We were at the head of the best fishing. There was an old bark-clearing not far off which afforded us a daily dessert of most delicious blackberries,--an important item in the woods,--and then all the features of the place--a sort of cave above ground--were of the right kind.
There was not a mosquito, or gnat, or other pest in the woods, the cool nights having already cut them off. The trout were sufficiently abundant, and afforded us a few hours' sport daily to supply our wants. The only drawback was, that they were out of season, and only palatable to a woodman's keen appetite. What is this about trout spawning in October and November, and in some cases not till March? These trout had all spawned in August, every one of them. The coldness and purity of the water evidently made them that much earlier. The game laws of the State protect the fish after September 1, proceeding upon the theory that its spawning season is later than that,--as it is in many cases, but not in all, as we found out.
The fish are small in these streams, seldom weighing over a few ounces. Occasionally a large one is seen of a pound or pound and a half weight. I remember one such, as black as night, that ran under a black rock. But I remember much more distinctly a still larger one that I caught and lost one eventful day.
I had him on my hook ten minutes, and actually got my thumb in his mouth, and yet he escaped.
It was only the over-eagerness of the sportsman. I imagined I could hold him by the teeth.
The place where I struck him was a deep well-hole, and I was perched upon a log that spanned it ten or twelve feet above the water. The situation was all the more interesting because I saw no possible way to land my fish. I could not lead him ashore, and my frail tackle could not be trusted to lift him sheer from that pit to my precarious perch. What should I do? call for help? but no help was near. I had a revolver in my pocket and might have shot him through and through, but that novel proceeding did not occur to me until it was too late. I would have taken a Sam Patch leap into the water, and have wrestled with my antagonist in his own element, but I knew the slack, thus sure to occur, would probably free him; so I peered down upon the beautiful creature and enjoyed my triumph as far as it went. He was caught very lightly through his upper jaw, and I expected every struggle and somersault would break the hold.
Presently I saw a place in the rocks where I thought it possible, with such an incentive, to get down within reach of the water: by careful manoeuvring I slipped my pole behind me and got hold of the line, which I cut and wound around my finger; then I made my way toward the end of the log and the place in the rocks, leading my fish along much exhausted on the top of the water. By an effort worthy the occasion I got down within reach of the fish, and, as I have already confessed, thrust my thumb into his mouth and pinched his cheek; he made a spring and was free from my hand and the hook at the same time; for a moment he lay panting on the top of the water, then, recovering himself slowly, made his way down through the clear, cruel element beyond all hope of recapture. My blind impulse to follow and try to seize him was very strong, but I kept my hold and peered and peered long after the fish was lost to view, then looked my mortification in the face and laughed a bitter laugh.
"But, hang it! I had all the fun of catching the fish, and only miss the pleasure of eating him, which at this time would not be great."
"The fun, I take it," said my soldier, "is in triumphing, and not in being beaten at the last."
"Well, have it so; but I would not exchange those ten or fifteen minutes with that trout for the tame two hours you have spent in catching that string of thirty. To _see_ a big fish after days of small fry is an event; to have a jump from one is a glimpse of the sportsman's paradise; and to hook one, and actually have him under your control for ten minutes,--why, that is paradise itself as long as it lasts."
One day I went down to the house of a settler a mile below, and engaged the good dame to make us a couple of loaves of bread, and in the evening we went down after them. How elastic and exhilarating the walk was through the cool, transparent shadows! The sun was gilding the mountains, and its yellow light seemed to be reflected through all the woods. At one point we looked through and along a valley of deep shadow upon a broad sweep of mountain quite near and densely clothed with woods, flooded from base to summit by the setting sun. It was a wild, memorable scene. What power and effectiveness in Nature, I thought, and how rarely an artist catches her touch! Looking down upon or squarely into a mountain covered with a heavy growth of birch and maple, and shone upon by the sun, is a sight peculiarly agreeable to me. How closely the swelling umbrageous heads of the trees fit together, and how the eye revels in the flowing and easy uniformity, while the mind feels the ruggedness and terrible power beneath!
