten a mouthful of bread, we concluded
+that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now to keep on to Chamberlain
+Lake, omitting Mud Pond, than to go back and start anew for the last
+place, though the Indian had never been through this way and knew
+nothing about it. In the meanwhile he would go back and finish carrying
+over his canoe and bundle to Mud Pond, cross that, and go down its
+outlet and up Chamberlain Lake, and trust to meet us there before night.
+It was now a little after noon. He supposed that the water in which we
+stood had flowed back from Mud Pond, which could not be far off
+eastward, but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp.
+
+Keeping on, we were ere long agreeably disappointed by reaching firmer
+ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but
+there was never any outlook over the forest. At one place I heard a very
+clear and piercing note from a small hawk as he dashed through the
+tree-tops over my head. We also saw and heard several times the red
+squirrel. This, according to the Indian, is the only squirrel found in
+those woods, except a very few striped ones. It must have a solitary
+time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life,
+seventy-five miles from a road as we had come. I wondered how he could
+call any particular tree there his home, and yet he would run up the
+stem of one out of the myriads, as if it were an old road to him. I
+fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us.
+One of those somber fir and spruce woods is not complete unless you
+hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his fine
+alarum--his spruce voice, like the working of the sap through some crack
+in a tree. Such an impertinent fellow would occasionally try to alarm
+the wood about me.
+
+“Oh,” said I, “I am well acquainted with your family. I know your
+cousins in Concord very well.” But my overtures were vain, for he would
+withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar-top, and
+spring his rattle again.
+
+We entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking
+was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen
+timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. The
+fallen trees were so numerous that for long distances the route was
+through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as
+high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over
+another fence into a second yard, and so on. In many places the canoe
+would have run if it had not been for the fallen timber. Again it would
+be more open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow. It was a mossy
+swamp, which it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is
+very likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though we saw
+none. It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or
+the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one
+of these grim forests you are surprised to find that the larger
+inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red
+squirrel to bark at you. Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does
+not howl; it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. I
+did, however, see one dead porcupine. Perhaps he had succumbed to the
+difficulties of the way. These bristly fellows are a very suitable small
+fruit of such unkempt wildernesses.
+
+Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and
+they who do the work are called “swampers.” I now perceived the fitness
+of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever
+saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here. However, I suppose they
+would tell you that this name took its origin from the fact that the
+chief work of roadmakers in those woods is to make the swamps passable.
+We came to a stream where the bridge, which had been made of logs tied
+together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over as we
+could. Such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we
+were on a path of any kind.
+
+We then crossed another low rising ground, and I, who wore shoes, had an
+opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used boots,
+had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he might not
+be able to get his wet boots on again. He went over the whole ground, or
+water, three times, for which reason our progress was very slow. Beside
+that, the water softened our feet, and to some extent unfitted them for
+walking.
+
+As I sat waiting for him it would naturally seem an unaccountable time
+that he was gone. Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the
+sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be,
+even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we
+should find ourselves at nightfall, I proposed that I should push
+through with what speed I could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and
+find the lake and the Indian, if possible, before night, and send the
+latter back to carry my companion’s bag.
+
+Having gone about a mile I heard a noise like the note of an owl, which
+I soon discovered to be made by the Indian, and answering him, we soon
+came together. He had reached the lake after crossing Mud Pond and
+running some rapids below it, and had come up about a mile and a half
+on our path. If he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not
+have found him that night, for the path branched once or twice before
+reaching this particular part of the lake. So he went back for my
+companion and his bag. Having waded through another stream, where the
+bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away, we continued on
+through alternate mud and water to the shores of Apmoojenegamook Lake,
+which we reached in season for a late supper, instead of dining there,
+as we had expected, having gone without our dinner.
+
+It was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my companion
+had gone over most of it three times he had walked full a dozen miles.
+In the winter, when the water is frozen and the snow is four feet deep,
+it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman. If you want an exact
+recipe for making such a road, take one part Mud Pond, and dilute it
+with equal parts of Umbazookskus and Apmoojenegamook; then send a
+family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and
+culverts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do
+the fencing.
+
+We had come out on a point extending into Apmoojenegamook, or
+Chamberlain Lake, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore,
+encumbered with bleached logs and trees. We were rejoiced to see such
+dry things in that part of the world. But at first we did not attend to
+dryness so much as to mud and wetness. We all three walked into the lake
+up to our middle to wash our clothes.
+
+This was another noble lake, twelve miles long; if you add Telos Lake,
+which, since the dam was built, has been connected with it by dead
+water, it will be twenty; and it is apparently from a mile and a half to
+two miles wide. We were about midway its length on the south side. We
+could see the only clearing in these parts, called the “Chamberlain
+Farm,” with two or three log buildings close together, on the opposite
+shore, some two and a half miles distant. The smoke of our fire on the
+shore brought over two men in a canoe from the farm, that being a common
+signal agreed on when one wishes to cross. It took them about half an
+hour to come over, and they had their labor for their pains this time.
+
+After putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging the others to
+dry on the pole which the Indian arranged over the fire, we ate our
+supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore with our feet to the fire
+without pitching our tent, making a thin bed of grass to cover the
+stones.
+
+Here first I was molested by the little midge called the no-see-em,
+especially over the sand at the water’s edge, for it is a kind of
+sand-fly. You would not observe them but for their light-colored wings.
+They are said to get under your clothes and produce a feverish heat,
+which I suppose was what I felt that night.
+
+Our insect foes in this excursion were, first, mosquitoes, only
+troublesome at night, or when we sat still on shore by day; second,
+black flies (_simulium molestum_), which molested us more or less on the
+carries by day, and sometimes in narrower parts of the stream; third,
+moose-flies, stout brown flies much like a horsefly. They can bite
+smartly, according to Polis, but are easily avoided or killed. Fourth,
+the no-see-ems. Of all these, the mosquitoes are the only ones that
+troubled me seriously, but as I was provided with a wash and a veil,
+they have not made any deep impression.
+
+The Indian would not use our wash to protect his face and hands, for
+fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any veil. He, therefore,
+suffered from insects throughout this journey more than either of us. He
+regularly tied up his face in his handkerchief, and buried it in his
+blanket, and he now finally lay down on the sand between us and the fire
+for the sake of the smoke, which he tried to make enter his blanket
+about his face, and for the same purpose he lit his pipe and breathed
+the smoke into his blanket.
+
+In the middle of the night we heard the voice of the loon, loud and
+distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in
+keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very
+unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awake for hours listening to it,
+it is so thrilling. When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are
+prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give
+voice to its wildness. Some idea of bears, wolves, or panthers runs in
+your head naturally, and when this note is first heard very far off at
+midnight, as you lie with your ear to the ground,--the forest being
+perfectly still about you, you take it for granted that it is the voice
+of a wolf or some other wild beast,--you conclude that it is a pack of
+wolves baying the moon, or, perchance, cantering after a moose. It was
+the unfailing and characteristic sound of those lakes.
+
+Some friends of mine, who two years ago went up the Caucomgomoc River,
+were serenaded by wolves while moose-hunting by moonlight. It was a
+sudden burst, as if a hundred demons had broke loose,--a startling sound
+enough, which, if any, would make your hair stand on end,--and all was
+still again. It lasted but a moment, and you’d have thought there were
+twenty of them, when probably there were only two or three. They heard
+it twice only, and they said that it gave expression to the wilderness
+which it lacked before. I heard of some men, who, while skinning a moose
+lately in those woods, were driven off from the carcass by a pack of
+wolves, which ate it up.
+
+This of the loon--I do not mean its laugh, but its looning--is a
+long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my
+ear--_hoo-hoo-ooooo_, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key,
+having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like
+it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at
+night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a
+dialect of my own, after all. Formerly, when lying awake at midnight in
+those woods, I had listened to hear some words or syllables of their
+language, but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry
+of the loon. I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native
+town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.
+
+I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a
+loon, flapping by close over my head along the shore. So, turning the
+other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+TUESDAY, JULY 28
+
+
+When we awoke we found a heavy dew on our blankets. I lay awake very
+early and listened to the clear, shrill _ah, te te, te te, te_ of the
+white-throated sparrow, repeated at short intervals, without the least
+variation, for half an hour, as if it could not enough express its
+happiness.
+
+We did some more washing in the lake this morning, and, with our clothes
+hung about on the dead trees and rocks, the shore looked like
+washing-day at home. The Indian, taking the hint, borrowed the soap,
+and, walking into the lake, washed his only cotton shirt on his person,
+then put on his pants and let it dry on him.
+
+I observed that he wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish
+flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, and strong
+linen or duck pants, which also had been white, blue woolen stockings,
+cowhide boots, and a Kossuth hat.[3] He carried no change of clothing,
+but, putting on a stout, thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe,
+and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket,
+which would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and strapping on his
+belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready
+to be gone all summer. This looked very independent--a few simple and
+effective tools, and no rubber clothing. He was always the first ready
+to start in the morning. Instead of carrying a large bundle of his own
+extra clothing, etc., he brought back the greatcoats of moose tied up in
+his blanket. I found that his outfit was the result of a long
+experience, and in the main hardly to be improved on, unless by washing
+and an extra shirt. Wanting a button here, he walked off to a place
+where some Indians had recently encamped, and searched for one, but I
+believe in vain.
+
+Having softened our stiffened boots and shoes with the pork fat, the
+usual disposition of what was left at breakfast, we crossed the lake,
+steering in a diagonal direction northeastly about four miles to the
+outlet. The Indian name, Apmoojenegamook, means lake that is crossed,
+because the usual course lies across and not along it. We did not intend
+to go far down the Allegash, but merely to get a view of the lakes which
+are its source, and then return this way to the East Branch of the
+Penobscot.
