The Forest

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"In Heaven's name, Dick," I demanded at last, "how did you get
_there_?"

"Fell," said he, succinctly. And that was all.

XIII.

THE HILLS.

We explained carefully to Dick that he had lit on the only spot in the
Halfway Pool where the water was at once deep enough to break his fall
and not too deep to stand in. We also pointed out that he had escaped
being telescoped or drowned by the merest hair's-breadth. From this we
drew moral conclusions. It did us good, but undoubtedly Dick knew it
already.

Now we gave our attention to the wetness of garments, for we were
chilled blue. A big fire and a clothes-rack of forked sticks and a
sapling, an open-air change, a lunch of hot tea and trout and cold
galette and beans, a pipe--and then the inevitable summing up.

We had in two and a half days made the easier half of the distance to
the Falls. At this rate we would consume a week or more in reaching the
starting-point of our explorations. It was a question whether we could
stand a week of ice-water and the heavy labour combined. Ordinarily we
might be able to abandon the canoe and push on afoot, as we were
accustomed to do when trout-fishing, but that involved fording the
river three times--a feat manifestly impossible in present freshet
conditions.

"I t'ink we quit heem," said Billy.

But then I was seized with an inspiration. Judging by the configuration
of the hills, the River bent sharply above the Falls. Why would it not
be possible to cut loose entirely at this point, to strike across
through the forest, and so to come out on the upper reaches? Remained
only the probability of our being able, encumbered by a pack, to scale
the mountains.

"Billy," said I, "have you ever been over in those hills?".

"No," said he.

"Do you know anything about the country? Are there any trails?"

"Dat countree is belong Tawabinisáy. He know heem. I don' know heem. I
t'ink he is have many hills, some lak'."

"Do you think we can climb those hills with packs?"

Billy cast a doubtful glance on Dick. Then his eye lit up.

"Tawabinisáy is tell me 'bout dat Lak' Kawágama. P'rhaps we fine heem."

In so saying Billy decided the attempt. What angler on the River has
not discussed--again idly, again academically--that mysterious Lake
alive with the burnished copper trout, lying hidden and wonderful in
the high hills, clear as crystal, bottomed with gravel like a fountain,
shaped like a great crescent whose curves were haunted of forest trees
grim and awesome with the solemnity of the primeval? That its exact
location was known to Tawabinisáy alone, that the trail to it was
purposely blinded and muddled with the crossing of many little ponds,
that the route was laborious--all those things, along with the minor
details so dear to winter fire-chats, were matters of notoriety.
Probably more expeditions to Kawágama have been planned--in
February--than would fill a volume with an account of anticipated
adventures. Only, none of them ever came off. We were accustomed to
gaze at the forbidden cliff ramparts of the hills, to think of the
Idiot's Delight, and the Halfway Pool, and the Organ Pool, and the
Burned Rock Pool, and the Rolling Stone Pool, and all the rest of them
even up to the Big Falls; and so we would quietly allow our February
plannings to lapse. One man Tawabinisáy had honoured. But this man,
named Clement, a banker from Peoria, had proved unworthy. Tawabinisáy
told how he caught trout, many, many trout, and piled them on the
shores of Kawágama to defile the air. Subsequently this same
"sportsman" buried another big catch on the beach of Superior. These
and other exploits finally earned him his exclusion from the delectable
land. I give his name because I have personally talked with his guides,
and heard their circumstantial accounts of his performances. Unless
three or four woodsmen are fearful liars, I do Mr. Clement no
injustice.

Since then Tawabinisáy had hidden himself behind his impenetrable grin.

So you can easily see that the discovery of Kawágama would be a feat
worthy even high hills.

That afternoon we rested and made our cache. A cache in the forest
country is simply a heavily constructed rustic platform on which
provisions and clothing are laid and wrapped completely about in sheets
of canoe bark tied firmly with strips of cedar bark, or withes made
from a bush whose appearance I know well, but whose name I cannot say.
In this receptacle we left all our canned goods, our extra clothing,
and our Dutch oven. We retained for transportation some pork, flour,
rice, baking-powder, oatmeal, sugar, and tea, cooking utensils,
blankets, the tent, fishing-tackle, and the little pistol. As we were
about to go into the high country where presumably both game and fish
might lack, we were forced to take a full supply for four--counting
Deuce as one--to last ten days. The packs counted up about one hundred
and fifteen pounds of grub, twenty pounds of blankets, ten of tent, say
eight or ten of hardware including the axe, about twenty of duffel.
This was further increased by the idiosyncrasy of Billy. He, like most
woodsmen, was wedded to a single utterly foolish article of personal
belonging, which he worshipped as a fetish, and without which he was
unhappy. In his case it was a huge winter overcoat that must have
weighed fifteen pounds. The total amounted to about one hundred and
ninety pounds. We gave Dick twenty, I took seventy-six, and Billy
shouldered the rest.

