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The Forest

S >> Stewart Edward White >> The Forest




Neat piles of brush, equally neat piles of cord-wood, knee-high stumps
as cleanly cut as by a saw, attested the old man's efficiency. We
conversed.

Yes, said he, the soil was good. It is laborious to clear away the
forest. Still, one arrives. M'sieu has but to look. In the memory of
his oldest grandson, even, all this was a forest. Le bon Dieu had
blessed him. His family was large. Yes, it was as M'sieu said,
eighty-seven--that is, counting himself. The soil was not wonderful. It
is indeed a large family and much labour, but somehow there was always
food for all. For his part he had a great pity for those whom God had
not blessed. It must be very lonesome without children.

We spared a private thought that this old man was certainly in no
danger of loneliness.

Yes, he went on, he was old--eighty-five. He was not as quick as he
used to be; he left that for the young ones. Still, he could do a day's
work. He was most proud to have made these gentlemen's acquaintance. He
wished us good-day.

We left him seated on the pine log, his axe between his knees, his
great, gnarled brown hands hanging idly. After a time we heard the
_whack_ of his implement; then after another long time we heard it
_whack_ again. We knew that those two blows had gone straight and
true and forceful to the mark. So old a man had no energy to expend in
the indirections of haste.

Our elfish guides led us back along the trail to the farmhouse. A girl
of thirteen had just arrived from school. In the summer the little ones
divided the educational advantages among themselves, turn and turn
about.

The newcomer had been out into the world, and was dressed accordingly.
A neat dark-blue cloth dress, plainly made, a dull red and blue checked
apron; a broad, round hat, shoes and stockings, all in the best and
quietest taste--marked contrast to the usual garish Sunday best of the
Anglo-Saxon. She herself exemplified the most striking type of beauty
to be found in the mixed bloods. Her hair was thick and glossy and
black in the mode that throws deep purple shadows under the rolls and
coils. Her face was a regular oval, like the opening in a wishbone. Her
skin was dark, but rich and dusky with life and red blood that ebbed
and flowed with her shyness. Her lips were full, and of a dark cherry
red. Her eyes were deep, rather musing, and furnished with the most
gloriously tangling of eyelashes. Dick went into ecstasies, took
several photographs which did not turn out well, and made one sketch
which did. Perpetually did he bewail the absence of oils. The type is
not uncommon, but its beauty rarely remains perfect after the fifteenth
year.

We made our ceremonious adieus to the Madame, and started back to town
under the guidance of one of the boys, who promised us a short cut.

This youth proved to be filled with the old, wandering spirit that
lures so many of his race into the wilderness life. He confided to us
as we walked that he liked to tramp extended distances, and that the
days were really not made long enough for those who had to return home
at night.

"I is been top of dose hills," he said. "Bime by I mak' heem go to dose
lak' beyon'."

He told us that some day he hoped to go out with the fur traders. In
his vocabulary "I wish" occurred with such wistful frequency that
finally I inquired curiously what use he would make of the Fairy Gift.

"If you could have just one wish come true, Pierre," I asked, "what
would you desire?"

His answer came without a moment's hesitation.

"I is lak' be one giant," said he.

"Why?" I demanded.

"So I can mak' heem de walk far," he replied simply.

I was tempted to point out to him the fact that big men do not outlast
the little men, and that vast strength rarely endures, but then a
better feeling persuaded me to leave him his illusions. The power, even
in fancy, of striding on seven-league boots across the fascinations
spread out below his kindling vision from "dose hills" was too precious
a possession lightly to be taken away.

Strangely enough, though his woodcraft naturally was not
inconsiderable, it did not hold his paramount interest. He knew
something about animals and their ways and their methods of capture,
but the chase did not appeal strongly to him, nor apparently did he
possess much skill along that line. He liked the actual physical
labour, the walking, the paddling, the tump-line, the camp-making, the
new country, the companionship of the wild life, the wilderness as a
whole rather than in any one of its single aspects as Fish Pond, Game
Preserve, Picture Gallery. In this he showed the true spirit of the
_voyageur_. I should confidently look to meet him in another ten
years--if threats of railroads spare the Far North so long--girdled
with the red sash, shod in silent moccasins, bending beneath the
portage load, trolling _Isabeau_ to the silent land somewhere
under the Arctic Circle. The French of the North have never been great
fighters nor great hunters, in the terms of the Anglo-Saxon
frontiersmen, but they have laughed in farther places.