As we came back, the light yet lingered on the top of Slide Mountain.
"'The last that parleys with the setting sun,'"
said I, quoting Wordsworth.
"That line is almost Shakespearean," said my companion. "It suggests that great hand at least, though it has not the grit and virility of the more primitive bard. What triumph and fresh morning power in Shakespeare's lines that will occur to us at sunrise to-morrow!--
"'And jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.'
"Or in this:--
"'Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.'
"There is savage, perennial beauty there, the quality that Wordsworth and nearly all the modern poets lack."
"But Wordsworth is the poet of the mountains," said I, "and of lonely peaks. True, he does not express the power and aboriginal grace there is in them, nor toy with them and pluck them up by the hair of their heads, as Shakespeare does. There is something in Peakamoose yonder, as we see it from this point, cutting the blue vault with its dark, serrated edge, not in the bard of Grasmere; but he expresses the feeling of loneliness and insignificance that the cultivated man has in the presence of mountains, and the burden of solemn emotion they give rise to. Then there is something much more wild and merciless, much more remote from human interests and ends, in our long, high, wooded ranges than is expressed by the peaks and scarred groups of the lake country of Britain. These mountains we behold and cross are not picturesque,--they are wild and inhuman as the sea. In them you are in a maze, in a weltering world of woods; you can see neither the earth nor the sky, but a confusion of the growth and decay of centuries, and must traverse them by your compass or your science of woodcraft,--a rift through the trees giving one a glimpse of the opposite range or of the valley beneath, and he is more at sea than ever; one does not know his own farm or settlement when framed in these mountain treetops; all look alike unfamiliar."
Not the least of the charm of camping out is your camp-fire at night. What an artist! What pictures are boldly thrown or faintly outlined upon the canvas of the night! Every object, every attitude of your companion is striking and memorable. You see effects and groups every moment that you would give money to be able to carry away with you in enduring form. How the shadows leap, and skulk, and hover about! Light and darkness are in perpetual tilt and warfare, with first the one unhorsed, then the other. The friendly and cheering fire, what acquaintance we make with it! We had almost forgotten there was such an element, we had so long known only its dark offspring, heat. Now we see the wild beauty uncaged and note its manner and temper. How surely it creates its own draught and sets the currents going, as force and enthusiasm always will! It carves itself a chimney out of the fluid and houseless air. A friend, a ministering angel, in subjection; a fiend, a fury, a monster, ready to devour the world, if ungoverned. By day it burrows in the ashes and sleeps; at night it comes forth and sits upon its throne of rude logs, and rules the camp, a sovereign queen.
Near camp stood a tall, ragged yellow birch, its partially cast-off bark hanging in crisp sheets or dense rolls.
"That tree needs the barber," we said, "and shall have a call from him to-night."
So after dark I touched a match into it, and we saw the flames creep up and wax in fury until the whole tree and its main branches stood wrapped in a sheet of roaring flame. It was a wild and striking spectacle, and must have advertised our camp to every nocturnal creature in the forest.
What does the camper think about when lounging around the fire at night? Not much,--of the sport of the day, of the big fish he lost and might have saved, of the distant settlement, of to-morrow's plans. An owl hoots off in the mountain and he thinks of him; if a wolf were to howl or a panther to scream, he would think of him the rest of the night. As it is, things flicker and hover through his mind, and he hardly knows whether it is the past or the present that possesses him. Certain it is, he feels the hush and solitude of the great forest, and, whether he will or not, all his musings are in some way cast upon that huge background of the night. Unless he is an old camper-out, there will be an undercurrent of dread or half fear. My companion said he could not help but feel all the time that there ought to be a sentinel out there pacing up and down. One seems to require less sleep in the woods, as if the ground and the untempered air rested and refreshed him sooner. The balsam and the hemlock heal his aches very quickly. If one is awakened often during the night, as he invariably is, he does not feel that sediment of sleep in his mind next day that he does when the same interruption occurs at home; the boughs have drawn it all out of him.