The carrying we did with the universal tump-line. This is usually
described as a strap passed about a pack and across the forehead of the
bearer. The description is incorrect. It passes across the top of the
head. The weight should rest on the small of the back just above the
hips--not on the broad of the back as most beginners place it. Then the
chin should be dropped, the body slanted sharply forward, and you may
be able to stagger forty rods at your first attempt.

Use soon accustoms you to carrying, however. The first time I ever did
any packing I had a hard time stumbling a few hundred feet over a hill
portage with just fifty pounds on my back. By the end of that same trip
I could carry a hundred pounds and a lot of miscellaneous traps, like
canoe-poles and guns, without serious inconvenience and over a long
portage. This quickly-gained power comes partly from a strengthening of
the muscles of the neck, but more from a mastery of balance. A pack can
twist you as suddenly and expertly on your back as the best of
wrestlers. It has a head lock on you, and you have to go or break your
neck. After a time you adjust your movements, just as after a time you
can travel on snow-shoes through heavy down timber without taking
conscious thought as to the placing of your feet.

But at first packing is as near infernal punishment as merely mundane
conditions can compass. Sixteen brand-new muscles ache, at first dully,
then sharply, then intolerably, until it seems you cannot bear it
another second. You are unable to keep your feet. A stagger means an
effort at recovery, and an effort at recovery means that you trip when
you place your feet, and that means, if you are lucky enough not to be
thrown, an extra tweak for every one of the sixteen new muscles. At
first you rest every time you feel tired. Then you begin to feel very
tired every fifty feet. Then you have to do the best you can, and prove
the pluck that is in you.

Mr. Tom Friant, an old woodsman of wide experience, has often told me
with relish of his first try at carrying. He had about sixty pounds,
and his companion double that amount. Mr. Friant stood it a few
centuries and then sat down. He couldn't have moved another step if a
gun had been at his ear.

"What's the matter?" asked his companion.

"Del," said Friant, "I'm all in. I can't navigate. Here's where I
quit."

"Can't you carry her any farther?"

"Not an inch."

"Well, pile her on. I'll carry her for you."

Friant looked at him a moment in silent amazement.

"Do you mean to say that you are going to carry your pack and mine
too?"

"That's what I mean to say. I'll do it if I have to."

Friant drew a long breath.

"Well," said he at last, "if a little sawed-off cuss like you can
wiggle under a hundred and eighty, I guess I can make it under sixty."

"That's right," said Del imperturbably. "_If you think you can, you
can_."

"And I did," ends Friant, with a chuckle.

Therein lies the whole secret. The work is irksome, sometimes even
painful, but if you think you can do it, you can, for though great is
the protest of the human frame against what it considers abuse, greater
is the power of a man's grit.

We carried the canoe above the larger eddies, where we embarked
ourselves and our packs for traverse, leaving Deuce under strict
command to await a second trip. Deuce disregarded the strict command.
From disobedience came great peril, for when he attempted to swim
across after us he was carried downstream, involved in a whirlpool,
sucked under, and nearly drowned. We could do nothing but watch. When,
finally, the River spued out a frightened and bedraggled dog, we drew a
breath of very genuine relief, for Deuce was dear to us through much
association.

The canoe we turned bottom up and left in the bushes, and so we set off
through the forest.

At the end of fifteen minutes we began to mount a gentle ascent. The
gentle ascent speedily became a sharp slope, the sharp slope an abrupt
hill, and the latter finally an almost sheer face of rock and thin
soil. We laid hold doggedly of little cedars; we dug our fingers into
little crevices, and felt for the same with our toes; we perspired in
streams and breathed in gasps; we held the strained muscles of our
necks rigid, for the twisting of a pack meant here a dangerous fall; we
flattened ourselves against the face of the mountain with always the
heavy, ceaseless pull of the tump-line attempting to tear us backward
from our holds. And so at last, when the muscles of our thighs refused
to strengthen our legs for the ascent of another foot, we would turn
our backs to the slant and sink gratefully into the only real luxury in
the world.