+
+After reaching the middle of the lake, we found the waves pretty high,
+and the Indian warned my companion, who was nodding, that he must not
+allow himself to fall asleep in the canoe lest he should upset us;
+adding, that when Indians want to sleep in a canoe, they lie down
+straight on the bottom. But in this crowded one that was impossible.
+However, he said that he would nudge him if he saw him nodding.
+
+A belt of dead trees stood all around the lake, some far out in the
+water, with others prostrate behind them, and they made the shore, for
+the most part, almost inaccessible. This is the effect of the dam at the
+outlet. Thus the natural sandy or rocky shore, with its green fringe,
+was concealed and destroyed. We coasted westward along the north side,
+searching for the outlet, about quarter of a mile distant from this
+savage-looking shore, on which the waves were breaking violently,
+knowing that it might easily be concealed amid this rubbish, or by the
+overlapping of the shore. It is remarkable how little these important
+gates to a lake are blazoned. There is no triumphal arch over the modest
+inlet or outlet, but at some undistinguished point it trickles in or out
+through the uninterrupted forest, almost as through a sponge.
+
+We reached the outlet in about an hour, and carried over the dam there,
+which is quite a solid structure, and about one quarter of a mile
+farther there was a second dam. The result of this particular damming
+about Chamberlain Lake is that the headwaters of the St. John are made
+to flow by Bangor. They have thus dammed all the larger lakes, raising
+their broad surfaces many feet, thus turning the forces of Nature
+against herself, that they might float their spoils out of the country.
+They rapidly run out of these immense forests all the finer and more
+accessible pine timber, and then leave the bears to watch the decaying
+dams, not clearing nor cultivating the land, nor making roads, nor
+building houses, but leaving it a wilderness, as they found it. In many
+parts only these dams remain, like deserted beaver dams. Think how much
+land they have flowed without asking Nature’s leave.
+
+The wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes.
+She feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees.
+Many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors,
+and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having
+fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and all is
+still again. It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of
+pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws
+them--to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting
+family than the mouse. That is as it happens. He speaks of a “berth” of
+timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might.
+
+When the chopper would praise a pine he will commonly tell you that the
+one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that
+were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. In my
+mind’s eye I can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke binding them
+together, the brazen-tipped horns betraying their servitude, taking
+their stand on the stump of each giant pine in succession throughout
+this whole forest, and chewing their cud there, until it is nothing but
+an ox-pasture, and run out at that. As if it were good for the oxen, and
+some medicinal quality ascended into their nostrils. Or is their
+elevated position intended merely as a symbol of the fact that the
+pastoral comes next in order to the sylvan or hunter life?
+
+The character of the logger’s admiration is betrayed by his very mode of
+expressing it. If he told all that was in his mind, he would say, “It
+was so big that I cut it down, and then a yoke of oxen could stand on
+its stump.” He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the
+tree. Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and
+a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you
+had not cut it down.
+
+The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving
+forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but he cannot converse
+with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and
+mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological
+tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on
+them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore
+of the wilderness he cuts it down, puts up a “deestrict” schoolhouse,
+and introduces Webster’s spelling-book.
+
+Below the last dam, the river being swift and shallow, we two walked
+about half a mile to lighten the canoe. I made it a rule to carry my
+knapsack when I walked, and also to keep it tied to a crossbar when in
+the canoe, that it might be found with the canoe if we should upset.
+
+I heard the dog-day locust here, a sound which I had associated only
+with more open, if not settled countries.
+
+We were now fairly on the Allegash River. After perhaps two miles of
+river we entered Heron Lake, scaring up forty or fifty young sheldrakes,
+at the entrance, which ran over the water with great rapidity, as usual
+in a long line.
+
+This lake, judging from the map, is about ten miles long. We had entered
+it on the southwest side, and saw a dark mountain northeast over the
+lake which the Indian said was called Peaked Mountain, and used by
+explorers to look for timber from. The shores were in the same ragged
+and unsightly condition, encumbered with dead timber, both fallen and
+standing, as in the last lake, owing to the dam on the Allegash below.
+Some low points or islands were almost drowned.
+
+I saw something white a mile off on the water, which turned out to be a
+great gull on a rock, which the Indian would have been glad to kill and
+eat. But it flew away long before we were near; and also a flock of
+summer ducks that were about the rock with it. I asking him about
+herons, since this was Heron Lake, he said that he found the blue
+heron’s nests in the hard-wood trees.
+
+Rounding a point, we stood across a bay toward a large island three or
+four miles down the lake. We met with shadflies midway, about a mile
+from the shore, and they evidently fly over the whole lake. On Moosehead
+I had seen a large devil’s-needle half a mile from the shore, coming
+from the middle of the lake, where it was three or four miles wide at
+least. It had probably crossed.
+
+We landed on the southeast side of the island, which was rather
+elevated, and densely wooded, with a rocky shore, in season for an early
+dinner. Somebody had camped there not long before and left the frame on
+which they stretched a moose-hide. The Indian proceeded at once to cut a
+canoe birch, slanted it up against another tree on the shore, tying it
+with a withe, and lay down to sleep in its shade. We made this island
+the limit of our excursion in this direction.
+
+The next dam was about fifteen miles farther north down the Allegash. We
+had been told in Bangor of a man who lived alone, a sort of hermit, at
+that dam, to take care of it, who spent his time tossing a bullet from
+one hand to the other, for want of employment. This sort of tit-for-tat
+intercourse between his two hands, bandying to and fro a leaden subject,
+seems to have been his symbol for society.
+
+There was another island visible toward the north end of the lake, with
+an elevated clearing on it; but we learned afterward that it was not
+inhabited, had only been used as a pasture for cattle which summered in
+these woods. This unnaturally smooth-shaven, squarish spot, in the midst
+of the otherwise uninterrupted forest, only reminded us how uninhabited
+the country was. You would sooner expect to meet a bear than an ox in
+such a clearing. At any rate, it must have been a surprise to the bears
+when they came across it. Such, seen far or near, you know at once to be
+man’s work, for Nature never does it. In order to let in the light to
+the earth he clears off the forest on the hillsides and plains, and
+sprinkles fine grass seed like an enchanter, and so carpets the earth
+with a firm sward.
+
+Polis had evidently more curiosity respecting the few settlers in those
+woods than we. If nothing was said, he took it for granted that we
+wanted to go straight to the next log hut. Having observed that we came
+by the log huts at Chesuncook, and the blind Canadian’s at the Mud Pond
+carry, without stopping to communicate with the inhabitants, he took
+occasion now to suggest that the usual way was, when you came near a
+house, to go to it, and tell the inhabitants what you had seen or heard,
+and then they told you what they had seen; but we laughed and said that
+we had had enough of houses for the present, and had come here partly to
+avoid them.
+
+In the meanwhile, the wind, increasing, blew down the Indian’s birch and
+created such a sea that we found ourselves prisoners on the island, the
+nearest shore being perhaps a mile distant, and we took the canoe out
+to prevent its drifting away. We did not know but we should be compelled
+to spend the rest of the day and the night there. At any rate, the
+Indian went to sleep again, my companion busied himself drying his
+plants, and I rambled along the shore westward, which was quite stony,
+and obstructed with fallen bleached or drifted trees for four or five
+rods in width.
+
+Our Indian said that he was a doctor, and could tell me some medicinal
+use for every plant I could show him. I immediately tried him. He said
+that the inner bark of the aspen was good for sore eyes; and so with
+various other plants, proving himself as good as his word. According to
+his account, he had acquired such knowledge in his youth from a wise old
+Indian with whom he associated, and he lamented that the present
+generation of Indians “had lost a great deal.”
+
+He said that the caribou was a “very great runner,” that there were none
+about this lake now, though there used to be many, and, pointing to the
+belt of dead trees caused by the dams, he added: “No likum stump. When
+he sees that he scared.”
+
+Pointing southeasterly over the lake and distant forest, he observed,
+“Me go Oldtown in three days.”
+
+I asked how he would get over the swamps and fallen trees. “Oh,” said
+he, “in winter all covered, go anywhere on snowshoes, right across
+lakes.”
+
+What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile
+swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our
+towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board
+and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!
+
+Here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered face of
+nature. From the Allegash River, across great Apmoojenegamook, he takes
+his way under the bear-haunted slopes of Katahdin to Pamadumcook and
+Millinocket’s inland seas, and so to the forks of the Nicketow, ever
+pushing the boughs of the fir and spruce aside, with his load of furs,
+contending day and night, night and day, with the shaggy demon
+vegetation, traveling through the mossy graveyard of trees. Or he could
+go by “that rough tooth of the sea” Kineo, great source of arrows and of
+spears to the ancients, when weapons of stone were used. Seeing and
+hearing moose, caribou, bears, porcupines, lynxes, wolves, and panthers.
+Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United
+States--never hear of America.
+
+There is a lumberer’s road called the Eagle Lake Road from the Seboois
+to the east side of this lake. It may seem strange that any road through
+such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, but at that
+season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are
+continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost
+as a railway. I am told that in the Aroostook country the sleds are
+required by law to be of one width, four feet, and sleighs must be
+altered to fit the track, so that one runner may go in one rut and the
+other follow the horse. Yet it is very bad turning out.
+
+We had for some time seen a thunder-shower coming up from the west over
+the woods of the island, and heard the muttering of the thunder, though
+we were in doubt whether it would reach us; but now the darkness rapidly
+increasing, and a fresh breeze rustling the forest, we hastily put up
+the plants which we had been drying, and with one consent made a rush
+for the tent material and set about pitching it. A place was selected
+and stakes and pins cut in the shortest possible time, and we were
+pinning it down lest it should be blown away, when the storm suddenly
+burst over us.