And it is wonderful how rarely any of the housed and tender white man's colds or influenzas come through these open doors and windows of the woods. It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.
If one takes anything to the woods to read, he seldom reads it; it does not taste good with such primitive air.
There are very few camp poems that I know of, poems that would be at home with one on such an expedition; there is plenty that is weird and spectral, as in Poe, but little that is woody and wild as this scene is. I recall a Canadian poem by the late C.D. Shanly--the only one, I believe, the author ever wrote--that fits well the distended pupil of the mind's eye about the camp-fire at night. It was printed many years ago in the "Atlantic Monthly," and is called "The Walker of the Snow;" it begins thus:--
"'Speed on, speed on, good master; The camp lies far away; We must cross the haunted valley Before the close of day.'"
"That has a Canadian sound," said Aaron; "give us more of it."
"'How the snow-blight came upon me I will tell you as we go,-- The blight of the shadow hunter Who walks the midnight snow.'"
And so on. The intent seems to be to personify the fearful cold that overtakes and benumbs the traveler in the great Canadian forests in winter. This stanza brings out the silence or desolation of the scene very effectively,--a scene without sound or motion:--
"'Save the wailing of the moose-bird With a plaintive note and low; And the skating of the red leaf Upon the frozen snow.'
"The rest of the poem runs thus:--
"'And said I, Though dark is falling, And far the camp must be, Yet my heart it would be lightsome If I had but company.
"'And then I sang and shouted, Keeping measure as I sped, To the harp-twang of the snow-shoe As it sprang beneath my tread.
"'Nor far into the valley Had I dipped upon my way, When a dusky figure joined me In a capuchin of gray,
"'Bending upon the snow-shoes With a long and limber stride; And I hailed the dusky stranger, As we traveled side by side.
"'But no token of communion Gave he by word or look, And the fear-chill fell upon me At the crossing of the brook.
"'For I saw by the sickly moonlight, As I followed, bending low, That the walking of the stranger Left no foot-marks on the snow.
"'Then the fear-chill gathered o'er me, Like a shroud around me cast, As I sank upon the snow-drift Where the shadow hunter passed.
"'And the otter-trappers found me, Before the break of day, With my dark hair blanched and whitened As the snow in which I lay.
"'But they spoke not as they raised me; For they knew that in the night I had seen the shadow hunter And had withered in his sight.
"'Sancta Maria speed us!
The sun is fallen low: Before us lies the valley Of the Walker of the Snow!'"
"Ah!" exclaimed my companion. "Let us pile on more of those dry birch-logs; I feel both the 'fear-chill' and the 'cold-chill'
creeping over me. How far is it to the valley of the Neversink?"
"About three or four hours' march, the man said."
"I hope we have no haunted valleys to cross?"
"None," said I, "but we pass an old log cabin about which there hangs a ghostly superstition. At a certain hour in the night, during the time the bark is loose on the hemlock, a female form is said to steal from it and grope its way into the wilderness. The tradition runs that her lover, who was a bark-peeler and wielded the spud, was killed by his rival, who felled a tree upon him while they were at work. The girl, who helped her mother cook for the 'hands,' was crazed by the shock, and that night stole forth into the woods and was never seen or heard of more. There are old hunters who aver that her cry may still be heard at night at the head of the valley whenever a tree falls in the stillness of the forest."
"Well, I heard a tree fall not ten minutes ago," said Aaron; "a distant, rushing sound with a subdued crash at the end of it, and the only answering cry I heard was the shrill voice of the screech owl off yonder against the mountain. But maybe it was not an owl,"
said he after a moment; "let us help the legend along by believing it was the voice of the lost maiden."