For be it known that real luxury cannot be bought; it must be worked
for. I refer to luxury as the exquisite savour of a pleasant sensation.
The keenest sense-impressions are undoubtedly those of contrast. In
looking back over a variety of experience, I have no hesitation at all
in selecting as the moment in which I have experienced the liveliest
physical pleasure one hot afternoon in July. The thermometer might have
stood anywhere. We would have placed childlike trust in any of its
statements, even three figures great. Our way had led through unbroken
forest oppressed by low brush and an underfooting of brakes. There had
been hills. Our clothes were wringing wet, to the last stitch; even the
leather of the tump-line was saturated. The hot air we gulped down did
not seem to satisfy our craving for oxygen any more than lukewarm water
ever seems to cut a real thirst. The woods were literally like an oven
in their hot dryness. Finally we skirted a little hill, and at the base
of that hill a great tree had fallen, and through the aperture thus
made in the forest a tiny current of cool air flowed like a stream. It
was not a great current, nor a wide; if we moved three feet in any
direction, we were out of it. But we sat us down directly across its
flow. And never have dinners or wines or men or women, or talks of
books or scenery or adventure or sport, or the softest, daintiest
refinements of man's invention given me the half of luxury I drank in
from that little breeze. So the commonest things--a dash of cool water
on the wrists, a gulp of hot tea, a warm, dry blanket, a whiff of
tobacco, a ray of sunshine--are more really the luxuries than all the
comforts and sybaritisms we buy. Undoubtedly the latter would also rise
to the higher category if we were to work for their essence instead of
merely signing club cheques or paying party calls for them.

Which means that when we three would rest our packs against the side of
that hill, and drop our head-straps below our chins, we were not at all
to be pitied, even though the forest growth denied us the encouragement
of knowing how much farther we had to go.

Before us the trees dropped away rapidly, so that twenty feet out in a
straight line we were looking directly into their tops. There, quite on
an equality with their own airy estate, we could watch the fly-catchers
and warblers conducting their small affairs of the chase. It lent us
the illusion of imponderability; we felt that we too might be able to
rest securely on graceful gossamer twigs. And sometimes, through a
chance opening, we could see down over billows of waving leaves to a
single little spot of blue, like a turquoise sunk in folds of green
velvet, which meant that the River was dropping below us. This, in the
mercy of the Red Gods, was meant as encouragement.

The time came, however, when the ramparts we scaled rose sheer and bare
in impregnability. Nothing could be done on the straight line, so we
turned sharp to the north. The way was difficult, for it lay over great
fragments of rock stricken from the cliff by winter, and further
rendered treacherous by the moss and wet by a thousand trickles of
water. At the end of one hour we found what might be called a ravine,
if you happened not to be particular, or a steep cleft in the precipice
if you were. Here we deserted the open air for piled-up brushy tangles,
many sharp-cornered rock fragments, and a choked streamlet. Finally the
whole outfit abruptly ceased. We climbed ten feet of crevices and stood
on the ridge.

The forest trees shut us in our own little area, so that we were for
the moment unable to look abroad over the country.

The descent, abrupt where we had mounted, stretched away gently toward
the north and west. And on that slope, protected as it was from the
severer storms that sweep up the open valleys in winter, stood the most
magnificent primeval forest it has ever been my fortune to behold. The
huge maple, beech, and birch trees lifted column-like straight up to a
lucent green canopy, always twinkling and shifting in the wind and the
sunlight. Below grew a thin screen of underbrush, through which we had
no difficulty at all in pushing, but which threw about us face-high a
tender green partition. The effect was that of a pew in an
old-fashioned church, so that, though we shared the upper stillnesses,
a certain delightful privacy of our own seemed assured us. This privacy
we knew to be assured also to many creatures besides ourselves. On the
other side of the screen of broad leaves we sensed the presence of
life. It did not intrude on us, nor were we permitted to intrude on it.
But it was there. We heard it rustling, pattering, scrambling,
whispering, scurrying with a rush of wings. More subtly we felt it, as
one knows of a presence in a darkened room. By the exercise of
imagination and experience we identified it in its manifestations--the
squirrel, the partridge, the weasel, the spruce hens, once or twice the
deer. We knew it saw us perfectly, although we could not see it, and
that gave us an impression of companionship; so the forest was not
lonely.