+
+As we lay huddled together under the tent, which leaked considerably
+about the sides, with our baggage at our feet, we listened to some of
+the grandest thunder which I ever heard--rapid peals, round and plump,
+bang, bang, bang, in succession, like artillery from some fortress in
+the sky; and the lightning was proportionally brilliant. The Indian
+said, “It must be good powder.” All for the benefit of the moose and us,
+echoing far over the concealed lakes. I thought it must be a place which
+the thunder loved, where the lightning practiced to keep its hand in,
+and it would do no harm to shatter a few pines.
+
+Looking out, I perceived that the violent shower falling on the lake had
+almost instantaneously flattened the waves, and, it clearing off, we
+resolved to start immediately, before the wind raised them again.
+
+Getting outside, I said that I saw clouds still in the southwest, and
+heard thunder there. We embarked, nevertheless, and paddled rapidly back
+toward the dams.
+
+At the outlet of Chamberlain Lake we were overtaken by another gusty
+rainstorm, which compelled us to take shelter, the Indian under his
+canoe on the bank, and we under the edge of the dam. However, we were
+more scared than wet. From my covert I could see the Indian peeping out
+from beneath his canoe to see what had become of the rain. When we had
+taken our respective places thus once or twice, the rain not coming down
+in earnest, we commenced rambling about the neighborhood, for the wind
+had by this time raised such waves on the lake that we could not stir,
+and we feared that we should be obliged to camp there. We got an early
+supper on the dam and tried for fish, while waiting for the tumult to
+subside. The fishes were not only few, but small and worthless.
+
+At length, just before sunset, we set out again. It was a wild evening
+when we coasted up the north side of this Apmoojenegamook Lake. One
+thunder-storm was just over, and the waves which it had raised still
+running with violence, and another storm was now seen coming up in the
+southwest, far over the lake; but it might be worse in the morning, and
+we wished to get as far as possible on our way while we might.
+
+It blew hard against the shore, which was as dreary and harborless as
+you can conceive. For half a dozen rods in width it was a perfect maze
+of submerged trees, all dead and bare and bleaching, some standing half
+their original height, others prostrate, and criss-across, above or
+beneath the surface, and mingled with them were loose trees and limbs
+and stumps, beating about. We could not have landed if we would, without
+the greatest danger of being swamped; so blow as it might, we must
+depend on coasting. It was twilight, too, and that stormy cloud was
+advancing rapidly in our rear. It was a pleasant excitement, yet we were
+glad to reach, at length, the cleared shore of the Chamberlain Farm.
+
+We landed on a low and thinly wooded point, and while my companions
+were pitching the tent, I ran up to the house to get some sugar, our
+six pounds being gone. It was no wonder they were, for Polis had a sweet
+tooth. He would first fill his dipper nearly a third full of sugar, and
+then add the coffee to it. Here was a clearing extending back from the
+lake to a hilltop, with some dark-colored log buildings and a storehouse
+in it, and half a dozen men standing in front of the principal hut,
+greedy for news. Among them was the man who tended the dam on the
+Allegash and tossed the bullet. He, having charge of the dams, and
+learning that we were going to Webster Stream the next day, told me that
+some of their men, who were haying at Telos Lake, had shut the dam at
+the canal there in order to catch trout, and if we wanted more water to
+take us through the canal we might raise the gate.
+
+They were unwilling to spare more than four pounds of brown
+sugar,--unlocking the storehouse to get it,--since they only kept a
+little for such cases as this, and they charged twenty cents a pound for
+it, which certainly it was worth to get it up there.
+
+When I returned to the shore it was quite dark, but we had a rousing
+fire to warm and dry us by, and a snug apartment behind it. The Indian
+went up to the house to inquire after a brother who had been absent
+hunting a year or two, and while another shower was beginning, I groped
+about cutting spruce and arbor-vitæ twigs for a bed. I preferred the
+arbor-vitæ on account of its fragrance, and spread it particularly thick
+about the shoulders. It is remarkable with what pure satisfaction the
+traveler in those woods will reach his camping-ground on the eve of a
+tempestuous night like this, as if he had got to his inn, and, rolling
+himself in his blanket, stretch himself on his six-feet-by-two bed of
+dripping fir twigs, with a thin sheet of cotton for roof, snug as a
+meadow mouse in its nest. Invariably our best nights were those when it
+rained, for then we were not troubled with mosquitoes.
+
+You soon come to disregard rain on such excursions, at least in the
+summer, it is so easy to dry yourself, supposing a dry change of
+clothing is not to be had. You can much sooner dry you by such a fire as
+you can make in the woods than in anybody’s kitchen, the fireplace is so
+much larger, and wood so much more abundant. A shed-shaped tent will
+catch and reflect the heat, and you may be drying while you are
+sleeping.
+
+Some who have leaky roofs in the towns may have been kept awake, but we
+were soon lulled asleep by a steady, soaking rain, which lasted all
+night.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] A soft felt hat of the kind worn by the Hungarian patriot, Kossuth,
+on his visit to this country in 1851-52.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WEDNESDAY, JULY 29
+
+
+When we awoke it had done raining, though it was still cloudy. The fire
+was put out, and the Indian’s boots, which stood under the eaves of the
+tent, were half full of water. He was much more improvident in such
+respects than either of us, and he had to thank us for keeping his
+powder dry. We decided to cross the lake at once, before breakfast; and
+before starting I took the bearing of the shore which we wished to
+strike, about three miles distant, lest a sudden misty rain should
+conceal it when we were midway.
+
+Though the bay in which we were was perfectly quiet and smooth, we found
+the lake already wide awake outside, but not dangerously or unpleasantly
+so. Nevertheless, when you get out on one of those lakes in a canoe like
+this, you do not forget that you are completely at the mercy of the
+wind, and a fickle power it is. The playful waves may at any time become
+too rude for you in their sport, and play right on over you. After much
+steady paddling and dancing over the dark waves we found ourselves in
+the neighborhood of the southern land. We breakfasted on a rocky point,
+the first convenient place that offered.
+
+It was well enough that we crossed thus early, for the waves now ran
+quite high, but beyond this point we had comparatively smooth water. You
+can commonly go along one side or the other of a lake, when you cannot
+cross it.
+
+My companion and I, having a discussion on some point of ancient
+history, were amused by the attitude which the Indian, who could not
+tell what we were talking about, assumed. He constituted himself umpire,
+and, judging by our air and gesture, he very seriously remarked from
+time to time, “You beat,” or “He beat.”
+
+Leaving a spacious bay on our left, we entered through a short strait
+into a small lake a couple of miles over, and thence into Telos Lake.
+This curved round toward the northeast, and may have been three or four
+miles long as we paddled.
+
+The outlet from the lake into the East Branch of the Penobscot is an
+artificial one, and it was not very apparent where it was exactly, but
+the lake ran curving far up northeasterly into two narrow valleys or
+ravines, as if it had for a long time been groping its way toward the
+Penobscot waters. By observing where the horizon was lowest, and
+following the longest of these, we at length reached the dam, having
+come about a dozen miles from the last camp. Somebody had left a line
+set for trout, and the jackknife with which the bait had been cut on the
+dam beside it, and, on a log close by, a loaf of bread. These proved the
+property of a solitary hunter, whom we soon met, and canoe and gun and
+traps were not far off. He told us that it was twenty miles to the foot
+of Grand Lake, and that the first house below the foot of the lake, on
+the East Branch, was Hunt’s, about forty-five miles farther.
+
+This hunter, who was a quite small, sunburnt man, having already carried
+his canoe over, had nothing so interesting and pressing to do as to
+observe our transit. He had been out a month or more alone. How much
+more respectable is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in
+these, or any woods--having real difficulties, not of his own creation,
+drawing his subsistence directly from nature--than that of the helpless
+multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely
+artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard
+times!
+
+Telos Lake, the head of the St. John on this side, and Webster Pond, the
+head of the East Branch of the Penobscot, are only about a mile apart,
+and they are connected by a ravine, in which but little digging was
+required to make the water of the former, which is the highest, flow
+into the latter. This canal is something less than a mile long and about
+four rods wide. The rush of the water has produced such changes in the
+canal that it has now the appearance of a very rapid mountain stream
+flowing through a ravine, and you would not suspect that any digging had
+been required to persuade the waters of the St. John to flow into the
+Penobscot here. It was so winding that one could see but a little way
+down.
+
+It is wonderful how well watered this country is. As you paddle across a
+lake, bays will be pointed out to you, by following up which, and
+perhaps the tributary stream which empties in, you may, after a short
+portage, or possibly, at some seasons, none at all, get into another
+river, which empties far away from the one you are on. Generally, you
+may go in any direction in a canoe, by making frequent but not very long
+portages. It seems as if the more youthful and impressionable streams
+can hardly resist the numerous invitations and temptations to leave
+their native beds and run down their neighbors’ channels.
+
+Wherever there is a channel for water there is a road for the canoe. It
+is said that some Western steamers can run on a heavy dew, whence we can
+imagine what a canoe may do.
+
+This canal, so called, was a considerable and extremely rapid and rocky
+river. The Indian decided that there was water enough in it without
+raising the dam, which would only make it more violent, and that he
+would run down it alone, while we carried the greater part of the
+baggage. Our provisions being about half consumed, there was the less
+left in the canoe. We had thrown away the pork-keg and wrapped its
+contents in birch bark.
+
+Following a moist trail through the forest, we reached the head of
+Webster Pond about the same time with the Indian, notwithstanding the
+velocity with which he moved, our route being the most direct. The pond
+was two or three miles long.
+
+At the outlet was another dam, at which we stopped and picked
+raspberries, while the Indian went down the stream a half-mile through
+the forest, to see what he had got to contend with. There was a deserted
+log camp here, apparently used the previous winter, with its “hovel” or
+barn for cattle. In the hut was a large fir-twig bed, raised two feet
+from the floor, occupying a large part of the single apartment, a long
+narrow table against the wall, with a stout log bench before it, and
+above the table a small window, the only one there was, which admitted a
+feeble light. It was a simple and strong fort erected against the cold.
