A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Forest

S >> Stewart Edward White >> The Forest




Dick and I earned our diplomas at this sort of work. It rained twelve
of the first fourteen days we were out. Towards the end of that two
weeks I doubt if even an Indian could have discovered a dry stick of
wood in the entire country. The land was of Laurentian rock formation,
running in parallel ridges of bare stone separated by hollows carpeted
with a thin layer of earth. The ridges were naturally ill-adapted to
camping, and the cup hollows speedily filled up with water until they
became most creditable little marshes. Often we hunted for an hour or
so before we could find any sort of a spot to pitch our tent. As for a
fire, it was a matter of chopping down dead trees large enough to have
remained dry inside, of armfuls of birch bark, and of the patient
drying out, by repeated ignition, of enough fuel to cook very simple
meals. Of course we could have kept a big fire going easily enough,
but we were travelling steadily and had not the time for that. In
these trying circumstances, Dick showed that, no matter how much of a
tenderfoot he might be, he was game enough under stress.

But to return to our pleasant afternoon. While you are consuming the
supper you will hang over some water to heat for the dish-washing, and
the dish-washing you will attend to the moment you have finished
eating. Do not commit the fallacy of sitting down for a little rest.
Better finish the job completely while you are about it. You will
appreciate leisure so much more later. In lack of a wash-rag you will
find that a bunch of tall grass bent double makes an ideal swab.

Now brush the flies from your tent, drop the mosquito-proof lining, and
enjoy yourself. The whole task, from first to last, has consumed but a
little over an hour. And you are through for the day.

In the woods, as nowhere else, you will earn your leisure only by
forethought. Make no move until you know it follows the line of
greatest economy. To putter is to wallow in endless desolation. If you
cannot move directly and swiftly and certainly along the line of least
resistance in everything you do, take a guide with you; you are not of
the woods people. You will never enjoy doing for yourself, for your
days will be crammed with unending labour.

It is but a little after seven. The long crimson shadows of the North
Country are lifting across the aisles of the forest. You sit on a log,
or lie on your back, and blow contented clouds straight up into the
air. Nothing can disturb you now. The wilderness is yours, for you have
taken from it the essentials of primitive civilization--shelter,
warmth, and food. An hour ago a rainstorm would have been a minor
catastrophe. Now you do not care. Blow high, blow low, you have made
for yourself an abiding-place, so that the signs of the sky are less
important to you than to the city dweller who wonders if he should take
an umbrella. From your doorstep you can look placidly out on the great
unknown. The noises of the forest draw close about you their circle of
mystery, but the circle cannot break upon you, for here you have
conjured the homely sounds of kettle and crackling flame to keep ward.
Thronging down through the twilight steal the jealous woodland shadows,
awful in the sublimity of the Silent Places, but at the sentry outposts
of your firelit trees they pause like wild animals, hesitating to
advance. The wilderness, untamed, dreadful at night, is all about; but
this one little spot you have reclaimed. Here is something before
unknown to the eerie spirits of the woods. As you sleepily knock the
ashes from the pipe, you look about on the familiar scene with
accustomed satisfaction. You are at home.




V.

ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT.

"Who hath lain alone to hear the wild goose cry?"


About once in so often you are due to lie awake at night. Why this is
so I have never been able to discover. It apparently comes from no
predisposing uneasiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of
too much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or
stimulating conversation. In fact, you turn in with the expectation of
rather a good night's rest. Almost at once the little noises of the
forest grow larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse;
your thoughts drift idly back and forth between reality and dream;
when--_snap!_--you are broad awake!

Perhaps the reservoir of your vital forces is full to the overflow of a
little waste; or perhaps, more subtly, the great Mother insists thus
that you enter the temple of her larger mysteries.

For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is
pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a
delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an
exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip
vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes
they stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose
themselves in the midst of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet
fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel
the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your
faculties receive. Hearing, sight, smell--all are preternaturally keen
to whatever of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad through the
night; and yet at the same time active appreciation dozes, so these
things lie on it sweet and cloying like fallen rose leaves.