XII.

THE RIVER.


At a certain spot on the North Shore--I am not going to tell you
where--you board one of the two or three fishing-steamers that collect
from the different stations the big ice-boxes of Lake Superior
whitefish. After a certain number of hours--I am not going to tell you
how many--your craft will turn in toward a semicircle of bold,
beautiful hills, that seem at first to be many less miles distant than
the reality, and at the last to be many more miles remote than is the
fact. From the prow you will make out first a uniform velvet green;
then the differentiation of many shades; then the dull neutrals of
rocks and crags; finally the narrow white of a pebble beach against
which the waves utter continually a rattling undertone. The steamer
pushes boldly in. The cool green of the water underneath changes to
gray. Suddenly you make out the bottom, as through a thick green glass,
and the big suckers and catfish idling over its riffled sands,
inconceivably far down through the unbelievably clear liquid. So
absorbed are you in this marvellous clarity that a slight, grinding jar
alone brings you to yourself. The steamer's nose is actually touching
the white strip of pebbles!

Now you can do one of a number of things. The forest slants down to
your feet in dwindling scrub, which half conceals an abandoned log
structure. This latter is the old Hudson's Bay post. Behind it is the
Fur Trail, and the Fur Trail will take you three miles to Burned Rock
Pool, where are spring water and mighty trout. But again, half a mile
to the left, is the mouth of the River. And the River meanders
charmingly through the woods of the flat country over numberless
riffles and rapids, beneath various steep gravel banks, until it sweeps
boldly under the cliff of the first high hill. There a rugged precipice
rises sheer and jagged and damp-dark to overhanging trees clinging to
the shoulder of the mountain. And precisely at that spot is a bend
where the water hits square, to divide right and left in whiteness, to
swirl into convolutions of foam, to lurk darkly for a moment on the
edge of tumult before racing away. And there you can stand hip-deep,
and just reach the eddy foam with a cast tied craftily of Royal
Coachman, Parmachenee Belle, and Montreal.

From that point you are with the hills. They draw back to leave wide
forest, but always they return to the River--as you would return season
after season were I to tell you how--throwing across your
woods-progress a sheer cliff forty or fifty feet high, shouldering you
incontinently into the necessity of fording to the other side. More and
more jealous they become as you penetrate, until at the Big Falls they
close in entirely, warning you that here they take the wilderness to
themselves. At the Big Falls anglers make their last camp. About the
fire they may discuss idly various academic questions--as to whether
the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the
legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether
it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by
sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above the Falls;
and so on.

These questions, as I have said, are merely academic. Your true angler
is a philosopher. Enough is to him worth fifteen courses, and if the
finite mind of man could imagine anything to be desired as an addition
to his present possessions on the River, he at least knows nothing of
it. Already he commands ten miles of water--swift, clear water--running
over stone, through a freshet bed so many hundreds of feet wide that he
has forgotten what it means to guard his back cast. It is to be waded
in the riffles, so that he can cross from one shore to the other as the
mood suits him. One bank is apt to be precipitous, the other to stretch
away in a mile or so of the coolest, greenest, stillest primeval forest
to be imagined. Thus he can cut across the wide bends of the River,
should he so desire and should haste be necessary to make camp before
dark. And, last, but not least by any manner of means, there are trout.

I mean real trout--big fellows, the kind the fishers of little streams
dream of but awake to call Morpheus a liar, just as they are too polite
to call you a liar when you are so indiscreet as to tell them a few
plain facts. I have one solemnly attested and witnessed record of
twenty-nine inches, caught in running water. I saw a friend land on one
cast three whose aggregate weight was four and one half pounds. I
witnessed, and partly shared, an exciting struggle in which three fish
on three rods were played in the same pool at the same time. They
weighed just fourteen pounds. One pool, a backset, was known as the
Idiot's Delight, because any one could catch fish there. I have lain on
my stomach at the Burned Rock Pool and seen the great fish lying so
close together as nearly to cover the bottom, rank after rank of them,
and the smallest not under a half pound. As to the largest--well, every
true fisherman knows him!