+
+We got our dinner on the shore, on the upper side of the dam. As we were
+sitting by our fire, concealed by the earth bank of the dam, a long
+line of sheldrakes, half grown, came waddling over it from the water
+below, passing within about a rod of us, so that we could almost have
+caught them in our hands. They were very abundant on all the streams and
+lakes which we visited, and every two or three hours they would rush
+away in a long string over the water before us, twenty to fifty of them
+at once, rarely ever flying, but running with great rapidity up or down
+the stream, even in the midst of the most violent rapids, and apparently
+as fast up as down.
+
+An Indian at Oldtown had told us that we should be obliged to carry ten
+miles between Telos Lake on the St. John and Second Lake on the East
+Branch of the Penobscot; but the lumberers whom we met assured us that
+there would not be more than a mile of carry. It turned out that the
+Indian was nearest right, as far as we were concerned. However, if one
+of us could have assisted the Indian in managing the canoe in the
+rapids, we might have run the greater part of the way; but as he was
+alone in the management of the canoe in such places we were obliged to
+walk the greater part.
+
+My companion and I carried a good part of the baggage on our shoulders,
+while the Indian took that which would be least injured by wet in the
+canoe. We did not know when we should see him again, for he had not been
+this way since the canal was cut. He agreed to stop when he got to
+smooth water, come up and find our path if he could, and halloo for us,
+and after waiting a reasonable time go on and try again--and we were to
+look out in like manner for him.
+
+He commenced by running through the sluiceway and over the dam, as
+usual, standing up in his tossing canoe, and was soon out of sight
+behind a point in a wild gorge. This Webster Stream is well known to
+lumbermen as a difficult one. It is exceedingly rapid and rocky, and
+also shallow, and can hardly be considered navigable, unless that may
+mean that what is launched in it is sure to be carried swiftly down it,
+though it may be dashed to pieces by the way. It is somewhat like
+navigating a thunder-spout. With commonly an irresistible force urging
+you on, you have got to choose your own course each moment between the
+rocks and shallows, and to get into it, moving forward always with the
+utmost possible moderation, and often holding on, if you can, that you
+may inspect the rapids before you.
+
+By the Indian’s direction we took an old path on the south side, which
+appeared to keep down the stream. It was a wild wood-path, with a few
+tracks of oxen which had been driven over it, probably to some old camp
+clearing for pasturage, mingled with the tracks of moose which had
+lately used it. We kept on steadily for about an hour without putting
+down our packs, occasionally winding around or climbing over a fallen
+tree, for the most part far out of sight and hearing of the river;
+till, after walking about three miles, we were glad to find that the
+path came to the river again at an old camp-ground, where there was a
+small opening in the forest, at which we paused.
+
+Swiftly as the shallow and rocky river ran here, a continuous rapid with
+dancing waves, I saw, as I sat on the shore, a long string of
+sheldrakes, which something scared, run up the opposite side of the
+stream by me, just touching the surface of the waves, and getting an
+impulse from them as they flowed from under them; but they soon came
+back, driven by the Indian, who had fallen a little behind us on account
+of the windings. He shot round a point just above, and came to land by
+us with considerable water in his canoe. He had found it, as he said,
+“very strong water,” and had been obliged to land once before to empty
+out what he had taken in.
+
+[Illustration: _Coming Down the Rapids_]
+
+He complained that it strained him to paddle so hard in order to keep
+his canoe straight in its course, having no one in the bows to aid
+him, and, shallow as it was, said that it would be no joke to upset
+there, for the force of the water was such that he had as lief I would
+strike him over the head with a paddle as have that water strike him.
+Seeing him come out of that gap was as if you should pour water down an
+inclined and zigzag trough, then drop a nutshell into it, and, taking a
+short cut to the bottom, get there in time to see it come out,
+notwithstanding the rush and tumult, right side up, and only partly full
+of water.
+
+After a moment’s breathing-space, while I held his canoe, he was soon
+out of sight again around another bend, and we, shouldering our packs,
+resumed our course.
+
+Before going a mile we heard the Indian calling to us. He had come up
+through the woods and along the path to find us, having reached
+sufficiently smooth water to warrant his taking us in. The shore was
+about one fourth of a mile distant through a dense, dark forest, and as
+he led us back to it, winding rapidly about to the right and left, I had
+the curiosity to look down carefully and found that he was following his
+steps backward. I could only occasionally perceive his trail in the
+moss, and yet he did not appear to look down nor hesitate an instant,
+but led us out exactly to his canoe. This surprised me, for without a
+compass, or the sight or noise of the river to guide us, we could not
+have kept our course many minutes, and could have retraced our steps but
+a short distance, with a great deal of pains and very slowly, using a
+laborious circumspection. But it was evident that he could go back
+through the forest wherever he had been during the day.
+
+After this rough walking in the dark woods it was an agreeable change to
+glide down the rapid river in the canoe once more. This river, though
+still very swift, was almost perfectly smooth here, and showed a very
+visible declivity, a regularly inclined plane, for several miles, like
+a mirror set a little aslant, on which we coasted down. It was very
+exhilarating, and the perfection of traveling, the coasting down this
+inclined mirror between two evergreen forests edged with lofty dead
+white pines, sometimes slanted half-way over the stream. I saw some
+monsters there, nearly destitute of branches, and scarcely diminishing
+in diameter for eighty or ninety feet.
+
+As we were thus swept along, our Indian repeated in a deliberate and
+drawling tone the words, “Daniel Webster, great lawyer,” apparently
+reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling
+on him once in Boston at what he supposed was his boarding-house. He had
+no business with him but merely went to pay his respects, as we should
+say. It was on the day after Webster delivered his Bunker Hill oration.
+The first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him,
+and then went away. The next time he saw him go by the door of the room
+in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without
+noticing him. He thought that if he had come to see Indians they would
+not have treated him so. At length, after very long delay, he came in,
+walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, “What do you
+want?” and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was
+going to strike him, said to himself, “You’d better take care; if you
+try that I shall know what to do.”
+
+He did not like him, and declared that all he said “was not worth talk
+about a musquash.”
+
+Coming to falls and rapids, our easy progress was suddenly terminated.
+The Indian went alongshore to inspect the water, while we climbed over
+the rocks, picking berries. When the Indian came back, he remarked, “You
+got to walk; ver’ strong water.”
+
+So, taking out his canoe, he launched it again below the falls, and was
+soon out of sight. At such times he would step into the canoe, take up
+his paddle, and start off, looking far down-stream as if absorbing all
+the intelligence of forest and stream into himself. We meanwhile
+scrambled along the shore with our packs, without any path. This was the
+last of _our_ boating for the day.
+
+The Indian now got along much faster than we, and waited for us from
+time to time. I found here the only cool spring that I drank at anywhere
+on this excursion, a little water filling a hollow in the sandy bank. It
+was a quite memorable event, and due to the elevation of the country,
+for wherever else we had been the water in the rivers and the streams
+emptying in was dead and warm, compared with that of a mountainous
+region. It was very bad walking along the shore over fallen and drifted
+trees and bushes, and rocks, from time to time swinging ourselves round
+over the water, or else taking to a gravel bar or going inland. At one
+place, the Indian being ahead, I was obliged to take off all my clothes
+in order to ford a small but deep stream emptying in, while my
+companion, who was inland, found a rude bridge, high up in the woods,
+and I saw no more of him for some time. I saw there very fresh moose
+tracks, and I passed one white pine log, lodged in the forest near the
+edge of the stream, which was quite five feet in diameter at the butt.
+
+Shortly after this I overtook the Indian at the edge of some burnt land,
+which extended three or four miles at least, beginning about three miles
+above Second Lake, which we were expecting to reach that night. This
+burnt region was still more rocky than before, but, though comparatively
+open, we could not yet see the lake. Not having seen my companion for
+some time, I climbed with the Indian a high rock on the edge of the
+river forming a narrow ridge only a foot or two wide at top, in order to
+look for him. After calling many times I at length heard him answer
+from a considerable distance inland, he having taken a trail which led
+off from the river, and being now in search of the river again. Seeing a
+much higher rock of the same character about one third of a mile farther
+down-stream, I proceeded toward it through the burnt land, in order to
+look for the lake from its summit, and hallooing all the while that my
+companion might join me on the way.
+
+Before we came together I noticed where a moose, which possibly I had
+scared by my shouting, had apparently just run along a large rotten
+trunk of a pine, which made a bridge thirty or forty feet long over a
+hollow, as convenient for him as for me. The tracks were as large as
+those of an ox, but an ox could not have crossed there. This burnt land
+was an exceedingly wild and desolate region. Judging by the weeds and
+sprouts, it appeared to have been burnt about two years before. It was
+covered with charred trunks, either prostrate or standing, which
+crocked our clothes and hands. Great shells of trees, sometimes unburnt
+without, or burnt on one side only, but black within, stood twenty or
+forty feet high. The fire had run up inside, as in a chimney, leaving
+the sapwood. There were great fields of fireweed, which presented masses
+of pink. Intermixed with these were blueberry and raspberry bushes.
+
+Having crossed a second rocky ridge, when I was beginning to ascend the
+third, the Indian, whom I had left on the shore, beckoned to me to come
+to him, but I made sign that I would first ascend the rock before me. My
+companion accompanied me to the top.
+
+There was a remarkable series of these great rock-waves revealed by the
+burning; breakers, as it were. No wonder that the river that found its
+way through them was rapid and obstructed by falls. We could see the
+lake over the woods, and that the river made an abrupt turn southward
+around the end of the cliff on which we stood, and that there was an
+important fall in it a short distance below us. I could see the canoe a
+hundred rods behind, but now on the opposite shore, and supposed that
+the Indian had concluded to take out and carry round some bad rapids on
+that side, but after waiting a while I could still see nothing of him,
+and I began to suspect that he had gone inland to look for the lake from
+some hilltop on that side. This proved to be the case, for after I had
+started to return to the canoe I heard a faint halloo, and descried him
+on the top of a distant rocky hill. I began to return along the ridge
+toward the angle in the river. My companion inquired where I was going;
+to which I answered that I was going far enough back to communicate with
+the Indian.