Next to this double sense of isolation and company was the feeling of
transparent shadow. The forest was thick and cool. Only rarely did the
sun find an orifice in the roof through which to pour a splash of
liquid gold. All the rest was in shadow. But the shadow was that of the
bottom of the sea--cool, green, and, above all, transparent. We saw
into the depth of it, but dimly, as we would see into the green
recesses of a tropic ocean. It possessed the same liquid quality.
Finally the illusion overcame us completely. We bathed in the shadows
as though they were palpable, and from that came great refreshment.

Under foot the soil was springy with the mould of numberless autumns.
The axe had never hurried slow old servant decay. Once in a while we
came across a prostrate trunk lying in the trough of destruction its
fall had occasioned. But the rest of the time we trod a carpet to the
making of which centuries of dead forest warriors had wrapped
themselves in mould and soft moss and gentle dissolution. Sometimes a
faint rounded shell of former fair proportion swelled above the level,
to crumble to punkwood at the lightest touch of our feet. Or, again,
the simulacrum of a tree trunk would bravely oppose our path, only to
melt away into nothing, like the opposing phantoms of Aeneas, when we
placed a knee against it for the surmounting.

If the pine woods be characterized by cathedral solemnity, and the
cedars and tamaracks by certain horrifical gloom, and the popples by a
silvery sunshine, and the berry-clearings by grateful heat and the
homely manner of familiar birds, then the great hardwood must be known
as the dwelling-place of transparent shadows, of cool green lucency,
and the repository of immemorial cheerful forest tradition which the
traveller can hear of, but which he is never permitted actually to
know.

[Illustration: IN THIS LOVABLE MYSTERY WE JOURNEYED ALL THE REST OF
THAT MORNING.]

In this lovable mystery we journeyed all the rest of that morning. The
packs were heavy with the first day's weight, and we were tired from
our climb; but the deep physical joy of going on and ever on into
unknown valleys, down a long, gentle slope that must lead somewhere,
through things animate and things of an almost animate life, opening
silently before us to give us passage, and closing as silently behind
us after we had passed--these made us forget our aches and fatigues for
the moment.

At noon we boiled tea near a little spring of clear, cold water. As yet
we had no opportunity of seeing farther than the closing in of many
trees. We were, as far as external appearances went, no more advanced
than our first resting-place after surmounting the ridge. This effect
is constant in the great forests. You are in a treadmill--though a
pleasant one withal. Your camp of to-day differs only in non-essentials
from that of yesterday, and your camp of to-morrow will probably be
almost exactly like to-day's. Only when you reach your objective point
do you come to a full realization that you have not been the Sisyphus
of the Red Gods.

Deuce returning from exploration brought indubitable evidence of
porcupines. We picked the barbed little weapons from his face and nose
and tongue with much difficulty for ourselves and much pain for Deuce.
We offered consolation by voicing for his dumbness his undoubted
intention to avoid all future porcupines. Then we took up the afternoon
tramp.

Now at last through the trees appeared the gleam of water. Tawabinisáy
had said that Kawágama was the only lake in its district. We therefore
became quite excited at this sapphire promise. Our packs were thrown
aside, and like school-boys we raced down the declivity to the shore.

XIV.

ON WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS.

We found ourselves peering through the thicket at a little reed and
grass grown body of water a few acres in extent. A short detour to the
right led us to an outlet--a brook of width and dash that convinced us
the little pond was only a stopping-place in the stream, and not a
headwater as we had at first imagined. Then a nearer approach led us
past pointed tree-stumps exquisitely chiselled with the marks of teeth;
so we knew we looked, not on a natural pond, but on the work of
beavers.

I examined the dam more closely. It was a marvel of engineering skill
in the accuracy with which the big trees had been felled exactly along
the most effective lines, the efficiency of the filling in, and the
just estimate of the waste water to be allowed. We named the place
obviously Beaver Pond, resumed our packs, and pushed on.