In such circumstance you will hear what the _voyageurs_ call the
voices of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak
very soft and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing,
beneath even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality
superimposes them over the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms
swimming across the field of vision, which disappear so quickly when
you concentrate your sight to look at them, and which reappear so
magically when again your gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of your
hazy half-consciousness they speak; when you bend your attention to
listen, they are gone, and only the tumults and the tinklings remain.

But in the moments of their audibility they are very distinct. Just as
often an odour will wake all a vanished memory, so these voices, by the
force of a large impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the
cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall murmur of a
multitude _en fête_, so that subtly you feel the gray old town,
with its walls, the crowded marketplace, the decent peasant crowd, the
booths, the mellow church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted
sun. Or, in the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters,
sound faint and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant
notes of laughter, as though many canoes were working against the
current; only the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices
louder. The _voyageurs_ call these mist people the Huntsmen, and
look frightened. To each is his vision, according to his experience.
The nations of the earth whisper to their exiled sons through the
voices of the rapids. Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest
always peaceful scenes--a harvest field, a street fair, a Sunday
morning in a cathedral town, careless travellers--never the turmoils
and struggles. Perhaps this is the great Mother's compensation in a
harsh mode of life.

Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more
concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water.
And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive
appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring
louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then
outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl
hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl
of some night creature--at once the yellow sunlit French meadows puff
away--you are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through
the texture of your tent.

The voices of the rapids have dropped into the background, as have the
dashing noises of the stream. Through the forest is a great silence,
but no stillness at all. The whippoorwill swings down and up the short
curve of his regular song; over and over an owl says his rapid
_whoo_, _whoo_, _whoo_. These, with the ceaseless dash of the rapids,
are the web on which the night traces her more delicate embroideries
of the unexpected. Distant crashes, single and impressive;
stealthy footsteps near at hand; the subdued scratching of claws; a
faint _sniff! sniff! sniff!_ of inquiry; the sudden clear tin-horn
_ko-ko-ko-óh_ of the little owl; the mournful, long-drawn-out cry
of the loon, instinct with the spirit of loneliness; the ethereal
call-note of the birds of passage high in the air; a _patter_,
_patter_, _patter_ among the dead leaves, immediately stilled;
and then at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the
beautiful silver purity of the white-throated sparrow--the nightingale
of the North--trembling with the ecstasy of beauty, as though a
shimmering moonbeam had turned to sound; and all the while the blurred
figure of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent--these
things combine subtly, until at last the great Silence of which they
are a part overarches the night and draws you forth to contemplation.

No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring water you drink at
such a time; no moment more refreshing than that in which you look
about you at the darkened forest. You have cast from you with the warm
blanket the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness, physical and spiritual,
bathes you from head to foot. All your senses are keyed to the last
vibrations. You hear the littler night prowlers, you glimpse the
greater. A faint, searching woods perfume of dampness greets your
nostrils. And somehow, mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood,
the forces of the world seem in suspense, as though a touch might
crystallize infinite possibilities into infinite power and motion. But
the touch lacks. The forces hover on the edge of action, unheeding the
little noises. In all humbleness and awe, you are a dweller of the
Silent Places.

At such a time you will meet with adventures. One night we put
fourteen inquisitive porcupines out of camp. Near M'Gregor's Bay I
discovered in the large grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping
the herbage like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells me of a fawn
that every night used to sleep outside his tent and within a foot of
his head, probably by way of protection against wolves. Its mother had
in all likelihood been killed. The instant my friend moved toward the
tent opening the little creature would disappear, and it was always
gone by earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not
uncommon. But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and
the woods shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world
forces is a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You
cannot know the night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by
coming into her presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her
face to face in her intimate mood.

The night wind from the river, or from the open spaces of the wilds,
chills you after a time. You begin to think of your blankets. In a few
moments you roll yourself in their soft wool. Instantly it is morning.

And, strange to say, you have not to pay by going through the day
unrefreshed. You may feel like turning in at eight instead of nine, and
you may fall asleep with unusual promptitude, but your journey will
begin clear-headedly, proceed springily, and end with much in reserve.
No languor, no dull headache, no exhaustion, follows your experience.
For this once your two hours of sleep have been as effective as nine.