So it came about for many years that the natural barrier interposed by
the Big Falls successfully turned the idle tide of anglers'
exploration. Beyond them lay an unknown country, but you had to climb
cruelly to see it, and you couldn't gain above what you already had in
any case. The nearest settlement was nearly sixty miles away, so even
added isolation had not its usual quickening effect on camper's effort.
The River is visited by few, anyway. An occasional adventurous steam
yacht pauses at the mouth, fishes a few little ones from the shallow
pools there, or a few big ones from the reefs, and pushes on. It never
dreams of sending an expedition to the interior. Our own people, and
two other parties, are all I know of who visit the River regularly. Our
camp-sites alone break the forest; our blazes alone continue the
initial short cut of the Fur Trail; our names alone distinguish the
various pools. We had always been satisfied to compromise with the
frowning Hills. In return for the delicious necks and points and forest
areas through which our clipped trails ran, we had tacitly respected
the mystery of the upper reaches.

This year, however, a number of unusual conditions changed our spirit.
I have perhaps neglected to state that our trip up to now had been a
rather singularly damp one. Of the first fourteen days twelve had been
rainy. This was only a slightly exaggerated sample for the rest of the
time. As a consequence we found the River filled even to the limit of
its freshet banks. The broad borders of stone beach between the
stream's edge and the bushes had quite disappeared; the riffles had
become rapids, and the rapids roaring torrents; the bends boiled
angrily with a smashing eddy that sucked air into pirouetting cavities
inches in depth. Plainly, fly-fishing was out of the question. No
self-respecting trout would rise to the surface of such a moil, or
abandon for syllabubs of tinsel the magnificent solidities of
ground-bait such a freshet would bring down from the hills. Also the
River was unfordable.

We made camp at the mouth and consulted together. Billy, the half-breed
who had joined us for the labour of a permanent camp, shook his head.

"I t'ink one week, ten day," he vouchsafed. "P'rhaps she go down den.
We mus' wait." We did not want to wait; the idleness of a permanent
camp is the most deadly in the world.

"Billy," said I, "have you ever been above the Big Falls?"

The half-breed's eyes flashed.

"Non," he replied simply. "Bâ, I lak' mak' heem firs' rate."

"All right, Billy; we'll do it."

The next day it rained, and the River went up two inches. The morning
following was fair enough, but so cold you could see your breath. We
began to experiment.

Now, this expedition had become a fishing vacation, so we had all the
comforts of home with us. When said comforts of home were laden into
the canoe, there remained forward and aft just about one square foot of
space for Billy and me, and not over two inches of freeboard for the
River. We could not stand up and pole; tracking with a tow-line was out
of the question, because there existed no banks on which to walk; the
current was too swift for paddling. So we knelt and poled. We knew it
before, but we had to be convinced by trial, that two inches of
freeboard will dip under the most gingerly effort. It did so. We
groaned, stepped out into ice-water up to our waists, and so began the
day's journey with fleeting reference to Dante's nethermost hell.

Next the shore the water was most of the time a little above our knees,
but the swirl of a rushing current brought an apron of foam to our
hips. Billy took the bow and pulled; I took the stern and pushed. In
places our combined efforts could but just counterbalance the strength
of the current. Then Billy had to hang on until I could get my shoulder
against the stern for a mighty heave, the few inches gain of which he
would guard as jealously as possible, until I could get into position
for another shove. At other places we were in nearly to our armpits,
but close under the banks where we could help ourselves by seizing
bushes.

Sometimes I lost my footing entirely and trailed out behind like a
streamer; sometimes Billy would be swept away, the canoe's bow would
swing down-stream, and I would have to dig my heels and hang on until
he had floundered upright. Fortunately for our provisions, this never
happened to both at the same time. The difficulties were still further
complicated by the fact that our feet speedily became so numb from the
cold that we could not feel the bottom, and so were much inclined to
aimless stumblings. By-and-by we got out and kicked trees to start the
circulation. In the meantime the sun had retired behind thick, leaden
clouds.