+
+When we reached the shore the Indian appeared from out the woods on the
+opposite side, but on account of the roar of the water it was difficult
+to communicate with him. He kept along the shore westward to his canoe,
+while we stopped at the angle where the stream turned southward around
+the precipice. I said to my companion that we would keep along the shore
+and keep the Indian in sight. We started to do so, being close together,
+the Indian behind us having launched his canoe again, but I saw the
+latter beckoning to me, and I called to my companion, who had just
+disappeared behind large rocks at the point of the precipice on his way
+down the stream, that I was going to help the Indian.
+
+I did so--helped get the canoe over a fall, lying with my breast over a
+rock, and holding one end while he received it below--and within ten or
+fifteen minutes I was back at the point where the river turned
+southward, while Polis glided down the river alone, parallel with me.
+But to my surprise, when I rounded the precipice, though the shore was
+bare of trees, without rocks, for a quarter of a mile at least, my
+companion was not to be seen. It was as if he had sunk into the earth.
+This was the more unaccountable to me, because I knew that his feet were
+very sore, and that he wished to keep with the party.
+
+I hastened along, hallooing and searching for him, thinking he might be
+concealed behind a rock, but the Indian had got along faster in his
+canoe, till he was arrested by the falls, about a quarter of a mile
+below. He then landed, and said that we could go no farther that night.
+The sun was setting, and on account of falls and rapids we should be
+obliged to leave this river and carry a good way into another farther
+east. The first thing then was to find my companion, for I was now very
+much alarmed about him, and I sent the Indian along the shore
+down-stream, which began to be covered with unburnt wood again just
+below the falls, while I searched backward about the precipice which we
+had passed.
+
+The Indian showed some unwillingness to exert himself, complaining that
+he was very tired in consequence of his day’s work, that it had strained
+him getting down so many rapids alone; but he went off calling somewhat
+like an owl. I remembered that my companion was nearsighted, and I
+feared that he had either fallen from the precipice, or fainted and sunk
+down amid the rocks beneath it. I shouted and searched above and below
+this precipice in the twilight till I could not see, expecting nothing
+less than to find his body beneath it. For half an hour I anticipated
+and believed only the worst. I thought what I should do the next day if
+I did not find him, and how his relatives would feel if I should return
+without him. I felt that if he were really lost away from the river
+there, it would be a desperate undertaking to find him; and where were
+they who could help you? What would it be to raise the country, where
+there were only two or three camps, twenty or thirty miles apart, and
+no road, and perhaps nobody at home?
+
+I rushed down from this precipice to the canoe in order to fire the
+Indian’s gun, but found that my companion had the caps. When the Indian
+returned he said that he had seen his tracks once or twice along the
+shore. This encouraged me very much. He objected to firing the gun,
+saying that if my companion heard it, which was not likely, on account
+of the roar of the stream, it would tempt him to come toward us, and he
+might break his neck in the dark. For the same reason we refrained from
+lighting a fire on the highest rock. I proposed that we should both keep
+down the stream to the lake, or that I should go at any rate, but the
+Indian said: “No use, can’t do anything in the dark. Come morning, then
+we find ’em. No harm--he make ’em camp. No bad animals here--warm
+night--he well off as you and I.”
+
+The darkness in the woods was by this so thick that it decided the
+question. We must camp where we were. I knew that he had his knapsack,
+with blankets and matches, and, if well, would fare no worse than we,
+except that he would have no supper nor society.
+
+This side of the river being so encumbered with rocks, we crossed to the
+eastern or smoother shore, and proceeded to camp there, within two or
+three rods of the falls. We pitched no tent, but lay on the sand,
+putting a few handfuls of grass and twigs under us, there being no
+evergreen at hand. For fuel we had some of the charred stumps. Our
+various bags of provisions had got quite wet in the rapids, and I
+arranged them about the fire to dry. The fall close by was the principal
+one on this stream, and it shook the earth under us. It was a cool, dewy
+night. I lay awake a good deal from anxiety. From time to time I fancied
+that I heard his voice calling through the roar of the falls from the
+opposite side of the river; but it is doubtful if we could have heard
+him across the stream there. Sometimes I doubted whether the Indian had
+really seen his tracks, since he manifested an unwillingness to make
+much of a search.
+
+It was the most wild and desolate region we had camped in, where, if
+anywhere, one might expect to meet with befitting inhabitants, but I
+heard only the squeak of a nighthawk flitting over. The moon in her
+first quarter, in the fore part of the night, setting over the bare
+rocky hills garnished with tall, charred, and hollow stumps or shells of
+trees, served to reveal the desolation.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THURSDAY, JULY 30
+
+
+I aroused the Indian early to go in search of our companion, expecting
+to find him within a mile or two, farther down the stream. The Indian
+wanted his breakfast first, but I reminded him that my companion had had
+neither breakfast nor supper. We were obliged first to carry our canoe
+and baggage over into another stream, the main East Branch, about three
+fourths of a mile distant, for Webster Stream was no farther navigable.
+We went twice over this carry, and the dewy bushes wet us through like
+water up to the middle. I hallooed from time to time, though I had
+little expectation that I could be heard over the roar of the rapids.
+
+In going over this portage the last time, the Indian, who was before me
+with the canoe on his head, stumbled and fell heavily once, and lay for
+a moment silent as if in pain. I hastily stepped forward to help him,
+asking if he was much hurt, but after a moment’s pause, without
+replying, he sprang up and went forward.
+
+We had launched our canoe and gone but little way down the East Branch,
+when I heard an answering shout from my companion, and soon after saw
+him standing on a point where there was a clearing a quarter of a mile
+below, and the smoke of his fire was rising near by. Before I saw him I
+naturally shouted again and again, but the Indian curtly remarked, “He
+hears you,” as if once was enough.
+
+It was just below the mouth of Webster Stream. When we arrived he was
+smoking his pipe, and said that he had passed a pretty comfortable
+night, though it was rather cold, on account of the dew. It appeared
+that when we stood together the previous evening, and I was shouting to
+the Indian across the river, he, being nearsighted, had not seen the
+Indian nor his canoe, and when I went back to the Indian’s assistance,
+did not see which way I went, and supposed that we were below and not
+above him, and so, making haste to catch up, he ran away from us. Having
+reached this clearing, a mile or more below our camp, the night overtook
+him, and he made a fire in a little hollow, and lay down by it in his
+blanket, still thinking that we were ahead of him.
+
+He had stuck up the remnant of a lumberer’s shirt, found on the point,
+on a pole by the waterside for a signal, and attached a note to it to
+inform us that he had gone on to the lake, and that if he did not find
+us there he would be back in a couple of hours. If he had not found us
+soon he had some thoughts of going back in search of the solitary hunter
+whom we had met at Telos Lake, ten miles behind, and, if successful,
+hire him to take him to Bangor. But if this hunter had moved as fast as
+we, he would have been twenty miles off by this time, and who could
+guess in what direction? It would have been like looking for a needle in
+a haymow to search for him in these woods. He had been considering how
+long he could live on berries alone.
+
+We all had good appetites for the breakfast which we made haste to cook
+here, and then, having partially dried our clothes, we glided swiftly
+down the winding stream toward Second Lake.
+
+As the shores became flatter with frequent sandbars, and the stream more
+winding in the lower land near the lake, elms and ash trees made their
+appearance; also the wild yellow lily, some of whose bulbs I collected
+for a soup. On some ridges the burnt land extended as far as the lake.
+This was a very beautiful lake, two or three miles long, with high
+mountains on the southwest side. The morning was a bright one, and
+perfectly still, the lake as smooth as glass, we making the only ripple
+as we paddled into it. The dark mountains about it were seen through a
+glaucous mist, and the white stems of canoe birches mingled with the
+other woods around it. The thrush sang on the distant shore, and the
+laugh of some loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired
+by the morning, came distinct over the lake to us. The beauty of the
+scene may have been enhanced to our eyes by the fact that we had just
+come together after a night of some anxiety.
+
+Having paddled down three quarters of the lake, we came to a standstill
+while my companion let down for fish. In the midst of our dreams of
+giant lake trout, even then supposed to be nibbling, our fisherman drew
+up a diminutive red perch, and we took up our paddles.
+
+It was not apparent where the outlet of the lake was, and while the
+Indian thought it was in one direction, I thought it was in another. He
+said, “I bet you fourpence it is there,” but he still held on in my
+direction, which proved to be the right one.
+
+As we were approaching the outlet he suddenly exclaimed, “Moose! moose!”
+and told us to be still. He put a cap on his gun, and, standing up in
+the stern, rapidly pushed the canoe straight toward the shore and the
+moose. It was a cow moose, about thirty rods off, standing in the water
+by the side of the outlet, partly behind some fallen timber and bushes,
+and at that distance she did not look very large. She was flapping her
+large ears, and from time to time poking off the flies with her nose
+from some part of her body. She did not appear much alarmed by our
+neighborhood, only occasionally turned her head and looked straight at
+us, and then gave her attention to the flies again. As we approached
+nearer she got out of the water, stood higher, and regarded us more
+suspiciously.
+
+Polis pushed the canoe steadily forward in the shallow water, but the
+canoe soon grounded in the mud eight or ten rods distant from the
+moose, and the Indian seized his gun. After standing still a moment she
+turned so as to expose her side, and he improved this moment to fire,
+over our heads. She thereupon moved off eight or ten rods at a moderate
+pace across a shallow bay to the opposite shore, and she stood still
+again while the Indian hastily loaded and fired twice at her, without
+her moving. My companion, who passed him his caps and bullets, said that
+Polis was as excited as a boy of fifteen, that his hand trembled, and he
+once put his ramrod back upside down.