VI.

THE 'LUNGE.

"Do you know the chosen water where the ouananiche is waiting?"


Dick and I travelled in a fifteen-foot wooden canoe, with grub, duffel,
tent, and Deuce, the black-and-white setter dog. As a consequence we
were pretty well down toward the water-line, for we had not realized
that a wooden canoe would carry so little weight for its length in
comparison with a birch-bark. A good heavy sea we could ride--with
proper management and a little baling; but sloppy waves kept us busy.

Deuce did not like it at all. He was a dog old in the wisdom of
experience. It had taken him just twenty minutes to learn all about
canoes. After a single tentative trial he jumped lightly to the very
centre of his place, with the lithe caution of a cat. Then if the water
happened to be smooth, he would sit gravely on his haunches, or would
rest his chin on the gunwale to contemplate the passing landscape. But
in rough weather he crouched directly over the keel, his nose between
his paws, and tried not to dodge when the cold water dashed in on him.
Deuce was a true woodsman in that respect. Discomfort he always bore
with equanimity, and he must often have been very cold and very
cramped.

For just over a week we had been travelling in open water, and the
elements had not been kind to us at all. We had crept up under
rock-cliff points; had weathered the rips of white water to shelter on
the other side; had struggled across open spaces where each wave was
singly a problem to fail in whose solution meant instant swamping; had
baled, and schemed, and figured, and carried, and sworn, and tried
again, and succeeded with about two cupfuls to spare, until we as well
as Deuce had grown a little tired of it. For the lust of travel was on
us.

The lust of travel is a very real disease. It usually takes you when
you have made up your mind that there is no hurry. Its predisposing
cause is a chart or map, and its main symptom is the feverish delight
with which you check off the landmarks of your journey. A fair wind of
some force is absolutely fatal. With that at your back you cannot
stop. Good fishing, fine scenery, interesting bays, reputed game, even
camps where friends might be visited--all pass swiftly astern. Hardly
do you pause for lunch at noon. The mad joy of putting country behind
you eats all other interests. You recover only when you have come to
your journey's end a week too early, and must then search out new
voyages to fill in the time.

All this morning we had been bucking a strong north wind. Fortunately,
the shelter of a string of islands had given us smooth water enough,
but the heavy gusts sometimes stopped us as effectively as though we
had butted solid land. Now about noon we came to the last island, and
looked out on a five-mile stretch of tumbling seas. We landed the canoe
and mounted a high rock.

"Can't make it like this," said I. "I'll take the outfit over and land
it, and come back for you and the dog. Let's see that chart."

We hid behind the rock and spread out the map.

"Four miles," measured Dick. "It's going to be a terror."

We looked at each other vaguely, suddenly tired.

"We can't camp here--at this time of day," objected Dick, to our
unspoken thoughts.

And then the map gave him an inspiration. "Here's a little river,"
ruminated Dick, "that goes to a little lake, and then there's another
little river that flows from the lake and comes out about ten miles
above here."

"It's a good thirty miles," I objected.

"What of it?" asked Dick calmly.

So the fever-lust of travel broke. We turned to the right behind the
last island, searched out the reed-grown opening to the stream, and
paddled serenely and philosophically against the current. Deuce sat up
and yawned with a mighty satisfaction.

We had been bending our heads to the demon of wind; our ears had been
filled with his shoutings, our eyes blinded with tears, our breath
caught away from us, our muscles strung to the fiercest endeavour.
Suddenly we found ourselves between the ranks of tall forest trees,
bathed in a warm sunlight, gliding like a feather from one grassy bend
to another of the laziest little stream that ever hesitated as to which
way the grasses of its bed should float. As for the wind, it was lost
somewhere away up high, where we could hear it muttering to itself
about something.

The woods leaned over the fringe of bushes cool and green and silent.
Occasionally through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of
straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes
jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a
homely rustic companion through the aloofness of patrician multitudes.