At the First Bend we were forced to carry some fifty feet. There the
River rushed down in a smooth apron straight against the cliff, where
its force actually raised the mass of water a good three feet higher
than the level of the surrounding pool. I tied on a bait-hook, and two
cartridges for sinkers, and in fifteen minutes had caught three trout,
one of which weighed three pounds, and the others two pounds and a
pound and a half respectively. At this point Dick and Deuce, who had
been paralleling through the woods, joined us. We broiled the trout,
and boiled tea, and shivered as near the fire as we could. That
afternoon, by dint of labour and labour, and yet more labour, we
made Burned Rock, and there we camped for the night, utterly
beaten out by about as hard a day's travel as a man would want to
undertake.

The following day was even worse, for as the natural bed of the River
narrowed, we found less and less footing and swifter and swifter water.
The journey to Burned Rock had been a matter of dogged hard work; this
was an affair of alertness, of taking advantage of every little eddy,
of breathless suspense during long seconds while the question of
supremacy between our strength and the stream's was being debated. And
the thermometer must have registered well towards freezing. Three times
we were forced to cross the River in order to get even precarious
footing. Those were the really doubtful moments. We had to get in
carefully, to sit craftily, and to paddle gingerly and firmly, without
attempting to counteract the downward sweep of the current. All our
energies and care were given to preventing those miserable curling
little waves from over-topping our precious two inches, and that
miserable little canoe from departing even by a hair's-breadth from the
exactly level keel. Where we were going did not matter. After an
interminable interval the tail of our eyes would catch the sway of
bushes near at hand.

"Now," Billy would mutter abstractedly.

With one accord we would arise from six inches of wet and step swiftly
into the River. The lightened canoe would strain back; we would brace
our legs. The traverse was accomplished.

[Illustration: WATCHED THE LONG NORTH COUNTRY TWILIGHT STEAL UP LIKE A
GRAY CLOUD FROM THE EAST.]

Being thus under the other bank, I would hold the canoe while Billy,
astraddle the other end for the purpose of depressing the water to
within reach of his hand, would bail away the consequences of our
crossing. Then we would make up the quarter of a mile we had lost.

We quit at the Organ Pool about three o'clock of the afternoon. Not
much was said that evening.

The day following we tied into it again. This time we put Dick and
Deuce on an old Indian trail that promised a short cut, with
instructions to wait at the end of it. In the joyous anticipation of
another wet day we forgot they had never before followed an Indian
trail. Let us now turn aside to the adventures of Dick and Deuce.

Be it premised here that Dick is a regular Indian of taciturnity when
it becomes a question of his own experience, so that for a long time we
knew of what follows but the single explanatory monosyllable which you
shall read in due time. But Dick has a beloved uncle. In moments of
expansion to this relative after his return he held forth as to the
happenings of that morning.

Dick and the setter managed the Indian trail for about twenty rods.
They thought they managed it for perhaps twice that distance. Then it
became borne in on them that the bushes went back, the faint
knife-clippings, and the half weather-browned brush-cuttings that alone
constitute an Indian trail had taken another direction, and that they
had now their own way to make through the forest. Dick knew the
direction well enough, so he broke ahead confidently. After a
half-hour's walk he crossed a tiny streamlet. After another half-hour's
walk he came to another. It was flowing the wrong way.

Dick did not understand this. He had never known of little streams
flowing away from rivers and towards eight-hundred-foot hills. This
might be a loop, of course. He resolved to follow it up-stream far
enough to settle the point. The following brought him in time to a
soggy little thicket with three areas of moss-covered mud and two
round, pellucid pools of water about a foot in diameter. As the little
stream had wound and twisted, Dick had by now lost entirely his sense
of direction. He fished out his compass and set it on a rock. The River
flows nearly north-east to the Big Falls, and Dick knew himself to be
somewhere east of the River. The compass appeared to be wrong. Dick was
a youth of sense, so he did not quarrel with the compass; he merely
became doubtful as to which was the north end of the needle--the white
or the black. After a few moments' puzzling he was quite at sea, and
could no more remember how he had been taught as to this than you can
clinch the spelling of a doubtful word after you have tried on paper a
dozen variations. But being a youth of sense he did not desert the
streamlet.

After a short half-mile of stumbling the apparent wrong direction in
the brook's bed, he came to the River. The River was also flowing the
wrong way, and uphill. Dick sat down and covered his eyes with his
hands, as I had told him to do in like instance, and so managed to
swing the country around where it belonged.

Now here was the River--and Dick resolved to desert it for no more
short cuts--but where was the canoe?