+
+The Indian now pushed quickly and quietly back, and a long distance
+round, in order to get into the outlet,--for he had fired over the neck
+of a peninsula between it and the lake,--till we approached the place
+where the moose had stood, when he exclaimed, “She is a goner!”
+
+[Illustration: _Shooting the Moose_]
+
+There, to be sure, she lay perfectly dead, just where she had stood
+to receive the last shots. Using a tape, I found that the moose measured
+six feet from the shoulder to the tip of the hoof, and was eight feet
+long.
+
+Polis, preparing to skin the moose, asked me to help him find a stone on
+which to sharpen his large knife. It being flat alluvial ground, covered
+with red maples, etc., this was no easy matter. We searched far and wide
+a long time till at length I found a flat kind of slate stone, on which
+he soon made his knife very sharp.
+
+While he was skinning the moose I proceeded to ascertain what kind of
+fishes were to be found in the sluggish and muddy outlet. The greatest
+difficulty was to find a pole. It was almost impossible to find a
+slender, straight pole ten or twelve feet long in those woods. You might
+search half an hour in vain. They are commonly spruce, arbor-vitæ, fir,
+etc., short, stout, and branchy, and do not make good fishpoles, even
+after you have patiently cut off all their tough and scraggy branches.
+The fishes were red perch and chivin.
+
+The Indian, having cut off a large piece of sirloin, the upper lip, and
+the tongue, wrapped them in the hide, and placed them in the bottom of
+the canoe, observing that there was “one man,” meaning the weight of
+one. Our load had previously been reduced some thirty pounds, but a
+hundred pounds were now added, which made our quarters still more
+narrow, and considerably increased the danger on the lakes and rapids as
+well as the labor of the carries. The skin was ours according to custom,
+since the Indian was in our employ, but we did not think of claiming it.
+He being a skillful dresser of moose-hides would make it worth seven or
+eight dollars to him, as I was told. He said that he sometimes earned
+fifty or sixty dollars in a day at them; he had killed ten moose in one
+day, though the skinning and all took two days. This was the way he had
+got his property.
+
+We continued along the outlet through a swampy region, by a long,
+winding deadwater, very much choked up by wood, where we were obliged to
+land sometimes in order to get the canoe over a log. It was hard to find
+any channel, and we did not know but we should be lost in the swamp. It
+abounded in ducks, as usual. At length we reached Grand Lake.
+
+We stopped to dine on an interesting rocky island, securing our canoe to
+the cliffy shore. Here was a good opportunity to dry our dewy blankets
+on the open sunny rock. Indians had recently camped here, and
+accidentally burned over the western end of the island. Polis picked up
+a gun-case of blue broadcloth, and said that he knew the Indian it
+belonged to and would carry it to him. His tribe is not so large but he
+may know all its effects. We proceeded to make a fire and cook our
+dinner amid some pines.
+
+I saw where the Indians had made canoes in a little secluded hollow in
+the woods, on the top of the rock, where they were out of the wind, and
+large piles of whittlings remained. This must have been a favorite
+resort of their ancestors, and, indeed, we found here the point of an
+arrow-head, such as they have not used for two centuries and now know
+not how to make. The Indian picked up a yellowish curved bone by the
+side of our fireplace and asked me to guess what it was. It was one of
+the upper incisors of a beaver, on which some party had feasted within a
+year or two. I found also most of the teeth and the skull. We here dined
+on fried moose meat.
+
+Our blankets being dry, we set out again, the Indian, as usual, having
+left his gazette on a tree. We paddled southward, keeping near the
+western shore. The Indian did not know exactly where the outlet was, and
+he went feeling his way by a middle course between two probable points,
+from which he could diverge either way at last without losing much
+distance. In approaching the south shore, as the clouds looked gusty and
+the waves ran pretty high, we so steered as to get partly under the lee
+of an island, though at a great distance from it.
+
+I could not distinguish the outlet till we were almost in it, and heard
+the water falling over the dam there. Here was a considerable fall, and
+a very substantial dam, but no sign of a cabin or camp.
+
+While we loitered here Polis took occasion to cut with his big knife
+some of the hair from his moose-hide, and so lightened and prepared it
+for drying. I noticed at several old Indian camps in the woods the pile
+of hair which they had cut from their hides.
+
+Having carried over the dam, he darted down the rapids, leaving us to
+walk for a mile or more, where for the most part there was no path, but
+very thick and difficult traveling near the stream. He would call to
+let us know where he was waiting for us with his canoe, when, on account
+of the windings of the stream, we did not know where the shore was, but
+he did not call often enough, forgetting that we were not Indians. He
+seemed to be very saving of his breath--yet he would be surprised if we
+went by, or did not strike the right spot. This was not because he was
+unaccommodating, but a proof of superior manners. Indians like to get
+along with the least possible communication and ado. He was really
+paying us a great compliment all the while, thinking that we preferred a
+hint to a kick.
+
+At length, climbing over the willows and fallen trees, when this was
+easier than to go round or under them, we overtook the canoe, and glided
+down the stream in smooth but swift water for several miles. I here
+observed, as at Webster Stream, that the river was a smooth and
+regularly inclined plane down which we coasted.
+
+We decided to camp early that we might have ample time before dark. So
+we stopped at the first favorable shore, where there was a narrow
+gravelly beach, some five miles below the outlet of the lake. Two steps
+from the water on either side, and you come to the abrupt, bushy, and
+rooty, if not turfy, edge of the bank, four or five feet high, where the
+interminable forest begins, as if the stream had but just cut its way
+through it.
+
+It is surprising on stepping ashore anywhere into this unbroken
+wilderness to see so often, at least within a few rods of the river, the
+marks of the axe, made by lumberers who have either camped here or
+driven logs past in previous springs. You will see perchance where they
+have cut large chips from a tall white pine stump for their fire.
+
+While we were pitching the camp and getting supper, the Indian cut the
+rest of the hair from his moose-hide, and proceeded to extend it
+vertically on a temporary frame between two small trees, half a dozen
+feet from the opposite side of the fire, lashing and stretching it with
+arbor-vitæ bark. Asking for a new kind of tea, he made us some pretty
+good of the checkerberry, which covered the ground, dropping a little
+bunch of it tied up with cedar bark into the kettle.
+
+After supper he put on the moose tongue and lips to boil. He showed me
+how to write on the under side of birch bark with a black spruce twig,
+which is hard and tough and can be brought to a point.
+
+The Indian wandered off into the woods a short distance just before
+night, and, coming back, said, “Me found great treasure.”
+
+“What’s that?” we asked.
+
+“Steel traps, under a log, thirty or forty, I didn’t count ’em. I guess
+Indian work--worth three dollars apiece.”
+
+It was a singular coincidence that he should have chanced to walk to and
+look under that particular log in that trackless forest.
+
+I saw chivin and chub in the stream when washing my hands, but my
+companion tried in vain to catch them. I heard the sound of bullfrogs
+from a swamp on the opposite side.
+
+You commonly make your camp just at sundown, and are collecting wood,
+getting your supper, or pitching your tent while the shades of night are
+gathering around and adding to the already dense gloom of the forest.
+You have no time to explore or look around you before it is dark. You
+may penetrate half a dozen rods farther into that twilight wilderness
+after some dry bark to kindle your fire with, and wonder what mysteries
+lie hidden still deeper in it, or you may run down to the shore for a
+dipper of water, and get a clearer view for a short distance up or down
+the stream, and while you stand there, see a fish leap, or duck alight
+in the river, or hear a thrush or robin sing in the woods.
+
+But there is no sauntering off to see the country. Ten or fifteen rods
+seems a great way from your companions, and you come back with the air
+of a much traveled man, as from a long journey, with adventures to
+relate, though you may have heard the crackling of the fire all the
+while--and at a hundred rods you might be lost past recovery and have to
+camp out. It is all mossy and _moosey_. In some of those dense fir and
+spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. The trees are
+a _standing_ night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume
+plucked from night’s raven wing. Then at night the general stillness is
+more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an
+owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman
+cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.
+
+To-night the Indian lay between the fire and his stretched moose-hide,
+to avoid mosquitoes. Indeed, he also made a small smoky fire of damp
+leaves at his head and feet, and then as usual rolled up his head in
+his blanket. We with our veils and our wash were tolerably comfortable,
+but it would be difficult to pursue any sedentary occupation in the
+woods at this season; you cannot see to read much by the light of a fire
+through a veil in the evening, nor handle pencil and paper well with
+gloves or anointed fingers.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+FRIDAY, JULY 31
+
+
+We had smooth but swift water for a considerable distance, where we
+glided rapidly along, scaring up ducks and kingfishers. But, as usual,
+our smooth progress ere long come to an end, and we were obliged to
+carry canoe and all about half a mile down the right bank around some
+rapids or falls. It required sharp eyes sometimes to tell which side was
+the carry, before you went over the falls, but Polis never failed to
+land us rightly. The raspberries were particularly abundant and large
+here, and all hands went to eating them, the Indian remarking on their
+size.
+
+Often on bare rocky carries the trail was so indistinct that I
+repeatedly lost it, but when I walked behind him I observed that he
+could keep it almost like a hound, and rarely hesitated, or, if he
+paused a moment on a bare rock, his eye immediately detected some sign
+which would have escaped me. Frequently _we_ found no path at all at
+these places, and were to him unaccountably delayed. He would only say
+it was “ver’ strange.”
+
+We had heard of a Grand Fall on this stream, and thought that each fall
+we came to must be it, but after christening several in succession with
+this name we gave up the search. There were more Grand or Petty Falls
+than I can remember.