Every bend offered us charming surprises. Sometimes a muskrat swam
hastily in a pointed furrow of ripple; vanishing wings, barely sensed
in the flash, left us staring; stealthy withdrawals of creatures, whose
presence we realized only in the fact of those withdrawals, snared our
eager interest; porcupines rattled and rustled importantly and regally
from the water's edge to the woods; herons, ravens, an occasional duck,
croaked away at our approach; thrice we surprised eagles, once a
tassel-eared Canada lynx. Or, if all else lacked, we still experienced
the little thrill of pleased novelty over the disclosure of a group of
silvery birches on a knoll; a magnificent white pine towering over the
beech and maple forest; the unexpected aisle of a long, straight
stretch of the little river.

Deuce approved thoroughly. He stretched himself and yawned and shook
off the water, and glanced at me open-mouthed with doggy good-nature,
and set himself to acquiring a conscientious olfactory knowledge of
both banks of the river. I do not doubt he knew a great deal more
about it than we did. Porcupines aroused his special enthusiasm.
Incidentally, two days later he returned to camp after an expedition of
his own, bristling as to the face with that animal's barbed weapons.
Thenceforward his interest waned.

We ascended the charming little river two or three miles. At a sharp
bend to the east a huge sheet of rock sloped from a round grass knoll
sparsely planted with birches directly down into a pool. Two or three
tree trunks jammed directly opposite had formed a sort of half dam
under which the water lay dark. A tiny grass meadow forty feet in
diameter narrowed the stream to half its width.

We landed. Dick seated himself on the shelving rock. I put my fish-rod
together. Deuce disappeared.

Deuce always disappeared whenever we landed. With nose down, hind
quarters well tucked under him, ears flying, he quartered the forest at
high speed, investigating every nook and cranny of it for the radius of
a quarter of a mile. When he has quite satisfied himself that we were
safe for the moment, he would return to the fire, where he would lie,
six inches of pink tongue vibrating with breathlessness, beautiful in
the consciousness of virtue. Dick generally sat on a rock and thought.
I generally fished.

After a time Deuce returned. I gave up flies, spoons, phantom minnows,
artificial frogs, and crayfish. As Dick continued to sit on the rock
and think, we both joined him. The sun was very warm and grateful, and
I am sure we both acquired an added respect for Dick's judgment.

Just when it happened neither of us was afterwards able to decide.
Perhaps Deuce knew. But suddenly, as often a figure appears in a
cinematograph, the diminutive meadow thirty feet away contained two
deer. They stood knee-deep in the grass, wagging their little tails in
impatience of the flies.

"Look a' there!" stammered Dick aloud.

Deuce sat up on his haunches.

I started for my camera.

The deer did not seem to be in the slightest degree alarmed. They
pointed four big ears in our direction, ate a few leisurely mouthfuls
of grass, sauntered to the stream for a drink of water, wagged their
little tails some more, and quietly faded into the cool shadows of the
forest.

[Illustration: AT SUCH A TIME YOU WILL MEET WITH ADVENTURES.]

An hour later we ran out into reeds, and so to the lake. It was a
pretty lake, forest-girt. Across the distance we made out a moving
object which shortly resolved itself into a birch canoe. The canoe
proved to contain an Indian, an Indian boy of about ten years, a black
dog, and a bundle. When within a few rods of each other we ceased
paddling, and drifted by with the momentum. The Indian was a
fine-looking man of about forty, his hair bound with a red fillet, his
feet incased in silk-worked moccasins, but otherwise dressed in white
men's garments. He smoked a short pipe, and contemplated us gravely.

"Bo' jou', bo' jou'," we called in the usual double-barrelled North
Country salutation.

"Bo' jou', bo' jou," he replied.

"Kée-gons?" we inquired as to the fishing in the lake.

"Áh-hah," he assented.

We drifted by each other without further speech. When the decent
distance of etiquette separated us we resumed our paddles.

I produced a young cable terminated by a tremendous spoon and a solid
brass snell as thick as a telegraph wire. We had laid in this
formidable implement in hopes of a big muscallunge. It had been trailed
for days at a time. We had become used to its vibration, which actually
seemed to communicate itself to every fibre of the light canoe. Every
once in a while we would stop with a jerk that would nearly snap our
heads off. Then we would know we had hooked the American continent. We
had become used to that also. It generally happened when we attempted a
little burst of speed. So when the canoe brought up so violently that
all our tinware rolled on Deuce, Dick was merely disgusted.