This point remained unsettled in Dick's mind, or rather it was
alternately settled in two ways. Sometimes the boy concluded we must be
still below him, so he would sit on a rock to wait. Then, after a few
moments, inactivity would bring him panic. The canoe must have passed
this point long since, and every second he wasted stupidly sitting on
that stone separated him farther from his friends and from food. Then
he would tear madly through the forest. Deuce enjoyed this game, but
Dick did not.

In time Dick found his farther progress along the banks cut off by a
hill. The hill ended abruptly at the water's edge in a sheer rock cliff
thirty feet high. This was in reality the end of the Indian trail short
cut--the point where Dick was to meet us--but he did not know it. He
happened for the moment to be obsessed by one of his canoe up-stream
panics, so he turned inland to a spot where the hill appeared
climbable, and started in to surmount the obstruction.

This was comparatively easy at first. Then the shoulder of the cliff
intervened. Dick mounted still a little higher up the hill, then
higher, then still higher. Far down to his left, through the trees,
broiled the River. The slope of the hill to it had become steeper than
a roof, and at the edge of the eaves came a cliff drop of thirty feet.
Dick picked his way gingerly over curving moss-beds, assisting his
balance by a number of little cedar trees. Then something happened.

Dick says the side of the hill slid out from under him. The fact of the
matter is, probably, the skin-moss over loose rounded stones gave way.
Dick sat down and began slowly to bump down the slant of the roof. He
never really lost his equilibrium, nor until the last ten feet did he
abandon the hope of checking his descent. Sometimes he did actually
succeed in stopping himself for a moment; but on his attempting to
follow up the advantage, the moss always slipped or the sapling let go
a tenuous hold and he continued on down. At last the River flashed out
below him. He saw the sheer drop. He saw the boiling eddies of the
Halfway Pool, capable of sucking down a saw-log. Then, with a final
rush of loose round stones, he shot the chutes feet first into space.

In the meantime Billy and I repeated our experience of the two previous
days, with a few variations caused by the necessity of passing two
exceptionally ugly rapids whose banks left little footing. We did this
precariously, with a rope. The cold water was beginning to tell on our
vitality, so that twice we went ashore and made hot tea. Just below the
Halfway Pool we began to do a little figuring ahead, which is a bad
thing. The Halfway Pool meant much inevitable labour, with its two
swift rapids and its swirling, eddies, as sedulously to be avoided as
so many steel bear-traps. Then there were a dozen others, and the three
miles of riffles, and all the rest of it. At our present rate it would
take us a week to make the Falls. Below the Halfway Pool we looked for
Dick. He was not to be seen. This made us cross. At the Halfway Pool we
intended to unload for portage, and also to ferry over Dick and the
setter in the lightened canoe. The tardiness of Dick delayed the game.

However, we drew ashore to the little clearing of the Halfway Camp,
made the year before, and wearily discharged our cargo. Suddenly,
upstream, and apparently up in the air, we heard distinctly the excited
yap of a dog. Billy and I looked at each other. Then we looked
upstream.

Close under the perpendicular wall of rock, and fifty feet from the end
of it, waist deep in water that swirled angrily about him, stood Dick.

I knew well enough what he was standing on--a little ledge of shale not
over five or six feet in length and two feet wide--for in lower water I
had often from its advantage cast a fly down below the big boulder. But
I knew it to be surrounded by water fifteen feet deep. It was
impossible to wade to the spot, impossible to swim to it. And why in
the name of all the woods gods would a man want to wade or swim to it
if he could? The affair, to our cold-benumbed intellects, was simply
incomprehensible.

Billy and I spoke no word. We silently, perhaps a little fearfully,
launched the empty canoe. Then we went into a space of water whose
treading proved us no angels. From the slack water under the cliff we
took another look. It was indeed Dick. He carried a rod-case in one
hand. His fish-creel lay against his hip. His broad hat sat accurately
level on his head. His face was imperturbable. Above, Deuce agonized,
afraid to leap into the stream, but convinced that his duty required
him to do so.

We steadied the canoe while Dick climbed in. You would have thought he
was embarking at the regularly appointed rendezvous. In silence we shot
the rapids, and collected Deuce from the end of the trail, whither he
followed us. In silence we worked our way across to where our duffel
lay scattered. In silence we disembarked.

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