+
+I cannot tell how many times we had to walk on account of falls or
+rapids. We were expecting all the while that the river would take a
+final leap and get to smooth water, but there was no improvement this
+forenoon. However, the carries were an agreeable variety. So surely as
+we stepped out of the canoe and stretched our legs we found ourselves in
+a blueberry and raspberry garden, each side of our rocky trail being
+lined with one or both. There was not a carry on the main East Branch
+where we did not find an abundance of both these berries, for these
+were the rockiest places and partially cleared, such as these plants
+prefer, and there had been none to gather the finest before us.
+
+We bathed and dined at the foot of one of these carries. It was the
+Indian who commonly reminded us that it was dinner-time, sometimes even
+by turning the prow to the shore. He once made an indirect, but lengthy
+apology, by saying that we might think it strange, but that one who
+worked hard all day was very particular to have his dinner in good
+season. At the most considerable fall on this stream, when I was walking
+over the carry close behind the Indian, he observed a track on the rock,
+which was but slightly covered with soil, and, stooping, muttered,
+“Caribou.”
+
+When we returned, he observed a much larger track near the same place,
+where some animal’s foot had sunk into a small hollow in the rock,
+partly filled with grass and earth, and he exclaimed with surprise,
+“What that?”
+
+“Well, what is it?” I asked.
+
+Stooping and laying his hand in it, he answered with a mysterious air,
+and in a half-whisper, “Devil [that is, Indian devil, or cougar]--ledges
+about here--very bad animal--pull ’em rocks all to pieces.”
+
+“How long since it was made?” I asked.
+
+“To-day or yesterday,” said he.
+
+We spent at least half the time in walking to-day. The Indian, being
+alone, commonly ran down far below the foot of the carries before he
+waited for us. The carry-paths themselves were more than usually
+indistinct, often the route being revealed only by the countless small
+holes in the fallen timber made by the tacks in the drivers’ boots. It
+was a tangled and perplexing thicket, through which we stumbled and
+threaded our way, and when we had finished a mile of it, our
+starting-point seemed far away. We were glad that we had not got to
+walk to Bangor along the banks of this river, which would be a journey
+of more than a hundred miles. Think of the denseness of the forest, the
+fallen trees and rocks, the windings of the river, the streams emptying
+in, and the frequent swamps to be crossed. It made you shudder. Yet the
+Indian from time to time pointed out to us where he had thus crept along
+day after day when he was a boy of ten, and in a starving condition.
+
+He had been hunting far north of this with two grown Indians. The winter
+came on unexpectedly early, and the ice compelled them to leave their
+canoe at Grand Lake, and walk down the bank. They shouldered their furs
+and started for Oldtown. The snow was not deep enough for snowshoes, or
+to cover the inequalities of the ground. Polis was soon too weak to
+carry any burden, but he managed to catch one otter. This was the most
+they all had to eat on this journey, and he remembered how good the
+yellow lily roots were, made into a soup with the otter oil. He shared
+this food equally with the other two, but being so small he suffered
+much more than they. He waded through the Mattawamkeag at its mouth,
+when it was freezing cold and came up to his chin, and he, being very
+weak and emaciated, expected to be swept away. The first house which
+they reached was at Lincoln, and thereabouts they met a white teamster
+with supplies, who, seeing their condition, gave them as much as they
+could eat. For six months after getting home he was very low and did not
+expect to live, and was perhaps always the worse for it.
+
+For seven or eight miles below that succession of “Grand” falls the
+aspect of the banks as well as the character of the stream was changed.
+After passing a tributary from the northeast we had swift smooth water.
+Low grassy banks and muddy shores began. Many elms as well as maples and
+more ash trees overhung the stream and supplanted the spruce.
+
+Mosquitoes, black flies, etc., pursued us in mid-channel, and we were
+glad sometimes to get into violent rapids, for then we escaped them. As
+we glided swiftly down the inclined plane of the river, a great cat owl
+launched itself away from a stump on the bank, and flew heavily across
+the stream, and the Indian, as usual, imitated its note. Soon afterward
+a white-headed eagle sailed down the stream before us. We drove him
+several miles, while we were looking for a good place to camp,--for we
+expected to be overtaken by a shower,--and still we could distinguish
+him by his white tail, sailing away from time to time from some tree by
+the shore still farther down the stream. Some _she-corways_ being
+surprised by us, a part of them dived, and we passed directly over them,
+and could trace their course here and there by a bubble on the surface,
+but we did not see them come up.
+
+It was some time before we found a camping-place, for the shore was
+either too grassy and muddy, where mosquitoes abounded, or too steep a
+hillside. We at length found a place to our minds, where, in a very
+dense spruce wood above a gravelly shore, there seemed to be but few
+insects. The trees were so thick that we were obliged to clear a space
+to build our fire and lie down in, and the young spruce trees that were
+left were like the wall of an apartment rising around us. We were
+obliged to pull ourselves up a steep bank to get there. But the place
+which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim,
+begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very center of
+civilization to you: “Home is home, be it never so homely.”
+
+The mosquitoes were numerous, and the Indian complained a good deal,
+though he lay, as the night before, between three fires and his
+stretched hide. As I sat on a stump by the fire with a veil and gloves
+on, trying to read, he observed, “I make you candle,” and in a minute he
+took a piece of birch bark about two inches wide and rolled it hard,
+like an allumette[4] fifteen inches long, lit it, fixed it by the other
+end horizontally in a split stick three feet high, and stuck it in the
+ground, turning the blazing end to the wind, and telling me to snuff it
+from time to time. It answered the purpose of a candle pretty well.
+
+I noticed, as I had before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes
+about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. Apparently
+they need rest as well as we. Few, if any, creatures are equally active
+all night. As soon as it was light I saw, through my veil, that the
+inside of the tent about our heads was quite blackened with myriads, and
+their combined hum was almost as bad to endure as their stings. I had an
+uncomfortable night on this account, though I am not sure that one
+succeeded in his attempt to sting me.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] A match. In this case an old-fashioned “spill,” or lamplighter, made
+by twisting a piece of paper, into a long, tight spiral roll.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+SATURDAY, SUNDAY, MONDAY AUGUST 1-3
+
+
+I caught two or three large red chivin within twenty feet of the camp,
+which, added to the moose tongue that had been left in the kettle
+boiling over night, and to our other stores, made a sumptuous breakfast.
+The Indian made us some hemlock tea instead of coffee. This was
+tolerable, though he said it was not strong enough. It was interesting
+to see so simple a dish as a kettle of water with a handful of green
+hemlock sprigs in it boiling over the huge fire in the open air, the
+leaves fast losing their lively green color, and know that it was for
+our breakfast.
+
+We were glad to embark once more and leave some of the mosquitoes
+behind. We found that we had camped about a mile above Hunt’s, which is
+the last house for those who ascend Katahdin on this side. We had
+expected to ascend it from this point, but my companion was obliged to
+give up this on account of sore feet. The Indian, however, suggested
+that perhaps he might get a pair of moccasins at this place, and that he
+could walk very easily in them without hurting his feet, wearing several
+pairs of stockings, and he said beside that they were so porous that
+when you had taken in water it all drained out in a little while. We
+stopped to get some sugar, but found that the family had moved away, and
+the house was unoccupied, except temporarily by some men who were
+getting the hay. I noticed a seine here stretched on the bank, which
+probably had been used to catch salmon.
+
+Just below this, on the west bank, we saw a moose-hide stretched, and
+with it a bearskin. The Indian said they belonged to Joe Aitteon,[5] but
+how he told I do not know. He was probably hunting near and had left
+them for the day. Finding that we were going directly to Oldtown, he
+regretted that he had not taken more of the moose meat to his family,
+saying that in a short time, by drying it, he could have made it so
+light as to have brought away the greater part, leaving the bones. We
+once or twice inquired after the lip, which is a famous tidbit, but he
+said, “That go Oldtown for my old woman; don’t get it every day.”
+
+Maples grew more and more numerous. It rained a little during the
+forenoon, and, as we expected a wetting, we stopped early and dined just
+above Whetstone Falls, about a dozen miles below Hunt’s. My companion,
+having lost his pipe, asked the Indian if he could make him one.
+
+“Oh, yer,” said he, and in a minute rolled up one of birch bark, telling
+him to wet the bowl from time to time.
+
+We carried round the falls. The distance was about three fourths of a
+mile. When we had carried over one load, the Indian returned by the
+shore, and I by the path; and though I made no particular haste I was
+nevertheless surprised to find him at the other end as soon as I. It was
+remarkable how easily he got over the worst ground. He said to me, “I
+take canoe and you take the rest, suppose you can keep along with me?”
+
+I thought he meant that while he ran down the rapids I should keep along
+the shore, and be ready to assist him from time to time, as I had done
+before; but as the walking would be very bad, I answered, “I suppose you
+will go too fast for me, but I will try.”
+
+But I was to go by the path, he said. This I thought would not help the
+matter, I should have so far to go to get to the riverside when he
+wanted me. But neither was this what he meant. He was proposing a race
+over the carry, and asked me if I thought I could keep along with him by
+the same path, adding that I must be pretty smart to do it. As his
+load, the canoe, would be much the heaviest and bulkiest, I thought that
+I ought to be able to do it, and said that I would try. So I proceeded
+to gather up the gun, axe, paddle, kettle, frying-pan, plates, dippers,
+carpets, etc., and while I was thus engaged he threw me his cowhide
+boots. “What, are these in the bargain?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, yer,” said he; but before I could make a bundle of my load I saw
+him disappearing over a hill with the canoe on his head.
+
+Hastily scraping the various articles together, I started on the run,
+and immediately went by him in the bushes, but I had no sooner left him
+out of sight in a rocky hollow than the greasy plates, dippers, etc.,
+took to themselves wings, and while I was employed in gathering them up,
+he went by me; but, hastily pressing the sooty kettle to my side, I
+started once more, and, soon passing him again, I saw him no more on the
+carry. I do not mention this as anything of a feat, for it was but poor
+running on my part, and he was obliged to move with great caution for
+fear of breaking his canoe as well as his neck. When he made his
+appearance, puffing and panting like myself, in answer to my inquiries
+where he had been, he said, “Locks cut ’em feet,” and, laughing, added,
+“Oh, me love to play sometimes.”