Now I must be permitted to celebrate by a little the pluck of Dick. He
was quite unused to the tump-line, comparatively inexperienced in
woods-walking, and weighed but one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Yet
not once in the course of that trip did he bewail his fate. Towards the
close of this first afternoon I dropped behind to see how he was making
it. The boy had his head down, his lips shut tight together, his legs
well straddled apart. As I watched he stumbled badly over the merest
twig.

"Dick," said I, "are you tired?"

"Yes," he confessed frankly.

"Can you make it another half-hour?"

"I guess so; I'll try."

At the end of the half-hour we dropped our packs. Dick had manifested
no impatience--not once had he even asked how nearly time was up--but
now he breathed a deep sigh of relief.

"I thought you were never going to stop," said he simply.

From Dick those words meant a good deal. For woods-walking differs as
widely from ordinary walking as trap-shooting from field-shooting. A
good pedestrian may tire very quickly in the forest. No two successive
steps are of the same length; no two successive steps fall on the same
quality of footing; no two successive steps are on the same level.
Those three are the major elements of fatigue. Add further the facts
that your way is continually obstructed both by real difficulties--such
as trees, trunks, and rocks--and lesser annoyances, such as branches,
bushes, and even spider-webs. These things all combine against
endurance. The inexperienced does not know how to meet them with a
minimum of effort. The tenderfoot is in a constant state of muscular
and mental rigidity against a fall or a stumble or a cut across the
face from some one of the infinitely numerous woods scourges. This
rigidity speedily exhausts the vital force.

So much for the philosophy of it. Its practical side might be
infinitely extended. Woodsmen are tough and enduring and in good
condition; but no more so than the average college athlete. Time and
again I have seen men of the latter class walked to a standstill. I
mean exactly that. They knew, and were justly proud, of their physical
condition, and they hated to acknowledge, even to themselves, that the
rest of us were more enduring. As a consequence they played on their
nerve, beyond their physical powers. When the collapse came it was
complete. I remember very well a crew of men turning out from a lumber
camp on the Sturgeon River to bring in on a litter a young fellow who
had given out while attempting to follow Bethel Bristol through a hard
day. Bristol said he dropped finally as though he had been struck on
the head. The woodsman had thereupon built him a little fire, made him
as comfortable as possible with both coats, and hiked for assistance. I
once went into the woods with a prominent college athlete. We walked
rather hard over a rough country until noon. Then the athlete lay on
his back for the rest of the day, while I finished alone the business
we had come on.

Now, these instances do not imply that Bristol, and certainly not
myself, were any stronger physically, or possessed more nervous force,
than the men we had tired out. Either of them on a road could have
trailed us, step for step, and as long as we pleased. But we knew the
game.

It comes at the last to be entirely a matter of experience. Any man can
walk in the woods all day at some gait. But his speed will depend on
his skill. It is exactly like making your way through heavy, dry sand.
As long as you restrain yourself to a certain leisurely plodding, you
get along without extraordinary effort, while even a slight increase of
speed drags fiercely at your feet. So it is with the woods. As long as
you walk slowly enough, so that you can pick your footing and lift
aside easily the branches that menace your face, you will expend little
nervous energy. But the slightest pressing, the slightest inclination
to go beyond what may be called your physical foresight, lands you
immediately in difficulties. You stumble, you break through the brush,
you shut your eyes to avoid sharp switchings. The reservoir of your
energy is open full cock. In about an hour you feel very, very tired.

This principle holds rigidly true of every one, from the softest
tenderfoot to the expertest forest-runner. For each there exists a
normal rate of travel, beyond which are penalties. Only, the
forest-runner, by long use, has raised the exponent of his powers.
Perhaps as a working hypothesis the following might be recommended:
_One good step is worth six stumbling steps; go only fast enough to
assure that good one._

You will learn, besides, a number of things practically which memory
cannot summon to order for instance here. "Brush slanted across your
path is easier lifted over your head and dropped behind you than pushed
aside," will do as an example.

A good woods-walker progresses without apparent hurry. I have followed
the disappearing back of Tawabinisáy when, as my companion elegantly
expressed it, "if you stopped to spit you got lost." Tawabinisáy
wandered through the forest, his hands in his pockets, humming a little
Indian hymn. And we were breaking madly along behind him with the
crashing of many timbers.

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