"There she goes again," he grumbled. "You've hooked Canada."

Canada held quiescent for about three seconds. Then it started due
south.

"Suffering serpents!" shrieked Dick.

"Paddle, you sulphurated idiot!" yelled I.

It was most interesting. All I had to do was to hang on and try to stay
in the boat. Dick paddled and fumed and splashed water and got more
excited. Canada dragged us bodily backward.

Then Canada changed his mind and started in our direction. I was plenty
busy taking in slack, so I did not notice Dick. Dick was absolutely
demented. His mind automatically reacted in the direction of paddling.
He paddled, blindly, frantically. Canada came surging in, his mouth
open, his wicked eyes flaming, a tremendous indistinct body lashing
foam. Dick glanced once over his shoulder, and let out a frantic howl.

"You've got the sea-serpent!" he shrieked.

I turned to fumble for the pistol. We were headed directly for a log
stranded on shore, and about ten feet from it.

"Dick!" I yelled in warning.

He thrust his paddle out forward just in time. The stout maple bent and
cracked. The canoe hit with a bump that threw us forward. I returned to
the young cable. It came in limp and slack.

We looked at each other sadly.

"No use," sighed Dick at last. "They've never invented the words, and
we'd upset if we kicked the dog."

I had the end of the line in my hands.

"Look here!" I cried. That thick brass wire had been as cleanly bitten
through as though it had been cut with clippers. "He must have caught
sight of you," said I.

Dick lifted up his voice in lamentation. "You had four feet of him out
of water," he wailed, "and there was a lot more."

"If you had kept cool," said I severely, "we shouldn't have lost him.
You don't want to get rattled in an emergency; there's no sense in it."

"What were you going to do with that?" asked Dick, pointing to where I
had laid the pistol.

"I was going to shoot him in the head," I replied with dignity. "It's
the best way to land them."

Dick laughed disagreeably. I looked down. At my side lay our largest
iron spoon.

We skirted the left-hand side of the lake in silence. Far out from
shore the water was ruffled where the wind swept down, but with us it
was as still and calm as the forest trees that looked over into it.
After a time we turned short to the left through a very narrow passage
between two marshy shores, and so, after a sharp bend of but a few
hundred feet, came into the other river.

This was a wide stream, smoothly hurrying, without rapids or tumult.
The forest had drawn to either side to let us pass. Here were the
wilder reaches after the intimacies of the little river. Across
stretches of marsh we could see an occasional great blue heron standing
mid-leg deep. Long strings of ducks struggled quacking from invisible
pools. The faint marsh odour saluted our nostrils from the point where
the lily-pads flashed broadly, ruffling in the wind. We dropped out the
smaller spoon and masterfully landed a five-pound pickerel. Even Deuce
brightened. He cared nothing for raw fish, but he knew their
possibilities. Towards evening we entered the hilly country, and so at
the last turned to the left into a sand cove where grew maples and
birches in beautiful park order under a hill. There we pitched camp,
and, as the flies lacked, built a friendship-fire about which to
forgather when the day was done.

Dick still vocally regretted the muscallunge told him of my big bear.

One day, late in the summer, I was engaged in packing some supplies
along an old fur trail north of Lake Superior. I had accomplished one
back-load, and with empty straps was returning to the cache for
another. The trail at one point emerged into and crossed an open park
some hundreds of feet in diameter, in which the grass grew to the
height of the knee. When I was about halfway across, a black bear arose
to his hind legs not ten feet from me, and remarked _Woof!_ in a
loud tone of voice. Now, if a man were to say _woof_ to you
unexpectedly, even in the formality of an Italian garden or the
accustomedness of a city street, you would be somewhat startled. So I
went to camp. There I told them about the bear. I tried to be
conservative in my description, because I did not wish to be accused of
exaggeration. My impression of the animal was that he and a spruce tree
that grew near enough for ready comparison were approximately of the
same stature. We returned to the grass park. After some difficulty we
found a clear footprint. It was a little larger than that made by a
good-sized coon.

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