+
+He said that he and his companions when they came to carries several
+miles long used to try who would get over first; each perhaps with a
+canoe on his head. I bore the sign of the kettle on my brown linen sack
+for the rest of the voyage.
+
+[Illustration: _Carrying round the Falls_]
+
+As we approached the mouth of the East Branch we passed two or three
+huts, the first sign of civilization after Hunt’s, though we saw no road
+as yet. We heard a cowbell, and even saw an infant held up to a small
+square window to see us pass. On entering the West Branch at Nicketow,
+Polis remarked that it was all smooth water hence to Oldtown, and he
+threw away his pole which was cut on the Umbazookskus.
+
+We camped about two miles below Nicketow, covering with fresh twigs the
+withered bed of a former traveler, and feeling that we were now in a
+settled country, especially when in the evening we heard an ox sneeze in
+its wild pasture across the river. Wherever you land along the
+frequented part of the river you have not far to go to find these sites
+of temporary inns, the withered bed of flattened twigs, the charred
+sticks, and perhaps the tent-poles. Not long since, similar beds were
+spread along the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware, and longer
+still ago, by the Thames and Seine, and they now help to make the soil
+where private and public gardens, mansions, and palaces are. We could
+not get fir twigs for our bed here, and the spruce was harsh in
+comparison, having more twig in proportion to its leaf, but we improved
+it somewhat with hemlock.
+
+After the regular supper we attempted to make a lily soup of the bulbs
+which I had brought along, for I wished to learn all I could before I
+got out of the woods. Following the Indian’s directions, I washed the
+bulbs carefully, minced some moose meat and some pork, salted and boiled
+all together, but we had not the patience to try the experiment fairly,
+for he said it must be boiled till the roots were completely softened so
+as to thicken the soup like flour; but though we left it on all night,
+we found it dried to the kettle in the morning and not yet boiled to a
+flour. Perhaps the roots were not ripe enough, for they commonly gather
+them in the fall. The Indian’s name for these bulbs was _sheepnoc_.
+
+He prepared to camp as usual between his moose-hide and the fire, but it
+beginning to rain suddenly he took refuge under the tent with us, and
+gave us a song before falling asleep. It rained hard in the night and
+spoiled another box of matches for us, which the Indian had left out,
+for he was very careless; but we had so much the better night for the
+rain, since it kept the mosquitoes down.
+
+Sunday, a cloudy and unpromising morning. One of us observed to the
+Indian, “You did not stretch your moose-hide last night, did you, Mr.
+Polis?”
+
+Whereat he replied in a tone of surprise, though perhaps not of ill
+humor: “What you ask me that question for? Suppose I stretch ’em, you
+see ’em. May be your way talking, may be all right, no Indian way.”
+
+I had observed that he did not wish to answer the same question more
+than once, and was often silent when it was put again, as if he were
+moody. Not that he was incommunicative, for he frequently commenced a
+longwinded narrative of his own accord--repeated at length the tradition
+of some old battle, or some passage in the recent history of his tribe
+in which he had acted a prominent part, from time to time drawing a
+long breath, and resuming the thread of his tale, with the true
+story-teller’s leisureliness. Especially after the day’s work was over,
+and he had put himself in posture for the night, he would be
+unexpectedly sociable, and we would fall asleep before he got through.
+
+The Indian was quite sick this morning with the colic. I thought that he
+was the worse for the moose meat he had eaten.
+
+We reached the Mattawamkeag at half past eight in the morning, in the
+midst of a drizzling rain, and, after buying some sugar, set out again.
+
+The Indian growing much worse, we stopped in the north part of Lincoln
+to get some brandy for him, but, failing in this, an apothecary
+recommended Brandreth’s pills, which he refused to take because he was
+not acquainted with them. He said, “Me doctor--first study my case, find
+out what ail ’em--then I know what to take.”
+
+We stopped at mid-forenoon on an island and made him a dipper of tea.
+Here, too, we dined and did some washing and botanizing, while he lay on
+the bank. In the afternoon we went on a little farther. As a
+thunder-shower appeared to be coming up we stopped opposite a barn on
+the west bank. Here we were obliged to spend the rest of the day and
+night, on account of our patient, whose sickness did not abate. He lay
+groaning under his canoe on the bank, looking very woebegone. You would
+not have thought, if you had seen him lying about thus, that he was
+worth six thousand dollars and had been to Washington. It seemed to me
+that he made a greater ado about his sickness than a Yankee does, and
+was more alarmed about himself. We talked somewhat of leaving him with
+his people in Lincoln,--for that is one of their homes,--but he objected
+on account of the expense, saying, “Suppose me well in morning, you and
+I go Oldtown by noon.”
+
+As we were taking our tea at twilight, while he lay groaning under his
+canoe, he asked me to get him a dipper of water. Taking the dipper in
+one hand, he seized his powderhorn with the other, and, pouring into it
+a charge or two of powder, stirred it up with his finger, and drank it
+off. This was all he took to-day after breakfast beside his tea.
+
+To save the trouble of pitching our tent, when we had secured our stores
+from wandering dogs, we camped in the solitary half-open barn near the
+bank, with the permission of the owner, lying on new-mown hay four feet
+deep. The fragrance of the hay, in which many ferns, etc., were mingled,
+was agreeable, though it was quite alive with grasshoppers which you
+could hear crawling through it. This served to graduate our approach to
+houses and feather beds. In the night some large bird, probably an owl,
+flitted through over our heads, and very early in the morning we were
+awakened by the twittering of swallows which had their nests there.
+
+We started early before breakfast, the Indian being considerably better,
+and soon glided by Lincoln, and stopped to breakfast two or three miles
+below this town.
+
+We frequently passed Indian islands with their small houses on them. The
+Penobscot Indians seem to be more social even than the whites. Ever and
+anon in the deepest wilderness of Maine you come to the log hut of a
+Yankee or Canada settler, but a Penobscot never takes up his residence
+in such a solitude. They are not even scattered about on their islands
+in the Penobscot, but gathered together on two or three, evidently for
+the sake of society. I saw one or two houses not now used by them,
+because, as our Indian said, they were too solitary.
+
+From time to time we met Indians in their canoes going up river. Our man
+did not commonly approach them, but only exchanged a few words with them
+at a distance. We took less notice of the scenery to-day, because we
+were in quite a settled country. The river became broad and sluggish,
+and we saw a blue heron winging its way slowly down the stream before
+us.
+
+The Sunkhaze, a short dead stream, comes in from the east two miles
+above Oldtown. Asking the meaning of this name, the Indian said,
+“Suppose you are going down Penobscot, just like we, and you see a canoe
+come out of bank and go along before you, but you no see ’em stream.
+That is _Sunkhaze_.”
+
+He had previously complimented me on my paddling, saying that I paddled
+“just like anybody,” giving me an Indian name which meant “great
+paddler.” When off this stream he said to me, who sat in the bows, “Me
+teach you paddle.”
+
+So, turning toward the shore, he got out, came forward, and placed my
+hands as he wished. He placed one of them quite outside the boat, and
+the other parallel with the first, grasping the paddle near the end,
+not over the flat extremity, and told me to slide it back and forth on
+the side of the canoe. This, I found, was a great improvement which I
+had not thought of, saving me the labor of lifting the paddle each time,
+and I wondered that he had not suggested it before. It is true, before
+our baggage was reduced we had been obliged to sit with our legs drawn
+up, and our knees above the side of the canoe, which would have
+prevented our paddling thus, or perhaps he was afraid of wearing out his
+canoe by constant friction on the side.
+
+I told him that I had been accustomed to sit in the stern, and lift my
+paddle at each stroke, getting a pry on the side each time, and I still
+paddled partly as if in the stern. He then wanted to see me paddle in
+the stern. So, changing paddles, for he had the longer and better one,
+and turning end for end, he sitting flat on the bottom and I on the
+crossbar, he began to paddle very hard, trying to turn the canoe,
+looking over his shoulder and laughing, but, finding it in vain, he
+relaxed his efforts, though we still sped along a mile or two very
+swiftly. He said that he had no fault to find with my paddling in the
+stern, but I complained that he did not paddle according to his own
+directions in the bows.
+
+As we drew near to Oldtown I asked Polis if he was not glad to get home
+again; but there was no relenting to his wildness, and he said, “It
+makes no difference to me where I am.” Such is the Indian’s pretense
+always.
+
+We approached the Indian Island through the narrow strait called “Cook.”
+He said: “I ’xpect we take in some water there, river so high--never see
+it so high at this season. Very rough water there; swamp steamboat once.
+Don’t you paddle till I tell you. Then you paddle right along.”
+
+It was a very short rapid. When we were in the midst of it he shouted,
+“Paddle!” and we shot through without taking in a drop. Soon after the
+Indian houses came in sight. I could not at first tell my companion
+which of two or three large white ones was our guide’s. He said it was
+the one with blinds.
+
+We landed opposite his door at about four in the afternoon, having come
+some forty miles this day. We stopped for an hour at his house. Mrs. P.
+wore a hat and had a silver brooch on her breast, but she was not
+introduced to us. The house was roomy and neat. A large new map of
+Oldtown and the Indian Island hung on the wall, and a clock opposite to
+it.
+
+This was the last that I saw of Joe Polis. We took the last train, and
+reached Bangor that night.
+
+THE END
+
+The Riverside Press
+
+CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
+
+U. S. A
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] Joe Aitteon was Thoreau’s guide on the second of his three
+excursions into the Maine Woods. He was an Indian whose home was on the
+same island where Polis lived.
+
+
+
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+Early Spring in Massachusetts          Autumn
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+    The above four are from the Journal of THOREAU. Edited by H. G.
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